Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century
Simon Dickie
Abstract
Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental—the creation of an emerging middle class. This book disputes these assumptions, plunging into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, it uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor that forces us to recognize just how slowly ordinary human sufferings became worthy of sympathy. Delving into an enormous archive of comic novels, jestbooks, farces, variety shows, and cartoons, the author finds a vast repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. Epigrams abo ... More
Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental—the creation of an emerging middle class. This book disputes these assumptions, plunging into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, it uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor that forces us to recognize just how slowly ordinary human sufferings became worthy of sympathy. Delving into an enormous archive of comic novels, jestbooks, farces, variety shows, and cartoons, the author finds a vast repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. Epigrams about syphilis and scurvy sit alongside one-act comedies about hunchbacks in love. The author shows us that everyone—rich and poor, women as well as men—laughed along. In the process, he also expands our understanding of many of the century’s major authors, including Samuel Richardson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. The author devotes particular attention to Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a novel that reflects repeatedly on the limits of compassion and the ethical problems of laughter. The book is a far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
Keywords:
emerging middle class,
comic literature,
enlightenment civility,
human sufferings,
sympathy,
comic novels,
jestbooks,
farces,
variety shows,
cartoons
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226146188 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2013 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226146201.001.0001 |
