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The New Foundling Hospital for Wit, ed. Donald W. Nichol. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006. 3 volumes. Pp. 1408. $495.
Reviving the spirit of Scriblerian satire at its most outrageous, The New Foundling Hospital for Wit ran to six parts or volumes from 1768 to 1773. By turns clever, scurrilous, and bawdy, this collection was wildly popular in its own day, but has long been overlooked if not forgotten. Now, however, Mr. Nichol's scholarly three-volume set makes the full run of this important collection of British satire widely accessible.
The New Foundling was a "bastion of bastard literature" compiled by the radical bookseller John Almon at a time when legal difficulties prohibited him from publishing his usual fare, political tracts for the opposition. For this reason, as I have argued elsewhere, Almon turned to literary representation, assembling some of the eighteenth century's most scathing and popular satires, parodies, imitations, and lampoons. These...