Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century

Cruelty and Laughter

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

What did British people laugh at in the mid-eighteenth century? The literary record offers a partial answer in the corrective laughter of Augustan satire, the cuckolds and sex plots of stage comedy, and the familiar cast of Irish idiots and soupe-maigre Frenchmen. The tortured distinction between true and false wit is an ancient topic in eighteenth-century studies. Historians of popular culture have told us much about the humor of protest. But what did people laugh at in everyday situations—in streets, coffeehouses, and polite assemblies? One might begin, like a good ethnographer, with a few jokes:

A Man being very much diseased and weak, was bemoaning himself to his only Son, whom he loved very well: For, Jack, says he, if I stand, my Legs ach; if I kneel, my Knees ach; if I go, my Feet ach; if I lie, then my Back achs; if I sit, my Hips ach; and if I lean, my Elbows ach. Why truly Father, says he (like a good dutiful Child) I advise you to hang yourself for an Hour or two, and if that does not do, then come to me again. One Day in the Grove, [Beau Nash] joined some Ladies, and asking one of them, who was crooked, whence she came? She replied, Strait from London. Indeed, Madam, said he, then you must have been confoundedly warpt by the Way. One observing a crooked Fellow in close Argument with another, who would have dissuaded him from some inconsiderable Resolution, said to his Friend, Prithee let him alone, and say no more to him, you see he's bent upon it. A Welchman begging upon the road came to a farm-house, where they fill'd his belly with whey, that it made his guts to ake: Hur prays to St. Davy for comfort; an owl being at roost in the barn, as he held up his head a praying, the owl shit just in his mouth. O thank good St. Davy, for hur desired but a drop, but hur hath given hur a mouthful. One Easter Monday, an arch Rogue meeting a blind Woman who was crying Puddings and Pies, taking her by the Arm said Come along with me Dame, I am going to Moorfields, where this Holliday-time, you may Chance to meet with good Custom. Thank'e kindly, Sir, says she. Whereupon he conducted her to Cripplegate Church, and placed her in the middle Isle. Now, says he, you are in Moorfields: which she believing to be true, immediately cried out, Hot Puddings and Pies! Hot Puddings and Pies! come their all Hot! &c. which caused the whole Congregation to burst out in a loud Laughter, and the Clerk came and told her she was in a Church: You are a lying son of a Whore, says she. Which so enraged the Clerk, that he dragged her out of the Church: she cursing and damning him all the while, nor would she believe him 'till she heard the Organs play. A young Man married to an ill-temper'd Woman, who not contented, tho' he was very kind to her, made continual Complaints to her Father, to the great Grief of both Families; the Husband, no longer able to endure this scurvy Humour, bang'd her soundly: Hereupon she complain'd to her Father, who understanding well the Perverseness of her Humour, took her to Task, and lac'd her Sides soundly too; saying, Go, commend me to your Husband, and tell him, I am now even with him, for I have cudgell'd his Wife, as he hath beaten my Daughter. Modern readers will be struck by the callousness of these jokes, their frank delight in human misery. All take it for granted that one laughed at illness, disability, hunger, and domestic violence. The blind pie vendor, the battered wife, the sickly old man, the starving Welsh migrant sheltering in a barn: the victims of these jokes are as helpless and vulnerable as it is possible to be. Those who mock them are delighting in their superiority and good fortune; they are indulging the "Sudden Glory" that Hobbes describes in his famous analysis of laughter, the rush of glee caused "by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves." Yet it is all surprisingly genial: the fellow who torments the pie seller is "an arch Rogue." In countless similar jokes, the tormentor is introduced as "a good impudent fellow," a "diverting wag," or "this facetious gentleman."

British jestbooks of this period are full of jokes about cripples, hunchbacks, blind men, and desperate beggars. One finds an almost encyclopedic range of jokes about the deaf. Some texts even separate out their deformity jokes into categories—"Of Crookedness and Lameness," "Of Noses," "Of Deaf Folk," "Of Faces and Scars." Noselessness was evidently a particularly amusing affliction—perhaps because it reduced one to an animal state (man, it was said, was the only being with a true nose).10 God bless your eyesight, says the joker to someone with no nose, because you certainly couldn't wear spectacles. The prank about a melancholy old father is typical of many in which sickly old folk are told to go and kill themselves. The joke against the blind pie seller is one of the most frequently reprinted of all jestbook anecdotes (one owner of The Complete London Jester identified it as a particular favorite, with a large inky spot in the margin).11 Judging by The Nut-Cracker (1751), the profitable jestbook he compiled for John Newbery, Christopher Smart was particularly fond of stuttering jokes:

An Arch Boy, belonging to one of the Ships of War at Portsmouth, had purchased of his Play-fellows a Magpye, which he carried to his Father's House, and was at the Door feeding it, when a Gentleman in the Neighbourhood, who had an Impediment in his Speech, coming up, T-T-T-Tom, says the Gentleman, can your Mag T-T-T-Talk yet? Ay Sir, says the Boy, better than you, or I'd wring his Head off.

This one appears alongside jokes about famous stutterers (D'Urfey, Addison, Lord Strangford) in almost every eighteenth-century jestbook. The wife-beating joke is one of thousands. A man who "us'd to divert himself now and then by beating his wife" begins another joke from Smart's Nut-Cracker.

The waggish insults already demand some major efforts of historical understanding. But it gets much worse. Large parts of every book are devoted to more brutal cruelties—blind men led into walls, dwarfs tossed out windows, lame matrons tumbled into ditches. Many of these are elaborate practical jokes, like the following:

The lord Mohun and the earl of Warwick being on the ramble, they took notice of an old woman, who early and late was boiling codlings [apples] near Charing-cross; one day they bought some of her, pitied her poverty, and promised to send her a bushel of charcoal for nothing. I thank your honours, replied the old woman. In the morning a porter brings a bushel of charcoal, at which the old woman was very joyful: but their lordships had filled up the hollow of the charcoal with gunpowder, and sealed up the ends with black wax and stood at a distance to see the effect of their project. The old woman's fire beginning to decay, she supplied it with the charcoal which was sent her. In a little time, bounce went the charcoal like so many crackers, down went the kettle into the street, and away flew the codlings about the old woman's ears; and she getting no hurt, their lordships were well pleased with the frolick.

Slangy and gleefully circumstantial, this is one of many anecdotes about a waggish aristocrat tormenting a cripple or starving pauper before a delighted mob. (So much for plebeian class consciousness.)

It is all strikingly at odds with emerging sentimental standards. Jestbook humor seems oblivious to contemporary debates about the nature and ethics of laughter, not to mention inherited Christian injunctions to feed the hungry and care for the sick. The cruelty of certain types of humor was a recurring subject in Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson, Akenside, Lord Kames, and almost every other moral philosopher. Scores of anonymous periodical essays dealt with the subject, and there were dedicated treatises like Whitehead's On Ridicule (1743) and Corbyn Morris's Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744). Eighteenth-century satirists all felt compelled to refute the charge of malice, to establish their own good nature and the righteous didacticism of their verse. Comic dramatists routinely added prologues insisting on the corrective functions of their humor. 15 Above all, it was becoming unacceptable to laugh at the defects and sufferings of others: sympathy was the proper response for these misfortunes. Nothing shocks us more, wrote Adam Smith in the opening pages of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), than an absence of sympathy. "It is natural," insisted James Beattie, that "pity should prevail over the ludicrous emotion." To Hume, anyone without sympathy was hardly human: "All his sentiments must be inverted, and directly opposite to those which prevail in the human species." Adopting a diff erent tone for her young female readers, Hester Chapone warns anyone who laughs at sickness or old age: "all it seriously to mind, when you are confessing your faults to Almighty God: and, be fully persuaded, that it is not one of the least which you have to repent of."

NASTY JOKES, POLITE WOMEN

Jestbooks have generally been categorized as "popular" texts. And certainly one's initial reaction is to see them as artifacts of low culture, examples of the vulgar taste from which the "polite" classes were self-consciously separating themselves. Laughing at hunchbacks or blind men seems more like the humor of the stables or the servants' hall. One instinctually associates such jokes with the cheaper forms of print: the Dicey chapbooks or even smaller comic pamphlets sold by itinerant peddlers and the shabbiest booksellers on and around London Bridge. Among higher classes, they are the sort of jokes one might associate with urban roués, madcap Oxbridge students, idle young gentlemen from the Inns of Court—generally the hangover of a premodern barbarity that was soon to sink into oblivion.

The problem is that none of these nasty witticisms comes from the cheapest or crudest forms of print. Most jestbooks were produced for middle- and upper-class readers: at 1s. 6d., 3s., or even 5s., they were far beyond the reach of a popular audience. They were produced in enormous quantities, with dozens of new volumes appearing each year. Swift and others might have scorned "Six-peny-worth of Wit, Westminster Drolleries, Delightful Tales, Compleat Jesters, and the like," but they were a profitable part of the eighteenth-century book market. Packed with cruel jokes, they surely force us to qualify our assumptions about levels of sentimentalism and about the rapid sharpening of social divisions in midcentury Britain. Polite anxieties about cultural distinctions would seem to have been less widespread than we have assumed. These texts and their readership offer further raw material for ongoing debates about the strength of class divisions in eighteenth-century Britain and certainly about the viability of the popular/polite distinction, with its emphasis on differences rather than continuities and its simplification of the infinite gradations and mutations of the British social hierarchy.

Above all, this readership forces us to look seriously at recent critiques of the last two decades' work on the middling sort. So much good work on the commercial middle classes has collectively reified this category, even if most scholars stop short of talking about class consciousness. In a meticulously researched study, the social historian H. R. French lays out the overwhelming heterogeneity obscured by terms like middling sort: vast differences between educated professionals (physicians, lawyers, minor clergymen) and artisans or shopkeepers (with further hierarchies between "clean" and "dirty" trades). Talk of a national middling sort also flattens out regional differences, conflating the "chief inhabitants" of rural communities with the bourgeoisie of provincial towns and the "big bourgeoisie" of the metropolis. In all these contexts, French insists, identities were contingent and multiple: like everyone else, middling people behaved and thought of themselves differently in different contexts. This was already evident in the very different pictures of middleclass life presented by such historians as Margaret Hunt (who describes a thrifty, industrious, and domestic middle class) and others (like Peter Borsay) who concentrate on leisure and consumption. Middle-class life was by definition a combination of work and leisure. At the same time, jestbooks also point to activities and pleasures that cut across classes: one finds very similar jokes in expensive texts and in the crudest broadsides or farthing pamphlets. Several of the most fashionable jestbooks were abridged as chapbooks or published in weekly parts for lower readers.

Given that these texts have received so little scholarly attention—and that they have so often been treated as popular texts—it seems important to discuss them and their social distribution in some detail. The only truly popular jestbooks were chapbook versions produced by the Dicey family and other printers and, beneath them, all sorts of even more diminutive pamphlets of perhaps a single quarto sheet, the work of ephemera publishers and provincial booksellers. Joaks upon Joaks, The Penny Budget of Wit, Pills to Purge Melancholy, A Whetstone for Dull Wits: these and other perennial favorites were poorly printed on cheap paper, with perhaps a couple of crude woodcuts. They sold for no more than a few pennies and provided barely literate readers with a short assortment of traditional humor: comic insults (calling someone an ass, goose, or blockhead) and all the tripping, scalding, and head knocking of early modern practical jokes. In these texts one meets the most traditional victims of folk humor: scolds and cuckolds, droning parsons, Puritans, Catholics, and the ubiquitous idiots of the Celtic fringe (Sawney the Scot, Taffy from Wales, and so on). There are laxatives and itching powders and all sorts of fun with human excrement. A barmaid pisses into a pot of beer; a boy makes a shit pie for his mother's lover. One finds all the usual bawdy tales, marital rows, and nocturnal mishaps in the corridors of coaching inns. Many favorite chapbooks relate the rudimentary life story and pranks of native tricksters like Tom Thumb, Tom Tram, Swalpo, and Robin Goodfellow—a succession of violent or scatological tricks against mean widows, Puritans, gypsies, and assorted other dupes. The Dicey chapbooks were printed in vast numbers, sometimes ten thousand or more, and circulated far more widely than any other printed matter in eighteenth-century England. They provide the clearest evidence of popular tastes and of the overwhelming stagnation of popular humor from the Middle Ages into the early nineteenth century, when the chapbooks finally declined and traditional popular humor was consigned to oblivion or cleaned up as children's literature.

These texts have now been widely studied, but we are still far less familiar with the duodecimo jestbooks and comic miscellanies put out by mainstream London booksellers—those producing the classics, sacred literature, expensive scientific or philosophical works, and what we now think of as polite literature. One of the largest jestbook publishers was the firm of Hawes and Hitch in Paternoster Row, which also published editions of Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison; of Locke and Virgil; New Testaments in Greek and Latin; and many extremely expensive belletristic texts. For most mainstream booksellers, jestbooks seem to have been a source of steady income comparable to almanacs. Most are well printed on good-quality paper, and they are frequently decorated with engraved frontispieces and rococo ornaments.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cruelty and Laughter by Simon Dickie Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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