title: City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London
author:  Vic Gatrell 
description: For those brought up on the genteel novels of Jane Austen, Gatrell (<i>The Hanging Tree</i>) has a rude surprise in store. Drawing heavily on Gillray, Cruikshank and Rowlandson's famous satirical prints, Gatrell vividly demonstrates the maliciousness and ribaldry of Georgian London. What made Londoners laugh was less the polished wit of the literary salon than a combination of drunken frat-boystyle jokes, toilet humor and nasty political satire. Gatrell notes that few of the tens of thousands of prints that appeared between 1770 and 1830the heyday of satiredealt with "social change" or high literature, except in the most condescending terms. They instead reflected "the subjects of everyday observation and conversation," at least of the artists' middle- and upper-class patrons, and "remind us that the views of most comfortable Londoners were then as unexamined and as bound by daily preoccupations as they are now." By 1830, the satirical impulse had been tamed by the rise of pietism, the idealization of female virtue, the coronation of a new king, steps toward voter franchise and the execution of leading radicals. Better manners and respectability, Gatrell sadly concludes, killed the fart joke. 300+ b&amp;w and color illus. <i>(Jan.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  # The Papers
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Henry James
  
  
  This page copyright © 2002 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
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  ### 1
  
  
  
  
  
    
  There was a longish period — the dense duration of a London
  
  
  winter, cheered, if cheered it could be called, with lurid electric,
  
  
  with fierce 'incandescent' flares and glares — when they repeatedly
  
  
  met, at feeding-time, in a small and not quite savoury pothouse a
  
  
  stone's-throw from the Strand. They talked always of pothouses, of
  
  
  feeding-time — by which they meant any hour between one and four of
  
  
  the afternoon; they talked of most things, even of some of the
  
  
  greatest, in a manner that gave, or that they desired to show as
  
  
  giving, in respect to the conditions of their life, the measure of
  
  
  their detachment, their contempt, their general irony. Their general
  
  
  irony, which they tried at the same time to keep gay and to make
  
  
  amusing at least to each other, wa