Customer Reviews
Beautifully illustrated, but.... - By: A. Crowther, 25 Aug 2008 
The best part of this book is its pictures--an amazing selection of satirical & "bawdy" prints from about 1790 to about 1830. Vic Gatrell's text is a robust defence of the society which created these pictures. The reader, having ploughed through 600 pages of pictures which are only funny if farting, urinating, defecating & copulating are funny in themselves, may possibly end up in a state of bilious revulsion against the whole age. The print makers celebrated "libertine" sex but also mocked the Prince of Wales crudely & persistently for having a mistress. They mocked William Wilberforce in horrible prints for trying to abolish the slave trade (see p480). They portrayed women as slabs of meat (see p386).
Vic Gatrell defends every one of the values of the age. For instance, on p109 he suggests that prostitutes in that age were on the whole happy--and apparently does so simply because Thomas Rowlandson portrayed them as happy in a print. The chapter "What Could Women Bear?" toys with the idea that the age could have been misogynistic (surely not!) but rebuts the charge with naïve arguments that show his ignorance of feminist criticism. A reading of "The Troublesome Helpmate" by Katharine M Rogers (1966) could have helped him here.
As we might expect, this portrayal of the pre-Victorian "Golden Age" ends with those nasty Victorian moralisers bringing in the "Age of Cant"--a term apparently invented by Lord Byron to pin down the kind of people who wanted to limit Byron's sex life. Here Gatrell's arguments descend into a persistent sarcasm which alllows him to talk of "morality" & "improvement" (with or without inverted commas) without actuallly showing that they were bad things. For instance, on pp574-5 he quotes Francis Place, who wrote in 1820 of the improvements in hygiene & behaviour that he had seen in the past thirty years. Place's comments are quoted with an implicit mockery, but it is difficult to see why. Were things reallly better in the good old days when the streets were full of "wretched half-starved, miserable scald headed children, with ricketty limbs & bandy legs"?
The Victorians were the people who stopped children being sent up chimneys, not the people who started the practice. The Victorians were the people who realised, with a shock, that many of the values they inherited were hypocritical, & started to insist that something should be done about it. They were the people who finallly realised that the poorest of their society were suffering, & started to do something about that, too. They even realised that libertine sex might end in women getting a pretty raw deal. Is it not possible that the Victorian age actuallly was what it said it was: an Age of Improvement?
Nice pictures, though.
Brilliant - By: R. Wright, 26 Oct 2007 
This is a fascinating, original, & utterly absorbing study of the Eighteenth Century. It is worth buying for the illustrations alone! Gatrell writes with warmth & insight - this is what literary history should be!
