IN the hands of historians, humor is no laughing matter.
South African-born Vic Gatrell is one of Britain's leading historians, and in "City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London" he uses more than 300 satiric prints -- most of them in color and from the British Museum's collection -- to build a portrait of what then was the world's most vibrant and important city. It also was the historical moment in which what we now call the Age of Reason was giving way to the forces that would produce our modern world.
It was, in other words, what we conveniently call "a pivotal era," though the mechanical image suggests an inevitability at war with the contingent, even antic, quality of real history.
Gatrell is too fine a historian and too close and scrupulous a reader of his source material ever to succumb to the cheap image. In fact, it's precisely his avid embrace of complexity that leads him to examine late Georgian London through a graphic window smudged with implication. Between 1770 and 1830, as many as 20,000 satiric engraved prints were produced and sold through the city's bookstores, often in editions running into the hundreds. Most of the purchasers were members of the upper classes -- the prince of Wales was both a particular target and an enthusiastic collector -- but the prints were displayed in shop windows and widely passed around and discussed in taverns and coffeehouses, where a growing middle class congregated. About half the surviving images have political themes; the rest are unnervingly frank and -- in that other sense -- graphic depictions of sex and bodily functions rendered in as Rabelaisian -- and often mean-spirited -- a fashion as mere ink can communicate.
As Gatrell describes them, "most commented on current gossip and scandal manners, fashions and sexual relations with more or less acerbity. Some were joke-sheets rather than satires properly speaking -- genially relishing life's comedies, the pleasures and vexations of London living, or the quiddities of personality, fashion, sex or class. Others were darker, crueler and more cynical images -- malicious, misanthropic or misogynistic."
Thus, chapters have such titles as "Lady Worsley's Bottom," "The Libertine's Last Fling," "Bums, Farts and Other Transgressions" and "What Could Women Bear" (hint, hint: Fashionable 18th century gowns exposed the breasts).
