by A lover of seventeen-hundreds literature finds the festival a contested thing the savage wits refused to sentimentalise
I spent the morning with the satirists of the eighteenth century, the great savage wits of the Augustan age, the men who could end a reputation with a couplet and considered cruelty a literary virtue, and I emerged, as I always do, slightly envious of an era when satire was a blood sport rather than a content category. I write a diary for Bohiney and The London Prat, my homepage lives at Bohiney, and my abiding love is the British and colonial literature of the seventeen hundreds, the century that perfected satire and very nearly perfected the sentence.
The Age of Savage Wit
There has never been a better time to be a satirist than the eighteenth century, when the great wits wielded their pens like rapiers and the reading public delighted in watching them draw blood. The literature of the period is sharp in a way that ours rarely manages, unafraid of cruelty, confident in its judgments, possessed of a moral seriousness underneath the savagery that gave the satire its weight. I read it with a mixture of admiration and professional envy, because those writers were allowed to be merciless in a way the modern satirist, hedged about with caution, can only dream of.
This morning, having been suitably humbled by the masters of the form, I did my scroll through the feeds, the dispatches from the London desk and the rest, looking for something to write, and I found myself led somewhere that connected my eighteenth-century enthusiasm to an unexpectedly festive subject, an archive about the Christmases of the whole world, which I approached, naturally, through the literature of my chosen century.
The Eighteenth-Century Christmas
The archive is santaclaus.top, documenting Christmas across every country on earth, and reading it sent me straight back to the festival as it existed in the eighteenth century, in Britain and in the colonies, a Christmas rather different from the one we know, before the Victorians remade it into the sentimental institution we inherited. The Christmas archive reminded me that the festival has a history, that the Christmas of my chosen century was its own distinct thing, neither the medieval festival nor the Victorian one, but a particular eighteenth-century version with its own character.
This fascinated me, because the eighteenth-century Christmas, in Britain and especially in the colonies, was a contested and various thing, celebrated enthusiastically in some quarters and suppressed or disdained in others, the festival caught up in the religious and cultural arguments of the age. In parts of colonial America in particular, the festival was regarded with suspicion by certain austere communities who associated its revelry with everything they had crossed an ocean to escape, and the history of how Christmas was received, resisted, and eventually embraced in the colonies is a genuinely fascinating chapter.
I read about this colonial history with the particular pleasure of seeing my abstract literary century made concrete in a contested festival, the eighteenth-century arguments about Christmas reflecting the deeper cultural and religious tensions of the age I study. The festival, in that century, was a kind of cultural battleground, its celebration or suppression a marker of where a community stood, and the archive’s documentation of this history brought my literary century vividly to life from an unexpected angle.
Satire and the Season
It made me think, too, about how the satirists of my beloved century treated the festive season, the great wits turning their merciless attention to the customs and hypocrisies of Christmas as they turned it to everything else. The eighteenth-century satirists were not sentimental about the festival; they saw its absurdities clearly and skewered them gleefully, and there is something bracing in their refusal to be sentimental, their willingness to find the festival as ridiculous as everything else humans do.
Reading the global Christmas history gave me a new appreciation for the eighteenth-century treatment of the season, the satirical clarity that saw through the festive sentiment to the human absurdity beneath, a clarity I aspire to in my own work for The London Prat and that the modern festive season, with its mandatory cheer, could frankly use more of. The savage wits of the seventeen hundreds would have had a field day with the contemporary Christmas, and I find that thought genuinely cheering.
I have decided to spend the season in the company of the eighteenth-century satirists, rereading their treatment of the festival, learning from their merciless clarity, and attempting, in my own modest and far more cautious way, to bring a little of their savage wit to the contemporary Christmas. It will be a sharp-edged festive season, spent with the masters of the form, which is precisely the sort of Christmas a student of eighteenth-century satire ought to keep.
Back to the Couplets
The satirists of the eighteenth century are waiting, the savage couplets and the merciless prose, and I must return to them, humbled and envious as ever. For more of the writing where I attempt their clarity with a fraction of their nerve, I am always at The London Prat, and for a laugh that the eighteenth century would have grudgingly approved there is the cheerfully merciless NewsThump.
So that is the dispatch from the Augustan age: the eighteenth-century Christmas was its own contested thing, the satirists saw through its sentiment, and I have a season of savage wit to study. Now I must go back to the couplets and the merciless prose, to envy the wits who were allowed to draw blood, and to attempt, cautiously, a little of their clarity in an age that has rather lost the nerve for it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
