Before we became respectable

Vic Gatrell’s investigation into rude old-fashioned laughter almost bursts out of its covers, with 700 pages and 289 illustrations showing political caricatures and prints ridiculing the fashionable and the badly behaved. Much of the mockery is aimed at the libertine sons of George III and their friends, male and female, but there are also even-handed attacks on radicals, whores and their clients, evangelicals and even the optimistically named but short-lived Society for the Suppression of Vice. Bottoms, nipples, vomit, bloody hands, chamber pots, men and women farting, peeing and shitting, whores merry and dejected, drunkards and fornicating couples crowd the pages. Most of these things are still about, but artistically this is a world we have lost, and Gatrell sets out to celebrate and catalogue it in its bawdy, sardonic and satirical splendour, and to consider why it suddenly disappeared in the 19th century.

Beginning with a vigorous description of London low life, he gives us Charles Lamb’s praise of the pleasures of the city in a letter: ‘O London with-the-many-sins.