Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham.

The Sackful of News.

Jack of Dover his Quest of Inquiry for the Veriest Fool in Christendom.

Pasquil’s Jests, with Mother Bunch’s Merriments and a Brown Dozen of Gulls.

One of the Puritan writers denounces the first article on our list as one of the “witless devices” of the Elizabethan age; and he is very near the truth. Of course, they are far older than that reign, and are mentioned in the Hundred Merry Tales; nor does the small book which holds them, contain them all, or represent the original date of their introduction to the public notice in a printed shape. They belong to the family of Noodledoms, Gaulardisms, and Gasconades, which seems to have enjoyed such general acceptance for a great length of time both in England and on the Continent; and while they are no doubt prodigiously silly, I am quite serious in my assurance, that I should be very sorry not to have them, and that I would liefer spare many literary memorials than this and the other Fooleries, with which they are on terms of relationship. Any one who chooses to refer to Old English Jest-Books, 1864, will understand my idiosyncracy, for there, at a much earlier period of my life, I took considerable pains to illustrate both their former acceptability and their to-day’s use. I have seen them described as ineptitudes; but that was by such as lacked critical insight, and left the mineral treasure ungotten. A superficial examination will not do; the divining rod must be applied. We must break the surface, and within are wonders surpassing those of the cave of Aladdin.

I would not have it to be supposed that these Gothamite and other drolleries are altogether destitute of point or legibility; but for my present purpose I have no space to linger over them, and hardly any occasion, as they offer no original types. They are, for the most part, bis cocta—an unconscious homage to preceding authors, with the subsidiary features varied for the nonce. Even Mother Bunch is nothing more than Elinor Rumming revived with certain additions and melodramatic embellishments; and Jack of Dover offers little that is novel to our consideration beyond the conception of a jury of penniless poets—reaching, so far as it is possible to make out, the abnormal number of twenty-eight—as a vehicle for a series of thin, vamped-up jokes, in the majority of which we easily identify old friends, and not improved by a change of clothes.

The present rarity of the bulk of this species of literature, and even disappearance in not a few cases of works or editions which must once have existed, are to be explained indeed by the insatiable hunger for novelty in external presentment and the neglect of discarded favourites quite as much as by the other more usual incidence of popularity.

When we cross over from an investigation of the older literature in order to make a general survey of the modern school, it is like the migration to a different climate. Something resembling an organic revolution has occurred in this sphere of action and ingenuity. New literary and theatrical agencies have been in operation. Great political convulsions and the overthrow of dynasties have made their secondary effects sensible. The Georges have turned everything upside down. Grandfather’s jest-book is equally out of date with his opinions and his costume. Joe Miller has won a victory more signal and more enduring than Blenheim. He is the jocular laureate of the new Hanoverian time, and of all time to come. His book, if he only knew it, is to see as many editions as the Pilgrim’s Progress, and to have as many readers as the Bible. He is to become in his way a colossus—a cyclopædia in himself.

What more could the most aspiring solicit or desire?

Soberly speaking, the appearance of Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wit’s Vademecum, under fortuitous circumstances in the time of George II., marked the new era in this description of industry, and was an English Hegira.