Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. By SIMON DICKIE. Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press. 2011. xvii + 362 p. £29 (hb). ISBN 978-0-226-14618-8

Spaces for Feeling: Emotion and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650-1850

The great visual satirists of ‘the age of caricature’ (Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruickshank), entertained an unprecedented newspaper and pamphlet audience with their political and social caricatures. Prominent among their subjects were the appearance, manners and sexual behaviours of women. It is (still) easy to laugh, but what specific emotion or emotions does satire actually invoke? Laughter and disdain are clearly important aspects of satire’s power to move the viewer and mount its critique, and a central feature of eighteenth-century satire is the appeal to particular forms of wit, intellectual scorn and pleasure. But sexualised satire also mobilises a remarkably similar range of emotions as racial and religious vilification: disgust, fear, anger, and hatred. Like these it is often highly somatised and deliberately crude, and a powerful mode for the regulation and reinforcement of preferred social norms. I ground my discussion of satire in the historical example offered by the life, image and writing of Elizabeth Craven (1750-1828). In his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Boswell referred to her as ‘the beautiful, gay, and fascinating Lady Craven’. Craven was subject to acute and very public satire particularly between the mid 1770s to the 1790s: attention was divided between ridicule for her sexual behaviours, aristocratic demeanour and literary ambitions. Popular fascination with sexual scandal was of course hardly unprecedented, there are a number of significant female subjects at this period. But Craven is perhaps unparalleled in the range and nature of satire levelled against a private (living) individual. This paper explores contemporary references to Craven in private correspondence, published prints, and a remarkable ceramic caricature teapot. Why was Craven such a target at this period, and what might these satirical jibes suggest about changing sexual and social order of late eighteenth–century Europe?

The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain: Political and Religious Culture, 1500-1820, 2017

Nowhere was this opposition between the capacity of satire and laughter simultaneously to confront and subvert authority and iniquity but also to solidify communities of readers more carefully, anxiously or contentiously studied than the Golden Age of English Satire. These debates targeted the nature of satire: what it was and what it was supposed to do. During this same period, a secondary philosophical dispute also opened up about the nature and function of laughter. This chapter is an attempt to trace those debates. But it is also an attempt to account for the ticklish relationship between satire and laughter more broadly from the perspective of recent psychological theories. In both eliciting laughter and solidifying communities, I claim, satirists were also offering a deeply affective experience for readers. According to most theorists then and today, satire was supposed to correct vice. But such a theory of satiric correction presupposes that readers and targets, having read a work of satire, will proactively apply the lessons of the work to themselves. Critics of satire, however, have had severe doubts that there is any simple or straightforward transaction between reading satire and reforming vice. In addition, recent work in the psychology of humour suggests that comic literature and laughter tend to induce in readers forms of cognitive disengagement that categorically prohibit goal-oriented behaviour and the reformation of vice. How, then, was this amalgam of satire and laughter supposed to work? In an attempt to make sense of the functions of satire, I turn in closing to perhaps the most suspicious critic of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift. I turn to him not merely as a coyly sneering satirist, but as, perhaps paradoxically, one of satire’s most optimistic practitioners. Swift was the one figure who suggested with caution, self-mockery and a hint of hope that satire might offer correction, if however indirectly. It did so not by eliciting readers’ laughter and by building coalitions of self-satisfied ethical agreement and critical censure that in turn reformed victims and readers. Instead, satire was most effective when most difficult – when it challenged readers directly. His goal was not to ‘divert’ the world, as he explained to Pope, but to ‘vex’ it, to force readers to re-evaluate the received wisdom by which we all live.

“It was heretofore the Wisdom of some wise Nations, to let People be Fools as much as they pleas’d, and never to punish seriously what deserv’d only to be laugh’d at.” This key phrase summarizes the idea behind one of the most hotly debated concepts of the eighteenth century, i.e. the famed test of ridicule. Shaftesbury’s Letter concerning Enthusiasm and Sensus Communis make ridicule and laughter appear as an “innocent Remedy” that can be applied to all sorts of what Shaftesbury regarded as cultural ‘evils’. These could range from harmless artistic failures to violent ‘distempers’ such as those of (in Shaftesbury’s opinion) the Tory zealots who practised religious persecution. It is still a common misconception that the ‘test of ridicule’ establishes laughter as a criterion of truth. It is more properly an enlightened reflection on the appropriate mental attitudes of those who are in search of truth. While the test acknowledges the importance and seriousness of such a quest, it also demands the readiness to test anyone’s, including a person’s own, preconceptions which Shaftesbury describes as “certain Idol-Notions, which we will never suffer to be unveil’d, or seen in open light” and, if necessary, to laugh at them. The conversational tone of the Earl’s published writings covers to a certain extent the unease about the (ab)uses of laughter that is more evident in some of his unpublished manuscripts. Throughout his writing career, Shaftesbury was very much interested in the cultural uses of laughter; in fact, his politics of ridicule are nothing less than a detailed cultural critique. It is therefore important for him to delineate the proper province of laughter: “There is a great difference between seeking how to raise a Laugh from every thing; and seeking, in every thing, what justly may be laugh’d at.” For Shaftesbury, the disciplining of one’s disposition to laughter was an important aspect of an individual’s character training. In his private exercises, based on what he regarded as the “Socratic Stoicism” of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, he devised an ‘anatomy’ or short cultural history of laughter which has hitherto not received the attention it deserves. Starting from the premise that “there [is] nothing more unsafe, or more difficult of management” than laughter, he attempted to find a way to turn it into a permanently disciplined “Passion wch may be employd […] against the Pomp & rediculouse solemnity of human affaires.” His aim was to promulgate a theory of decent laughter designed for a cultured caste of “well bred People, those of a finer Make, better Tast & raisd above the Vulgar.” There are seeming inconsistencies of the Earl’s views on laughter which have already been investigated in some detail (e.g. by Richard B. Wolf), especially with regard to his concept of satire as opposed to what he says about ridicule. This will be an aspect of a lecture which will in addition examine the Earl’s theory of laughter as set forth throughout his published writings, its pictorial representation in the engravings devised by Shaftesbury himself for the second edition of Characteristicks, and the relation of these to his private Askêmata as well as to his unpublished Pathologia. The aim of the lecture is to illuminate all aspects of Shaftesbury’s attempt to exchange a “vulgar, sordid, profuse, horrid Laughter for that more reservd gentle kind” which was an integral part of his Whig utopia.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2019

Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2018

The senses in early modern England, 1558–1660, 2015

The European Journal of Humour Research, 2018

HUMOR, 2018

International Review of Social History, 2007