State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature

A history of political satire in English literature from its Roman foundations to the present day

Satire is a funny, aggressive, and largely oppositional literature which is typically created by people who refuse to participate in a given regime’s perception of itself. Although satire has always been a primary literature of state affairs, and although it has always been used to intervene in ongoing discussions about political theory and practice, there has been no attempt to examine this fascinating and unusual literature across the full chronological horizon. In State of Ridicule, Dan Sperrin provides the first ever longue durée history of political satire in British literature. He traces satire’s many extended and discontinuous trajectories through time while also chronicling some of the most inflamed and challenging political contexts within which it has been written.

Sperrin begins by describing the Roman foundations and substructures of British satire, paying particularly close attention to the core Roman canon: Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. He then proceeds chronologically, populating the branches of satire’s family tree with such figures as Chaucer, Jonson, Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Dickens, as well as a whole series of writers who are now largely forgotten. Satire, Sperrin shows, can be a literature of explicit statements and overt provocation--but it can also be notoriously indirect, oblique, suggestive, and covert, complicated by an author’s anonymity or pseudonymity. Sperrin meticulously analyses the references to transient political events that may mystify the contemporary reader. He also presents vivid and intriguing pen portraits of the satirists themselves along the way. Sperrin argues that if satire is to be contended with and reflected upon in all its provocative complexity--and if it is to be seen as anything more than a literature of political vandalism--then we must explore the full depth and intrigue of its past. This book offers a new starting point for our intellectual and imaginative contact with an important and fascinating kind of literature.

Dan Sperrin is research fellow in English at Trinity College, Cambridge, who specialises in literary and graphic satire of the long eighteenth century. He is also a political cartoonist at The London Magazine (and elsewhere).