Victorian Comedy and Laughter

Chapter 1 Introduction: Victorian Comedy and Laughter—Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent

Chapter 2 Laughter and Conviviality

Chapter 3 Brutal Buffoonery and Clown Atrocity: Dickens’s Pantomime Violence

Chapter 4 Edward Lear’s Travels in Nonsense and Europe

Chapter 5 ‘Capital Company’: Writing and Telling Jokes in Victorian Britain

Chapter 6 George Eliot’s Jokes

Chapter 7 The Game of Words: A Victorian Clown’s Gag-Book and Circus Performance

Chapter 9 ‘Deliberately Shaped for Fun by the High Gods’: Little Tich, Size and Respectability in the Music Hall

Chapter 10 Laughing Out of Turn: Fin de Siècle Literary Realism and the Vernacular Humours of the Music Hall

Chapter 11 What Was New About the ‘New Humour’?: Barry Pain’s ‘Divine Carelessness’

Chapter 12 Just Laughter: Neurodiversity in Oscar Wilde’s ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’