“Gunny” from Nevada once thought that “Brits” were “prudish,” he reveals in his Amazon.com review of City of Laughter, but, Gunny says, “Mr. Gatrell” has “blow[n] that all apart.” The six decades after 1770 were a “golden age of graphic satire” (15), Vic Gatrell writes in his zesty book, and a “great age of English scatology and ad hominem caricature” (177). Twenty thousand or so witty, bawdy, and cheeky prints lampooned the great and good in satire's halcyon days. They caught the spirit and image-hunger of the times. Crowds huddled around printshop windows, not needing to read to laugh along. Politicians winced. Some printers made a mint that was quickly frittered away. Two hundred and eighty-nine prints are reproduced in this book, each one a visual clue to cultural and social shifts.

This satirical humor “reminds us of where we’ve come from,” Gatrell writes; it was “peculiarly English” (15). This comprehensive “we” will raise eyebrows. These smutty prints were “metropolitan products,” after all, and male comedy in the main (15). Hard data about print runs and circulation are lacking, although typical buyers were from elite and middle walks of life. Engravers were bawdy boozers on the whole from middling backgrounds, living in or near satire's stomping grounds in noisy Covent Garden. George Cruickshank's academy was a pub on a dark and dank lane. Like him, Samuel Rowlandson loved late binges. George's father and satire's shining star—Isaac—died from alcohol poisoning. Working deftly with copperplate and paper, engravers developed irreverent voices that made establishment prestige seem shaky. Most turned their backs on scurrility after 1820 in apparent acceptance of middle-class mantras of “improvement,” although they put the sleaze of the high-and-mighty on show for a while at any rate.

Politeness this was not, in what has been dubbed a “polite age.” Politeness and impoliteness existed in creative counterpoint, but not enough attention has been given to coarse Georgian gentlemen, even though Shaftesbury whined that politeness was skin-deep “embroidery.” Well-heeled gents turned rough-edged bawdy at the drop of a hat. Younger William Pitt knocked back six bottles of wine a day. Charles Fox had a pickled liver. Hell-raisers flocked to drinking clubs. The Regent was a godsend for gossip columnists, costing more than a manufacturing town, William Makepeace Thackery quipped. Masculine and libertine codes were like two peas in a pod for these men. Around half of cataloged prints took aim at politics. The other half dwelt on gossip, fashion, and sex, although overlaps are a leitmotif. Unlike William Hogarth, Rowlandson and others (including prolific and acidic James Gilray, who produced over one thousand prints) were not finger-pointing moralists. Burlesque lavatory humor was their hymn. No well-to-do bedroom or gent sitting on a chamber pot seemed safe from sharpshooting engravers or hack reporters. Some women also enjoyed bawdy fun that was not too risqué for “urbane female culture” (359). Nor was there much ground between high and low, rubbing shoulders at cockpits or hanging trees (the subject of Gatrell's last book). Things changed after 1820, but before then, satire enjoyed a busy Indian Summer. Prints had spoken of war before but “we all went politically mad,” printseller Thomas Dolby said in 1817. Taxes drained pockets, harvests failed, the end of war led to hard times, Peterloo brought matters to a boil, repression smothered everything, and links between satire and radicalism were “unprecedented” (495). Prints blasted “old corruption.” The royal brothers were roasted as they skipped from one bed to another. The regent topped the list of targets, beating “old Boney.” His efforts to exclude his queen after he was crowned were incendiary. Printers pumped out around 440 prints about the couple, almost all backing the queen, a final straw for the king who had stomached razor-sharp satire for four decades. He forked out £2,600 (around £100,000 today) for hush money to silence satirists.

So why were there no clampdowns when spies were everywhere and people were jailed for raising glasses to France? In spite of everything, engravers were “loyal” to the constitution, preferring muckraking to leveling (143). They did not mince words, but satire was a “substitute” for revolution, “too cheery” for anything else, and much to the taste of bawdy elites who were its main markets after all (146, 484). Satire was malicious, not seditious. Prints were harmless popguns, Pitt said, with a dismissive flick of the wrist. In any event, it was easier to prosecute authors than artists. Words were more precise, Hogarth wrote. No leading engraver fell victim to “Gagging Acts.”

Not all engravers left radical folds, but markets for bolshie prints slumped, and satire became a ghost of its former self. Most moved away from gutters and no longer slouched in taprooms. The royal purse was only one reason, and not the key one either. Tides turned. “Old England” and “old humour” withered, along with cockfights and bull baitings (418). Sensitivities softened. Middling people were richer, respectable, and more sure of themselves. Women had growing “public” voices and roles; female sensibilities were more interested in hearts and souls, Gatrell writes. London filled up with do-gooders who couldn’t stand anything bawdy, whose hearts lay with William Wilberforce and any of the many societies to improve or suppress something. Libertinism was bracketed together with French hotheads and rank corruption. Higher fences separated respectable and low lifestyles, summed up by Francis Place reading deep into the night in 1825 and looking from his window thinking happily how Charing Cross outside had changed for the better since 1795, when it was a hangout for prostitutes and all-day drinkers. London was getting cleaner. It looked better with old houses knocked down, wider streets, and plush shops, all “material” equivalents of improved manners.

Gatrell himself does not hold back. He believes in “watersheds” in “civility and manners,” “humour,” and “Francis Places's watershed” (19, 417, 418, 452, 580, 587). He hooks his packed book around sweeping changes or climactic decades, and not everything is squeezed in smoothly. The last chapter on harsher attitudes toward low life could be better integrated, for example. Watersheds always ruffle feathers. A lingering doubt is how much City of Laughter is about Englishness, which it wants to be. It is about “London's great world”; counties do not feature in the index (352). It is also about a coterie of men (mainly) whose debauchery became more visible. But any rough edges are more than made up for by Gatrell's bright and breezy prose, his pulsating intellect and interpretations, and how he puts himself into his book. Make no mistake, he is on the side of bawdy satirists. “The angels cannot be allowed to score all the points,” he writes; London's “cleansing process was a deepening wish to control” (432). “Temperance bigots … multiplied alarmingly,” he says with evident distaste. Being a “do-gooder” is nothing to be proud of in his pages. Po-faced Francis Place is Gatrell's bogeyman, made to look pompous for his “priggish humourlessness [and] earnestness” (583). Place embodies quests for discipline that watered down comedy into tame jokes, puns, and double entendres that tickled music-hall audiences. Find a fart in Victorian Punch, Gatrell challenges. Gatrell, however, puts laughter back in the heart of history and culture. His book is a rare breath of fresh air, and it is easy to imagine him enjoying writing it. And also I can’t help but feel that sometimes he cocks a well-deserved snook at the more stuffy and staid sides of the historical profession, now and then anyway.