Freaks, Dwarfs and Boors
Thomas Keymer: 18th-Century Jokes, 2 August 2012
Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental 18th Century
by Simon Dickie.
Chicago, 362 pp., £29, December 2011,978 0 226 14618 8 Show More
by Simon Dickie.
Chicago, 362 pp., £29, December 2011,
“... Compassion was invented in the 18th century, or so the story goes. Sensibility and sympathy were the wellspring of benevolent action and the glue of society (Adam Smith). There were no qualities more admirable ‘than beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed ... ”