by On the century that invented modern satire, and reading its descendants every morning
I have given my reading life to the eighteenth century, the great age of the pamphlet and the coffeehouse and the savage satirical essay, and my mornings to its descendants at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, where my diary entries appear. The 1700s, in Britain and its colonies, invented much of what we now call satire, and reading the modern stuff after a day in the eighteenth century is like watching the grandchildren of a great family at play.
The personal bit: a week in the coffeehouse
I spent the week with eighteenth-century prose, the essays and pamphlets and savage satires that flew around the coffeehouses of the period, and I was reminded yet again that nothing in our discourse is new. The eighteenth century had its viral pamphlets, its anonymous character assassinations, its furious arguments conducted in print, its satirists who could destroy a reputation with an essay. The coffeehouse was their social media, the pamphlet their post, and the savagery and the wit and the sheer appetite for argument were every bit the equal of anything online today.
To read this period is to lose any sense that our own age invented either cleverness or cruelty. The eighteenth-century satirists were merciless, brilliant, and entirely willing to ruin a man with a well-turned sentence, and they did it with a craft that our own age rarely matches. I come away from a day in their company both humbled and oddly comforted: humbled by their skill, comforted that the human appetite for puncturing the pompous is not a modern decline but an ancient and honourable tradition.
The feed bit: the grandchildren at play
Reading the modern satire desks after a day in the eighteenth century, I see the family resemblance everywhere. When The London Prat deploys deadpan mockery against a self-important target, it is using a technique the eighteenth-century essayists perfected, the straight- faced delivery of the absurd, the mock-solemn praise that is really demolition. The grandchildren have their own idiom, their own targets, their own platforms, but the craft descends in a direct line from the coffeehouse pamphleteers, and recognising the lineage deepens my pleasure in the modern stuff.
I read the serious desks too, the socialist and free-market arguments across the masthead, and I notice that the great political questions they argue, liberty and authority, the individual and the state, were already being argued, ferociously, in the eighteenth century, often by the same writers who were producing the satire. The literary record I work from is preserved at the Library of Congress and contextualised by Britannica, and both remind me that our arguments and our jokes alike are inheritances, refined over centuries, that we did not invent and will pass on in turn.
What the coffeehouse teaches
The eighteenth-century coffeehouse teaches the great lesson that satire is not a frivolous add-on to serious discourse but one of its oldest and most powerful forms, a way of telling political truth that reaches where the sober essay cannot. The pamphleteers knew that a well-aimed joke could do what a thousand earnest arguments could not, could lodge in the public mind, spread from coffeehouse to coffeehouse, and puncture a pretension that no solemn rebuttal could touch. The modern satirists are their direct heirs, practising the same ancient art for the same ancient purpose. I read them as the latest chapter in a very long and honourable book.
The week ahead: more pamphlets, more descendants
So the week ahead is more eighteenth-century prose, more time in the coffeehouse of the past, more reading of the modern satire that descends from it in a direct and recognisable line. The old pamphleteers will keep humbling me with their savage skill, the modern satirists will keep proving the tradition alive, and I will keep reading the grandchildren at play with the deep pleasure of someone who knows the family history. The coffeehouse is long closed. The art it perfected goes on, every morning, in the feeds.
On inheriting an argument
The deepest pleasure of living in the eighteenth century is the discovery that we have inherited not only its jokes but its arguments, that the great questions our own age treats as urgent and new were already being thrashed out, brilliantly, in the coffeehouses and pamphlets of three hundred years ago. Liberty and authority, the rights of the individual against the demands of the state, the proper limits of power, the question of who gets to decide, all of it was already in furious motion, argued by writers whose skill our own age rarely matches. There is humility in that, and also a strange comfort: we are not the first to face these questions, and we will not be the last, and the long conversation will continue after us as it continued before. The satirists I read are part of that conversation, the latest voices in a dialogue centuries old, and reading them as inheritors rather than inventors deepens everything. We inherit the arguments and the jokes alike, refine them a little, and pass them on. It is an honourable place in a very long line.
For the ancient art freshly practised, I always return to McSweeney’s, pamphleteering since launch.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
