City of Laughter

How straight-laced and, let's face it, clean, twenty-first century London seems in comparison to its bawdy and filthy eighteenth-century cousin. The gap between the rich and poor was as great then as it is now, and the public's obsession with gossip about royalty and the aristocracy was as intense, but the well-to-do were not averse to visiting low-life taverns and brothels in search of adventure.

Luckily, as this thrilling and beautiful book decribes and illustrates in loving detail, caricaturists of the highest calibre were there to capture the boozing and the sex in prints that were by turn witty, amusing, affectionate, satirical, and rude.

Eighteenth-century London was a bustling, dirty, crowded, lively city. As Piccadilly and St James's Street developed as the home of the rich, the rest of the population crammed themselves into grotty buildings to the east. Tradesmen, craftsmen and nearly all of London's satirical engravers lived in or near Covent Garden; it was by mixing with these 'middling people', particularly in taverns, that the Cruikshanks (father Isaac, and sons Robert and George) and Thomas Rowlandson were able to produce their most exciting work.

Rich and poor alike were sustained by two things: sex and drink. Gatrell quotes memoirist Captain Gronow: '"A three-bottle man was not an unusual guest at a fashionable table": at dinner, "a perpetual thirst seemed to come over people"'. For the poor, whose lives consisted of unremitting work, 'sex was the leading pleasure.' Thus while the down-at-heel forgot their hardships in drink, aristocratic playboys and libertines went adventuring to alleviate the boredom of endless parties (which Byron described as a "deplorable waste of time"). In the footsteps of Hogarth, the satirsts took relish in drawing debauched scenes both of men's clubs and gatherings of the poor. Common elements include fighting, prostrate bodies, overflowing chamberpots, vomit and bare breasts.

Vibrant and amusing those these prints are, they comprise only one element of the satirists' work. Greater, and some would say, more relentless attacks were launched on members of parliament, the aristocracy and the monarchy. William Pitt the Younger's slender form appears often (Gillray famously turned him into a mushroom) as does Charles James Fox's hirsute one and voluminously exaggerated resemblances of simpering Lady this and behorned, cuckolded, Lord that.

Gatrell points out that many of the satirists' targets were not bothered by their caricatures. Pitt considered the prints ' "one of the harmless popguns of a free press"' and 'Fox affected not to care in the slightest about his public reputation'. For one person, however, the sustained attack against him caused him the greatest suffering: the Prince Regent, later George IV.

George's affairs and his gluttony were gifts to the satirists, but none took up the cause with as much gusto as George Cruikshank. Time and again he portrayed the drunken, portly Regent, often supported by, or in bed with, one of his (similarly rotund) mistresses. By 1820, George hardly dared showed his face in public; frustrated by the ineffectuality of prosecution, he resorted to paying off the artists and buying up as many prints, plates and copyrights as he could (he spent the equivalent of £100,000 in three years). Even George Cruikshank (and his brother) succumbed to bribery, but by then a reforming tide was changing English humour as liberal Tories replaced hated regency ministers and the middle class became more prosperous, respectable and virtuous.

London's printsellers and booksellers were vital to the successful dissemination of the satires (William Blake noted that, by 1800, they were as numerous as butchers). They boldly defied harsh censorship laws, sometimes ending up in prison for their trouble, but the rewards were worth the risk. Again it is interesting to note that many of the printsellers' wealthiest patrons were those most mocked by the satirists.

Gatrell's scope is wide; he muses on the nature of laughter, asking why the bums of farts of these Georgian images seem too obviously crude to us now, and how changes in society's attitudes affected the satirists' output from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.

City of Laughter is everything a book should be: enthusiastic about its subject, learned and engrossing. It is beautifully illustrated with almost 300 prints and printed on good quality paper. Buy a copy immediately.