cover image City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London

City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London

Vic Gatrell, . . Walker, $45 (696pp) ISBN 978-0-8027-1602-6

For those brought up on the genteel novels of Jane Austen, Gatrell (The Hanging Tree ) has a rude surprise in store. Drawing heavily on Gillray, Cruikshank and Rowlandson's famous satirical prints, Gatrell vividly demonstrates the maliciousness and ribaldry of Georgian London. What made Londoners laugh was less the polished wit of the literary salon than a combination of drunken frat-boy–style jokes, toilet humor and nasty political satire. Gatrell notes that few of the tens of thousands of prints that appeared between 1770 and 1830—the heyday of satire—dealt with "social change" or high literature, except in the most condescending terms. They instead reflected "the subjects of everyday observation and conversation," at least of the artists' middle- and upper-class patrons, and "remind us that the views of most comfortable Londoners were then as unexamined and as bound by daily preoccupations as they are now." By 1830, the satirical impulse had been tamed by the rise of pietism, the idealization of female virtue, the coronation of a new king, steps toward voter franchise and the execution of leading radicals. Better manners and respectability, Gatrell sadly concludes, killed the fart joke. 300+ b&w and color illus. (Jan.)