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

by Vic Gatrell

Between 1770 and 1830, London was the world's largest and richest city, the center of hectic social ferment and spectacular sexual liberation. These singular conditions prompted revolutionary modes of thought, novel sensibilities, and constant debate about the relations between men and women. Such an atmosphere also stimulated outrageous behavior, from James Boswell's copulating on Westminster Bridge to the Prince Regent's attempt to seduce a woman by pleading, sobbing, and stabbing himself with a pen-knife.  And nowhere was London's lewdness and iconoclasm more vividly represented than its satire.

City of Laughter chronicles the rise and fall of a great tradition of ridicule and of the satirical, humorous, and widely circulated prints that sustained it. Focusing not on the polished wit upon which polite society prided itself, but rather on malicious, sardonic and satirical humor--humor that was bawdy, knowing and ironic--Vic Gatrell explores what this tradition says about Georgian views of the world and about their own pretensions. Taking the reader into the clubs and taverns where laughter flowed most freely, Gatrell examines how Londoners laughed about sex, scandal, fashion, drink and similar pleasures of life.

Combining words and images-including more than 300 original drawings by Cruikshank, Gillray, Rowlandson, and others--City of Laughter  offers a brilliantly original panorama of the era,  providing a ground-breaking reappraisal of a period of  change and a unique account of the origins of our attitudes toward sex, celebrity and satire today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, London, 18th Century, British Literature, Research, Satire

696 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Vic Gatrell is a social historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

a.k.a. V.A.C. Gatrell

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Newton, Madamoiselle Parisot (1796)

In 1795, the Prince of Wales married Caroline of Brunswick. He later said that he could only get through the wedding night by getting drunk on brandy, explaining that she ‘never well washed, or changed often enough’, and showed ‘such marks of filth both in the fore and hind parts of her…that she turned my stomach and from that moment I made a vow never to touch her again’. Word of this filtered into society; one cartoonist, Isaac Cruikshank, published a piece called Oh! Che Boccone! (‘Oh! What a mouthful!’), showing the prince standing in horror by the bridal bed, with a bottle of Spanish fly on the table next to him:


Cruikshank, Oh! Che Boccone! (1795)

For a satirist to venture into the bedrooms of the royal family was only the start: other cartoons showed him as grossly fat, portrayed his many liaisons in explicit detail, showed him prodigiously passing wind or detailed the lice crawling out from under his wig. As Vic Gatrell says, ‘No heir apparent had been so contemptuously treated before; none has been so treated since, not even the present one.’

There is a gulf of manners and behaviour that separates the eighteenth-century and Regency world from the Victorian one that followed. This book (which is a luscious object; every page is high-quality glossy paper with colour prints all the way through) examines that difference by looking at what made people laugh – by examining jokes and humour, as exemplified by the ‘caricatures’ or ‘satires’ that were such a huge part of eighteenth-century culture.

The printshops that sold these works often drew vast crowds outside them, gawping at the latest prints in the window; they sold at a price that ‘ordinary’ people could afford, and many pasted them into portfolios or stuck them on to screens in their houses. In a world where visual imagery was rare, these drawings lampooned society gossip, high fashion, comedy of the sexes, and especially political intrigue, and the artists responsible were in many cases hugely talented in their field – notably James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and the Cruikshank brothers.


Rowlandson, Miseries of the Country (1807)

By modern standards, the language of these satires was relentlessly bawdy, cruel and misogynistic, and showed a constant reliance on ‘Bums, Farts and Other Transgressions’ (as one of Gatrell's chapters is titled). As the book shows, this is kind of what things were like back then. Gatrell looks at contemporary prose satires, court records, diaries and letters to work out what kind of context this humour existed in: this is world where there was a market for books like The Benefit of Farting Explained, &c.; or, The Fundament-all Cause of the Distempers incident to the Fair Sex inquir'd into: Proving a posteriori most of the Disordures in-tail'd on 'em are owing to Flatulences not Seasonably Vented, by Don Fart-in-hand-o Puff-in-dorst (1722).

Obviously, this all depended on a sort of blokeyness – a clubbish, matey masculinism which was accepted to exist alongside a more polite social persona; ‘men who affected the greatest refinement in female company or in the salon were allowed among other men to drink themselves silly or to tell rude jokes in the tavern’.

Where did this leave women? There were a couple of female caricaturists, but they were definitely in a tiny minority. Women did, though, buy and enjoy the prints, especially those which ridiculed current fashions.


‘Miss Hoare’, A Modern Venus or a Lady of the Present Fashion in the State of Nature (1786)

 Gatrell is pleasingly thorough about unpicking these matters:

How did women bear the many condescending, cruel, parodic or fantasy-laden representations of themselves that were peddled by men? What did they think of men's farts-and-bums humour when (or if) they met it? And did they recognize ‘misogyny’ when it hit them? […] by modern standards practically the whole body of jokes and satires that addressed relations between the sexes can seem to have been woman-fearing, woman-hating or woman-patronizing. […] Add to that our tendency to project on to past women present-day notion of what they should have found intolerable, and the trickiness of the task is clear. What women laughed at, how unrestrainedly they laughed, whether they laughed at all, and how many of them laughed, are among the murkiest of our subjects.

Women did share in the general bawdiness of the time, of course. Gatrell mentions one lady who embroidered scriptural passages on her clothing, including the motto on her garters, ‘set your affection on things above’. In general, the world of the satires drew on the Enlightenment libertine tradition, which rested on what Gatrell calls ‘a “one-sex” model of male and female equivalence’, assuming that both men and women laughed at bodily functions and liked and desired sex. This tradition ‘spoke up for reason against superstition, sensuality against control, equality against hierarchy. Most notably, it rarely turned women into the passive victims of male desire’. But it came at the cost of a relentless objectification.


Rowlandson, Connoisseurs (1799)

The fact that people behaved in a more high-minded way in polite society was, by many, attributed to pure hypocrisy – or, in the terminology of the time, to ‘cant’. (Byron lamented that the ‘age of cant’ had overtaken the ‘age of cunt’.) But the pose gradually became accepted as the reality – especially for women, who were steadily corralled into being the gatekeepers for ‘correct’ behaviour.

In many ways of course, this was all to the good. The increased politeness after the 1820s led to all kinds of improvements that we depend on nowadays, and while William Wilberforce is shown here to be an insufferable moralising busybody, he did, after all, end slavery.

We […] can hardly regret the softening of the manners that once sustained blatant masculinism, sensuality and malice, any more than we could wish for the return of public executions. […] A good deal of the old satire now seems infantile, fart-obsessed and gross, and as cynical and cruel as the hierarchical society that hatched it. [… But] what sustained the cleansing process was a deepening wish to control, moralize and pathologize those who defied that process, along with that mounting fastidiousness about aggression, desire and the body that now helps to define moral respectability.

As so often, what was presented as being about reform and improvement was often coopted by the forces of control and censure. The old caricatures almost completely disappeared, to be replaced by toothless Punch cartoons and book illustrations, in which the lower classes of society were still sometimes depicted, but never with any joy. This was often well-intentioned, as a kind of consciousness-raising exercise, but the fact remained that they could only be allowed to have lives of abject misery and squalor.

And it was in that spirit of reform that the old humour disappeared as well, either polished out of existence or buried behind the new ‘cant’. Something was lost there, this book suggests: the eighteenth-century artists may have been much cruder, but ‘at least their baser instincts were openly displayed’.

[Breck Baumann · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extensive, admirably researched study of the racy and uncensored world of London throughout the eighteenth century. Here, Vic Gatrell delights by highlighting the pop culture and politics of the times, the pleasures and vices of both the lower and upper classes—as well as such topics as decorum, misogyny, rumormongering, and adultery. The physical book itself is beyond beautiful, with full-color plates littered throughout almost every other page, and those same pages having that crisp and light feel not unlike that of a religious text. All the same, it unfortunately has the tendency to read more like that of an exhausting holy book to browse through occasionally and set down, rather than that of what one would expect involving satire, crudeness, explicit tales, caricatures, and dodgy situations. Academic in both approach and prose, City of Laughter certainly doesn't thrill, but just so happens to offer that occasional captivating treat and tidbit from a society and period that still continues to rhyme throughout the centuries.

[Alexis Hall]

This is kind of, uh, heavy. Although very shiny and containing many pictures, which tends to make history go down easier, if you're me.

It's a hardcore look at the crude, sometimes slightly incomprehensible world of 18th century satire. It's honestly quite an oblique and obscure subject (what humans find funny is not quite as fundamental as you might think) and, while not exactly easy-reading, the book is carefully written, meticulously researched and occasionally genuinely fascinating.

Fun ... not so much.

[Basil Bowdler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A big read which I nearly repaid with a big review but then lost my progress (thanks shitty app). Gatrell charts the golden age and decline of a satirical culture in Regency London which celebrated and mocked the sexual exploits and scandals of high society with an unembarrassed pleasure which feels not only alien today but outright disgusting. Less merry old England than randy old England. The c. 20,000 satirical engravings produced 1780-1830 drive the book and even without Gatrell's empassioned and witty text they're an absolute delight. PMs administering enemas to the nation and devils running in horror from vaginas? Yes pls. I'm completely on board with the argument that looking for an 'average' reaction to these drawings is an impossible and misguided venture, but I would've liked more of a discussion about the production, distribution and reception of all the bums, farts and vaginas that we see. Before Nash London was a far more geographically chaotic and porous city than it became subsequently. Likewise, the great and the not so great mixed freely and very agreeably in the clubs of seedy Covent Garden and shared a sense of bawdy manliness which transcended class. A real highlight of the book is Gatrell's discussion of the female gaze on all of this ('What could women bear?') in which he concludes that by no means all, but a surprisingly large number of women seemed to enjoy this earthy culture with as much pleasure and unselfconsciousness as men. By 1830 it was all over as (I love this) 'the shift from cunt to cant' (p. 413) was completed. The most outrageous engravers were bought off by the crown and the audience for their works faded too as London was spiritually and spatially tidied up. But Gatrell's discussion of cultural resistance amidst the growing climate of respectability is perhaps the book's highlight. Given how homoerotic so many of these prints were (even bearing in mind that attitudes towards bodies were a lot less embarrassed 200 years ago how can you explain so much male genitalia) it would be good to get more on the queer aspects of this culture than we get and there are points where I started to doubt if as many people joined in Gatrell's laughter as he wants us to imagine. Maybe some of the magic is lost by reading this after some of Gatrell's later works, but still a sprawling joy of a history book.

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is well-illustrated and contains satiric prints of Gilleray et al. that are not easily found by the general public. The scatological and satirical sexuality of many of the prints in this book exceeds what is generally reprinted and makes one have a different picture of the mores and "politesse" of Jane Austen's period. Some prints of course were collected and viewed primarily, if not wholly, by men, yet clearly women, married or not, "proper" or items of gossip and satire in the prints read them. Gatrell discusses the change beginning ca. 1820 in mores that led to the decline and end of such satiricl prints and the beginning of the Victorian age. He analyzes carefully but in an understandable way how the prints are satirical. The prints are reproduced clearly, though sometimes, if they have many dialogue boxes or subtitles it is hard to read the words; often, however, Gatrell quotes these fully. It was indeed a "rude" age, ruder than the impression that Jane Austen gives. Gatrell speculates that when Frank Churchill goes to London to have his hair cut (EMMA), he may well have "drifted towards club, brothel or bagnio, and had a bit on the side as everyone else did." (p. 117-118). Interesting to wonder about such things

[Ecaterina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very good. I love the cartoons of that era. Plus they where very whimsical...

[Delilah Marvelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sex and satire come full circle in this well crafted and witty collection of prints and history. It's just fabulous.

[Elameno · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a fantastic in depth look at 18th century London and how satire fit into the culture of the city. The writing was clear and engaging, though I differed in opinion with the writer on a few of his points. My only real complaint is that many of the images are too small to see the details! It's strange that the publisher would spend so much money printing the whole book on heavy high gloss paper, but not print the images large enough to see the details the author is discussing. It's great to see them all in colour though!

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finishing Christopher Benfey's wonderful book on post-Civil War American literary culture the post-glow buzz of a great author with wonderful writing makes it difficult to find anything else that can match his quality of style. While searching through the stacks at the library I discovered, Vic Gatrell's City of Laughter: Sex and Sature in Eighteenth-Century London (New York: Walker & Company, 2006). The book is an analytical study of the use of satire in 18th-century London. Gatrell primarily uses graphic representations in the form of satirical cartoons and some literary texts to explain how satire was deployed and how its use changed from the 18th to the 19th-centuries. It is filled with lots of the images Gatrell refers to and the publishers have placed each image carefully to relate to Gatrell's arguments an important stylistic choice in any book so dependent on the subltelty of imagery. While Gatrell's analysis is dependent on a host of theorists of sexuality, gender and the body (in discussing this period it is necessary to understand the ribald nature of humour in this period) he brings to the field an important monograph and attention to a collection of 18th-century artists.

It is a pleasure being introduced to artists like Thomas Rowlandson, Robert Cruikshank and especially the work of James Gillray who Gatrell argues was one of the most important satirical artists of his day. Indeed, Gillray's engravings are imbued with a depth of quality and draughtsmanship that is unique and speaks well past his own period. They are beautiful and elegantly crafted pieces of satire that rise above the medium becoming works of art. Gatrell's book begins with a sense of place, broadly drawing the arena he wishes to discuss and then introduces the reader to 18th-century forms of laughter (laughter about the body, sexuality, the grotesque and the profane), concepts of gender and sexuality and how 18th-century laughter faded and changed in the face of the cant of 19th-century sentimentality and prudery. The book is a welcome introduction for anyone seeking to understand the sometimes elusive 18th-century English concepts of humour and laughter.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite history books. Gatrell charts the rise and fall of English graphic satire: from the moralism of Hogarth, to the bawdy savagery of Rowlandson and Gillray, to more restrained world of late-period George Cruikshank. Gatrell moves with ease between analysing individual artists and their work, the world of high politics they set out to attack, and the wider cultural attitudes they drew on. This book both explains the 'big picture' changes and makes you appreciate individual art works. It is both well-written and well-illustrated, something that is increasingly hard to find in history books issued by British publishers.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Idiosyncratic sources -- 18th and 19th-century caricatures and prints -- lead to an involving discussion of how social and political mores shifted from Georgian and Regency England to the early Victorian Era. Gatrell sometimes overreaches in his interpretations, but the wealth of well-reproduced prints are worth the price of admission.

[Brady · Rating 2 out of 5]

disappointing. How can a book about sex and satire be boring!? And also heavy! This is 600 pages of heavy-gauge, glossy paper. The pictures are fun, but skip the prose.

[Barbara Monajem · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an awesome research tool. The illustrations are wonderful.

[The Boyce]

'Lud, ma'am. Nothing has changed

[Gavin Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must for anyone interested in 18th century London.