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. O city abounding in whores, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang.’ The Romantics preferred clean air, and London was dirty, as were its people, and not only the lower classes. The Prince of Wales’ bride, Caroline of Brunswick, complained that he and his companions were ‘constantly drunk and filthy . . . sleeping and snoring in boots on the sofa’. Their daughter, Princess Charlotte, described her father and uncles falling off their chairs one by one, the Duke of York finally pulling the tablecloth with everything upon it on top of all of them — proof that the caricaturists who showed them drunk under the table were not exaggerating.

George III’s inability to bring up his sons properly was a gift to satirists. Another was the conduct of the long war against the French, leading to bitter divisions of opinion, and forcing the English to concentrate their attention on themselves.