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

by Vic Gatrell (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Hardcover (Illustrated) 19 used & new from £3.07
Paperback (Illustrated) £19.99 £13.99 32 used & new from £7.47

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 695 pages
  • Publisher: Walker & Company (28 Nov 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0802716024
  • ISBN-13: 978-0802716026
  • Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 16.3 x 4.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 532,993 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  • See Complete Table of Contents

Product Description

Review
"'The most sumptuous and beautiful history book in years... Great toppling pyramids of bottoms and bosoms decorate this book, nipples stipple it, and on every page chamber pots and tankards overflow' Stella Tillyard, Sunday Times" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Nicholas Lezard, Paperback Choice, The Guardian, October 2007
One can only stand in awe when contemplating Gatrell's achievement. ... His industry and commitment are prodigious. ... And there is a larger issue here than the straightforward energy of the medium of the satirical print: it concerned liberty and independence, a freedom of mind that could either tell the truth to power, or simply laugh at everything. It couldn't last: an age of moralising dawned, and you could make a case for saying that we're still living in it. So all the more reason for cherishing this book, which celebrates, as Gatrell puts it, "our great, louche, comic tradition" ... This is a work that will keep you entertained for months. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully illustrated, but...., 25 Aug 2008
By A. Crowther (Bradford, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
The best part of this book is its pictures--an amazing selection of satirical and "bawdy" prints from about 1790 to about 1830. Vic Gatrell's text is a robust defence of the society which created these pictures. The reader, having ploughed through 600 pages of pictures which are only funny if farting, urinating, defecating and copulating are funny in themselves, may possibly end up in a state of bilious revulsion against the whole age. The print makers celebrated "libertine" sex but also mocked the Prince of Wales crudely and persistently for having a mistress. They mocked William Wilberforce in horrible prints for trying to abolish the slave trade (see p480). They portrayed women as slabs of meat (see p386).

Vic Gatrell defends every one of the values of the age. For instance, on p109 he suggests that prostitutes in that age were on the whole happy--and apparently does so simply because Thomas Rowlandson portrayed them as happy in a print. The chapter "What Could Women Bear?" toys with the idea that the age could have been misogynistic (surely not!) but rebuts the charge with naïve arguments that show his ignorance of feminist criticism. A reading of "The Troublesome Helpmate" by Katharine M Rogers (1966) could have helped him here.

As we might expect, this portrayal of the pre-Victorian "Golden Age" ends with those nasty Victorian moralisers bringing in the "Age of Cant"--a term apparently invented by Lord Byron to pin down the kind of people who wanted to limit Byron's sex life. Here Gatrell's arguments descend into a persistent sarcasm which allows him to talk of "morality" and "improvement" (with or without inverted commas) without actually showing that they were bad things. For instance, on pp574-5 he quotes Francis Place, who wrote in 1820 of the improvements in hygiene and behaviour that he had seen in the past thirty years. Place's comments are quoted with an implicit mockery, but it is difficult to see why. Were things really better in the good old days when the streets were full of "wretched half-starved, miserable scald headed children, with ricketty limbs and bandy legs"?

The Victorians were the people who stopped children being sent up chimneys, not the people who started the practice. The Victorians were the people who realised, with a shock, that many of the values they inherited were hypocritical, and started to insist that something should be done about it. They were the people who finally realised that the poorest of their society were suffering, and started to do something about that, too. They even realised that libertine sex might end in women getting a pretty raw deal. Is it not possible that the Victorian age actually was what it said it was: an Age of Improvement?

Nice pictures, though.
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10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, 26 Oct 2007
By R. Wright (Methil) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (Paperback)
This is a fascinating, original, and utterly absorbing study of the Eighteenth Century. It is worth buying for the illustrations alone! Gatrell writes with warmth and insight - this is what literary history should be!
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