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SIMON DICKIE. Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 384.
Some weeks before I sat down to read Simon Dickie's book, I had made my way through Steven Pinker's controversial Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), in which he argues, often convincingly I thought, that most of humanity has progressed beyond the horrific violence (which he vividly evokes) that the inhabitants of past centuries had simply accepted as normal or inevitable. So I was not at all surprised by Dickie's contention that much of the English eighteenth century (he uses 1740-70 for his many and varied examples) was "almost oblivious to the humanitarian sensibilities we have come to associate with this period" (p. xi), and that much of the humor indulged in during those years, clear across class lines, is deeply offensive to our current sensibilities, crude and cruel in the extreme, its laughter at disability and deformity cause for our strong revulsion. As Dickie opens his book he insistently evokes the enormous differences between prevailing attitudes toward our fellow creatures' infirmities in the eighteenth century and what we think of as our own sympathy and compassion: "Ridiculing and inflicting pain were everyday amusements, and powerful forces were defending them. Violence, intolerance, and schadenfreude were all tolerated as unavoidable side effects of British liberty and its very foundation" (p. 1). Dickie's provocative reminders of the day-to-day unspeakable cruelties and crudities of much of mid-eighteenth-century English life are salutary and convincing. So, too, is his insistence that disability and deformity, commonplace and indeed ubiquitous in London especially, were for many reliable sources of humor and mockery that subsequent history has obscured or indeed forgotten.
Dickie has performed a valuable service by digging deep in eighteenth-century popular (and for that matter high) culture and unearthing forgotten texts and the attitudes they project that prove his point beyond any doubt. His scholarship is thorough, indeed comprehensive, and his book is richly informative, as he looks at jestbooks, as he surveys (the title of his concluding chapter) "the forgotten best-sellers of early English fiction," what he calls "ramble novels," as he contemplates attitudes toward "cripples and hunchbacks" (disability as a source...