Lust in Hogarth's 'Sleeping Congregation' : or, how to waste time in post-Puritan England

The author suggests that the overriding theme of the engraved version of The Sleeping Congregation is Hogarth’s post-Puritan view of the old vice of Acedia or indolence. It is shown that the print, in Hogarth’s typical irony, updates a long pictorial and literary tradition of sleeping during the sermon; sleep, the characteristic mark of indolence and connected with lustful thoughts, a vice a hard working and ambitious member of the rising middle-class like Hogarth would have little patience with.