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Gatrell, Vic

City of Laughter, [15] 74

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Bottoms Up

Matthew J. Reisz on Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London

Vic Gatrell’s book City of Laughter paints a compelling, seductive picture of London in a lost Golden Age – the Golden Age revealed in the hundreds of satirical prints that poured from the presses from about 1770 to 1830. It draws on many literary sources and is illustrated with almost 300 colour images, most from the under-explored archives at the British Museum and Yale (and many never previously reprinted). Vivid, inventive, energetic, savage in puncturing pretension and full of lavatorial and obscene humour, they offer us a fantastic panorama of a libertine London, full of violence, hearty pleasure, uninhibited sex and high spirits.

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