Hogarth's scenes of London life - both the seedy backstreets and the salons of high society - are the most extraordinary, arresting images of the everyday in the eighteenth century. Black men and women feature widely in his work, but until this book have been largely ignored by commentators. Blacks had become the 'invisible faces' of Hogarth's art - and of the eighteenth century in general. David Dabydeen draws back the curtain on these forgotten figures and offers a quite fascinating perspective on the life of blacks in England two and a half centuries ago.