Cruelty and Laughter
Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century
Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental – the product of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie contests these assumptions in "Cruelty and Laughter", a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the veneer of Enlightenment civility, Dickie uncovers a rich strain of cruel humor that forces us to recognize just how slowly ordinary sufferings became worthy of sympathy.
Delving into an enormous archive of jestbooks, comic periodicals, farces, variety shows, and minor comic novels, Dickie discovers a bottomless repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. He also finds epigrams about scurvy and one-act farces about hunchbacks in love, powerful proofs of the limits of compassion in the period. Everyone – rich and poor, women as well as men – laughed along. In the process, Dickie expands our understanding of many of the century's major authors, including Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen".Cruelty and Laughter" is an engaging, far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
Reviews
"This book is a prodigiously erudite reminder that the eighteenth century was not just polite, but vicious. Drawing on jestbooks, verse satires, comic fiction, and a plethora of overlooked sources, Dickie depicts a literary, visual, and physical world replete with cruelty, ribald denigration, and low and bawdy humor. Skillfully combining textual exegesis with a profound knowledge of recent social history, he shows that mockery of the lower orders, beggars, and the poor; jests and japes at the expense of the crippled, deformed, and handicapped; and ribald enthusiasm for sexual violence and rape were part of a cruel social world in which the unprivileged and disadvantaged, even as they sometimes excited compassion and sympathy, were just as likely to excite a disdain that ran the full gamut of verbal and physical violence" – John Brewer, California Institute of Technology
"A pioneering work. Dickie uncovers a rich, long-neglected archive and challenges received wisdom on virtually every page. A joy to read and a revelation" – Toni Bowers, University of Pennsylvania
"With great verve, occasional disgust, and intermittent outrage, Simon Dickie portrays a society of entrenched hierarchies in which entitled aristocrats entertained themselves with cripple dances, libertine young bucks wreaked havoc in both popular fiction and common reality, and the poor and disabled were the inevitable butts of cruel jokes on and off the page. Working against common scholarly assumptions but backed by ample evidence, he argues that delight in the suffering of others was one thing that all classes of eighteenth-century society shared. Throughout he combines the virtues of a historian and a literary critic with a creative and self-conscious awareness of the complex relation of representation to reality. One of the most original, readable, educational, and entertaining books in the field of eighteenth-century studies I have read in the past decade" – Helen Deutsch, University of California, Los Angeles
"This excellent and thoroughly researched book argues clearly that eighteenth-century readers read – and worse, enjoyed laughing at – jokes that we would find in incredibly bad taste; and in that, Dickie sees the key to the persistence of an entire way of thinking that is now lost to us. Bringing a tremendous amount of material to our attention, he takes a provocative stance against what he sees as an idealized image of the eighteenth century and points to numerous avenues for future research. Terrific and important, 'Cruelty and Laughter' will be of great interest to scholars of eighteenth-century history, literature, popular culture, humor, and the history of the book" – John O'Brien, author of "Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690-1760"
