Victorian Comedy and Laughter

'A sparkling collection — at once authoritative and intrepid. Louise Lee has assembled a remarkable set of essays, shedding fresh light on the many lives of comedy at work and play in nineteenth-century culture (from poetry to fiction, circus to music hall, and beyond). This volume is a welcome contribution to Victorian studies; but, more importantly, it’s a reminder—in Lee’s words—that “laughter is good to think with.”'

- Matthew Bevis, University of Oxford & author of Wordsworth's Fun (2019)

This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central

rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality,

Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear,

George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-loved

Victorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracing

three consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all of the contributors engage with the

crucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic

form. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of print

culture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone,

Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke — both on

the page and the stage — while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider the

impassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end of

the century.