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

Mr. Dickie’s work of cultural criticism is impossible either to dismiss or to recommend without serious qualifications. His three aims, from the Preface, are to “bring to light a vast but little-known archive of eighteenth-century comic texts,” to “contest some prevailing tendencies” of contemporary criticism that emphasize “politeness, sentimentalism, and other ‘middle-class’ values,” and to offer “an expanded understanding of some major authors, including Gay, Goldsmith, Behn, Charlotte Lennox, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Richardson, Smollett, Sarah Fielding, Burney, Austen, and Sterne.” He succeeds only in the first, and disappoints most in the third.

The archive includes jestbooks, verse miscellanies, farces, and comic fiction, especially Ramble novels. Most of the book consists of topical documentation of the contents of such works, the flavor of which is suggested by the titles and subtitles of some chapters: “Deformity Genres,” “Dancing Cripples and the London Stage,” “Disabled Bodies and the Inevitability of Laughter,” “Delights of Privilege: Laughing at the Lower Orders,” “Rape Jokes and the Law.” It may be true that “Eighteenth-century Britons—or a high proportion of them—openly delighted in the miseries of others,” but it does not follow because we are supposedly squeamish about such behavior in the early twenty-first century, that it is worthy of cataloguing or detailed analysis. His examples of violent practical jokes and sexual or scatological coarseness in “Cripples, Hunchbacks, and the Limits of Sympathy,” for instance, make this chapter a long, hard slog; none of the examples has the wit, say, of a Swift poem, coarse as that poem may be.

To be fair, Mr. Dickie does not claim merit for the works. His final chapter, “The Forgotten Best-Sellers of Early English Fiction [that is, the Ramble novels],” deliberately preempts criticism. “Still, the question remains. Who exactly was buying this shameless rubbish?” Mr. Dickie’s answer is—everyone who could afford it. The extremely popular Ramble novels were priced in line with the canonical works by Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, he points out, and therefore would have had a middle-class and upper-class audience. Observations and discoveries like these may appeal to social historians and cultural anthropologists. I am reminded of a recent review of a book about Herculaneum that described the author, seeking knowledge of Roman diets, joyfully evocating the analysis of the contents of human bowels from a large cesspit under an apartment block.

If literary criticism dismisses aesthetic merit, it becomes sociology or anthropology. The work Mr. Dickie examines is, in his words, “ephemeral fiction,” and the question remains whether it is not a good thing for all modern intellectual endeavors that this archive has largely disappeared. If these works were not important enough to be preserved by their contemporary audience, why are they important enough to study today? The answer could lie in the light they cast on canonical works. The chapter “Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate” is, unfortunately, the only extended example of Mr. Dickie’s focusing on a major author’s work. The result is a reading that argues Parson Adams owes more than a little to the stock figures humiliated in the ephemeral works previously outlined: “One cannot avoid a sense that Fielding is enjoying knocking Adams around, even as he pities him. The grimace of fright, the bald head, the terrified flight from the hounds—these are straight out of farce.” Mr. Dickie also offers his contribution to the debate between the Battestin and Rawson-Paulson camps “by exploring an insistent strand of anticlerical humor in Joseph Andrews—a vestige, one assumes, of his early freethinking.” His diction reveals a modern secular bias when he speaks of providential intervention as among “the most irrational Christian doctrines,” and when he refers to “mainstream [sic] English anticlericalism,” but generally his arguments in this chapter are tenable and well-documented, if not compellingly conclusive.

Mr. Dickie knows the forgotten archive that is his subject and modern literary and cultural...