A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/92285 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications A Study of Political Humour in British Literature in the 1790s by Chi-Fang Chen A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies September, 2016 Table of Contents Table of Contents i List of Illustration iii Acknowledgement iv Declaration v Abstract vi Introduction. The Problem of the Political Nature of Humour 1 Joke as a Political Expression and the Political Community 12 Humour as a Way of Life and Byway to Knowledge 18 Chapter 1. The Comedy of ‘Common Life’ and the Social Theories in the Eighteenth-Century Comic Discourse 29 1.1 The ‘Decline’ of Satire and the Emergence of Modern Comedy 31 1.2 ‘Common Life’ and the Comedy of Character 39 1.3 The Contradictions of Comic Sociability 54 Chapter 2. The Contestation over ‘Common Life’ from Burke’s Critique of Comedy to the Humour of Popular Radicalism 76 2.1 Burke’s Political Ethics of Theatre and Comedy 81 2.2 Social Totality, Pathetic Tragedy, and Radical Comedy 91 2.3 Popular Radical Humour and the Quixotism of Burke 99 2.4 Common Sense and the ‘Open Theatre of the World’ 107 2.5 The ‘Contagious’ Laughter: A Universal Sympathy ‘Passing from Heart to Heart’ 118 2.6 The Contagion of Laughter in Print 130 Chapter 3. ‘Inoffensive Sport’ and Political Criticism in John Wolcot 142 i 3.1 Human Comedy and Royalty 148 3.2 The ‘Horatian’, the ‘Juvenalian’, and the Political Controversy between the ‘Satiric’ and the ‘Comic’ 160 3.3 Comedy as Literary and Political Critique, and British ‘Liberty’ 182 Chapter 4. Counter-Revolution and the Social Discipline of ‘Common life’ in the ‘Anti-Jacobin’ Novels 196 4.1 Comedy, the Decorum of the Novel, and Social Discipline 198 4.2 Community, the ‘Humourist’ and the Comic Dispersal of the Multitude 221 4.3 Domesticity, the Novel, Humour and Political ‘Neutrality’ 242 4.4 D’Israeli’s Flim-Flams! and the Problem of Autotelic Humour 255 Conclusion. Humour and Common Life 273 Bibliography 289 ii List of Illustration Illustration: Richard Newton, ‘Treason!!!” (1798) 7 iii Acknowledgement I would like to thank my three supervisors at different stages of my PhD: Jon Mee, for guiding me with his erudition and encouragement through my first two years; Tina Lupton, for her kind consent to be my replacement supervisor after Jon’s departure and her generous assistance and advice on a variety of issues; and David Taylor, also for his excellent advice, and for his rigorous criticism of my work. The Arts Faculty Seminar Series gave me many opportunities to share my thoughts on various subjects. The academic events organised by the Eighteenth Century Centre at Warwick provided me with helpful introductions into eighteenth century studies, which was completely new to me at the start of my research. I thank Ross Forman and Jackie Labbe who read and gave valuable feedback on my work in its early stages. My gratitude also to Georgina Green, Markman Ellis and Terry Eagleton, with whom I had the pleasure of talking about my work, though who may or may not remember. I have had conversations with many other individuals about my work, and I regret not being able to learn or remember their names to include them here, but my gratitude towards these individuals is no less. I had the pleasure of discussing my work and sharing my thoughts on my subject at different stages with a number of people: Máté Vince, Mary Addyman, Alireza Fakhrkonandeh, Clare Siviter, George Ttoouli, Michael Tsang, Waiyee Loh, and Laura Wood. Special thanks to George Ttoouli, Michael Tsang, Mike Soong and Yan-Kun Huang, who kindly provided mental support and friendship during difficult times. Another thank you to Ross Forman, for his mentorship particularly during my academic struggles. I thank Mark Philp and Mary Fairclough, my examiners, for their rigorous criticisms of the argumentation and their useful suggestions about the amendments of its structure. Finally, I am grateful to my parents and my sister, who had to put up with my endless procrastination over everything. iv Declaration This thesis, entitled ‘A Study of Political Humour in British Literature in the 1790s’, is entirely my own work. No parts of the thesis have been previously submitted for a degree anywhere. Chi-Fang Chen v Abstract British responses to the French Revolution are characterised by humorous expression in the literature of the 1790s. Yet political humour is often not readily harnessed to an immediate political agenda. ‘Political humour’ as an idea appears to be a contradiction and elicits a contradictory set of epithets, which falls into two distinct categories: ideological commitment and disinterested amusement. This thesis argues that it is this tension that contributes to the redrawing of the ambit of politics. This thesis continues the recent scholarly approach to the British response to the Revolution less as a formal ‘debate’ than as a ‘controversy’, which involves a diversity of cultural practices and experimentation of expression and social organisation. I argue that the employment of humour in the political literature of the 1790s provides extended or alternative means of political engagement. The political humour goes beyond topical political agendas and alludes to the eighteenth-century comic theory, which instructs ethical questions about social relation or ways of life. I demonstrate that the claim to autotelic innocence of humour in the comic discourse of the eighteenth century was predicated on contradictory social tendencies: laughing either reinforces individual boundary or facilitates transmissive and collective conviviality. ‘Common life’, which denotes a social relation in settlement, is the existential horizon that enacts this contradiction. With ‘common life’ in crisis or contestation in the 1790s, and with social organisation under political controversy, humour as political disclaimer is thereby reworked into a particular political language. I read the comic discourses of Burke and the popular radicals, the satire of Peter Pindar, and the comic rhetoric of the anti-Jacobin novels to explore this political language. In doing so, this thesis seeks to suggest ways of reading the literary culture of the 1790s in terms of the circumscription or expansion of the scope of political life, so as to examine how humour contributed and responded to changes in political culture. vi Introduction The Problem of the Political Nature of Humour Commenting on the graphic satire of James Gillray, the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Wright writes that wit is something above politics and history: ‘Party politics are transient, but wit survives, when the circumstance in which it originated is forgotten, or sunk into insignificance’.1 But is it possible for Gillray’s viewer to enjoy his wit without the knowledge or a degree of empathy into the political events to which his wit was responding? What, then, does Wright suggest of the relationship between comic entertainment and politics? This study concentrates on the political humour, or the literature of comic expression, that prevailed in Britain in response to the controversies generated by the impact of the French Revolution in the 1790s. It analyses the formal features of humorous literature in relation to its political content, but not before first reconsidering critical methodology. I use ‘humour’ as an umbrella term, a convenient synecdoche of a set of key term of the comic modes of expression in the comic genres, ranging from modes of language of ‘wit’, ‘humour’, and ‘joke’, to genres of comedy, farce, satire, and parody.2 I do so because the objective of 1 Thomas Wright and R. H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray (London, 1851), 174. 2 The scope of ‘comic’ expression, as critics such as Harry Levin recognise, is indefinite. Nonetheless, Levin provides a methodological sleight-of-hand that may help us out of this critical impasse: ‘We might find a word of encouragement in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dictum on games (a genus of which comedies are a species, as we shall be recognising). We should look, he tells us, 1 this study is not an analytical inquiry into the rhetorical systems of the comic modes of expression, but a political inquiry into, as this study will unfold, the social and pragmatic implications in the discourse and practice of any of these various modes. Also, I want to highlight the political tensions among these comic modes so that the 1790s can be properly represented as an age of controversy (for example, as I will show in the chapters, there are political contradictions in ‘comedy’ and ‘laughter’, or ‘comedy’ and ‘farce’). The range of these terms reflects the range of ethical and epistemological concerns in eighteenth-century discourse, which I shall address in questions raised in this thesis. Wright’s suggestion that a value of innocent amusement can be extracted from a humorous expression, even if it is produced in a specific political and historical context, may well be put to doubt in our critical climate, in which hardly anything can escape the dimension of the political. However, his judgment indicates some of our critical problems.