Hogarth lived and worked all his life in London. His art was intrinsically involved with the city as the hyperactive focal point of an increasingly commercialised imperial nation, in which royal and religious influence were replaced by what was in effect the beginning of the modern consumer society. The demand for art came increasingly from the new middle classes, wealthy from trade and industry. Artistic taste was dominated by the work of Continental painters, and until the early 1700s there was no distinctive "British" school of painting. Hogarth, who had his own powerful moral and artistic integrity, balanced his career finely between the financial need to accommodate the taste of this new class of patrons, his desire to provide a critique of the downside of fashionable London life and his striving to be taken seriously as a British artist.

The precarious circumstances of Hogarth's early life helped to define his artistic personality and his subject matter, and explain his extraordinary drive and ambition. Hogarth was born in 1697 near Smithfield Market, London. He experienced poverty early, spending his later childhood with his family in Fleet debtors' prison after his father's failure to make a living from teaching, writing and running a coffee-house. Hogarth's apprenticeship to a silver engraver was to provide him with a financially sound career based on his evident drawing ability. Despite his impatience with the "Narrowness of this business", Hogarth established his own engraving workshop in 1720, developing his own graphic style in original satirical engravings and carrying out more humdrum commissions for trade cards and book illustrations.

At the same time Hogarth enrolled in the new art academy in St. Martin's Lane. There he met other aspiring and well-known painters, including Sir James Thornhill, the first British painter to compete seriously with the Continental painters working in London. Hogarth later attended Thornhill's own art academy in Covent Garden, and secretly married his daughter Jane in 1729. Hogarth always described himself as self-taught, and, although he went to the academies' life drawing classes, developed his own highly personal way of training his extraordinary visual memory by direct observation of life around him rather than copying old masters or taking lessons from other painters. Hogarth made astonishingly rapid progress; his first successful work was an innovative depiction of a performance of the popular satirical play The Beggars' Opera, by John Gay. Hogarth's interest in the theatre was a crucial part of his life and art; one of his lifelong friends was the actor John Garrick.