City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London (review)

If Jeremy Clarkson, the famously politically incorrect host of BBC's leading lads' television show, Top Gear, were ever to write a book about late Georgian graphic satire, this would be it. As Vic Gattrell asserts in his introduction, this is a book based on the evidence "not of sermons, advice books, or female sensibilities, but of men's attitudes and practices —and not very earnest men either" (p. 15). It is, in effect, an examination of the "lads' view" of life in London in late Georgian England, as revealed in a monumental survey of thousands of surviving satirical prints, drawn largely from the British Library's collection. Created by men, largely for men, the humour is unsurprisingly homosocial: bawdy, rude, and frequently scatological; the women frisky, voluptuous, and desiring; the tone ironically knowing, cynically sceptical —and decidedly impolite.

The interested non-specialist, or the students and scholars of Georgian England who want to learn more about the histories of manners, print culture, or the city of London itself, will find this book a fascinating compendium. Gattrell has done a prodigious amount of research and, in writing a history of laughter in Georgian London, he has taken on a daunting task (nothing is so likely to lead to patronizing pedantry as the need to explain a joke) and done a service to the city, as well as to history. His London is that of the man-about-town: piquant, zestful, frequently tawdry, but seldom boring. The humour that he savours is at times salacious, sly, and sniggering; at others, blatantly obvious or carefully coded. Anyone interested in exploring the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and manners in a century that elevated politeness and sensibility to ways of life need only dip in to this tome to find their obverse. Gattrell revels in the robust earthiness of what he terms "the golden age of graphic satire" (roughly the 1770s to 1820s) (p. 9), and he clearly regrets its decline as London and Londoners changed. Satire's "deepening obsolescence," according to Gattrell, "is framed by a better-washed, better-combed and better mannered cityscape and by mounting shopkeeper prosperity" (p. 594). The pandemic of respectability that infected Londoners in the early nineteenth century coincided with larger social, economic, and political changes, and with generational change. Of the city's leading satirists, James Gillray's vicious pen had been tamed by a government pension as early as 1797; by 1815 he was dead. So too was Isaac Cruikshank, who died, appropriately enough, of drink. Tellingly, in 1823 at the respectable age of 31, Cruikshank's brilliant son George forswore satire to concentrate instead on comic-book illustration (p. 598). The louche, knowing, cheerfully —or bitingly —vulgar humour of the Georgians all but vanished.

Gattrell's achievement goes far beyond the explication of humour in late Georgian prints, however. A sweeping history of mentalités, City of Laughter engages confidently and provocatively with urban history and with the histories of gender, art, print culture, society, and politics. It is in this sweep that both the book's brilliance and its shortcomings lie. No one, even Gattrell with his outstanding command of source material for the period, would be able to cover every aspect of this subject in enough detail to please all the subject specialists in each area. Some fault-finding is thus inevitable. By accepting the conventional groupings of graphic satires into social and political categories and by concentrating primarily on the less-studied comic and social satires, for instance, Gattrell makes his project feasible; however, as Cindy McCreery has argued in her pioneering study, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-century England (Oxford University Press, 2004), this sort of categorization can be misleading, particularly when considering the images of women, because "the social was frequently political" (p. 9). She makes a strong case for viewing graphic satires of women in their "broader historical, artistic, and commercial context" (p. 10), thus revealing a...