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City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London | 
| Author: Vic Gatrell
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Category: Book
List Price: £19.99
Buy New: £13.99
You Save: £6.00 (30%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 51397
Media: Paperback
Pages: 698
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.7
ISBN: 1843543222
EAN: 9781843543220
ASIN: 1843543222
Publication Date: September 13, 2007
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| Customer Reviews:
 Beautifully illustrated, but.... August 25, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
 Brilliant October 26, 2007
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
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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