Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century by Simon Dickie (review)

In Cruelty and Laughter, Simon Dickie proves that cultural shifts towards sympathy and benevolence in eighteenth-century England did little to displace an enduring comic tradition that delighted in the misfortunes of cripples, beggars, orphans, illiterate servants, rape victims, and fishwives. He also leaves us wondering if the apparent rise of sentiment exemplifies any real centripetal pull towards a lived standard of politeness. Dickie's wide constellation of comic literature evokes a cacophonous, schizophrenic climate of textual consumption in which a reader might weep alongside Clarissa one day and guffaw at punch lines from an Old Bailey rape trial the next. Content with the confused coexistence of disparate responses to human suffering, Dickie insists, satisfyingly, on an ongoing irresolution in this culture's sensibility rather than a grand synthesis of its deep contradictions. Most impressive are his deeply archival research and the buoyant, unpretentious style in which he delivers his findings. Focused tightly between 1740 and 1770, Dickie brings to light unstudied bodies of texts—jest books, low "deformity verse," courtroom sessions papers, comic miscellanies, "ramble fiction"—and dynamically conveys their content. Indispensable for scholars of the novel, manners, reading, disability, and humour, this book would also be genuinely teachable to the newest students of the eighteenth century.

Much recovery work aims to legitimate the discoveries of the archive by arguing for the literary or historical value of neglected authors or genres. The textual record has been transformed in the last few decades by scholarship, especially on women writers, that reveals the diversity of literary production in the eighteenth century, often uniting little-known works with distinct literary or philosophical traditions. Dickie inverts this scholarly project, explaining how seemingly worthless texts constitute a forgotten comic canon that was readily consumed by an eager reading public but that has little redeeming value. As Dickie asks of much comic fiction in the period, "How bad are these books?" (265). Quite bad, it turns out, and therefore indicative of modes of reading—rushed, inattentive, uncharitable, lewd—we typically leave unrecognized. Also often overlooked, Dickie claims, is the influence of low humorous modes—"deformity jokes," "wallops and smut," "slum realism"—on fiction that has gained a reputation as literary (46, 156, 260). Lovelace's pranks, Colonel Trim's failed eloquence, and Matt Bramble's hypochondria incorporate the farcical energies of low humour not to socially transformative ends, but to appeal to readers' comfort with socially conservative comedy that worked at the expense of the disadvantaged. A chapter devoted to Joseph Andrews shows Henry Fielding's satire, for instance, to be perpetually loosening into straight comedy in spite of the novel's ethical claims. A rich treatment of a familiar work, this fourth chapter brilliantly demonstrates the foundational presence of the unfamiliar archive, discussed in foregoing chapters, within the field's central texts.

Such discoveries lead us backward to a persistent social tradition that celebrates the essential difference between fortunate and unfortunate persons. The indigent and disabled are consistently represented in this comic tradition as lacking not only intellect and refinement but also feeling, honesty, and cleanliness. Such attitudes were not limited to unfeeling libertines but defined politeness itself: "laughing at social inferiors was part of becoming a gentleman" (124). Recognizing the complexity of the social order and some definitive shifts towards compassionate attitudes in the period, Dickie gently resists any optimism that might arise from social histories of the eighteenth century, finding in "the laughter of the elites" an elemental confidence that their distinctions of class and wealth were not under threat by new mobilities within the ranks of the poor and labouring (130). Gender, too, remains hierarchical in this account, a point made disturbingly clear in a chapter on rape jokes. Various forms of sexual violence "are presented as little more than the ongoing comedy of plebeian life," and the victim's word is suspicious and unreliable (243...