Description
Edward 'Ned' Ward, the author of The London Spy: there can be few authors who have attracted such fascination, fondness, and familiarity, but about whom so little is known. For the first time in modern scholarship, Grub Street Laughter places Ward centre stage, drawing on fresh evidence and social network methodologies to reveal his life and career in new detail. It challenges his customary reputation as a mercenary Grub Street hack, instead establishing Ward as an important and entrepreneurial satirist who represents one of the earliest sustained attempts to make a living from writing satire and comedy for print. He wrote 'commercial' satire: he aspired to amuse and entertain as wide an audience as possible, in the hope that his publications would sell well in the bookshops. His comic observations are irreverent, rumbustious, and richly descriptive: they offer a striking portrait of ordinary life and culture in early eighteenth-century Britain, and a unique perspective on the interests, values, and sensibilities of the time. Ward's remarkable story takes us into the heart of Grub Street London: the dynamic environs of London's print industry during a crucial phase in its development after 1695. It reveals friendships and rivalries that drove an industry expanding in local, national, and international scope. And it shines a light on the mechanics of press controls, as nervous ministers battled to suppress comic attacks proliferating in print. Laughter was recognized as a powerful polemical weapon and the paper trail left by legal proceedings against authors and booksellers leads right into the courtroom, where the boundary between satire and sedition was tested and redrawn. Grub Street Laughter is a history of laughter that combines the study of comic material with an analysis of the contexts of its production, dissemination, and reception—from the taverns of London where Ward lived and worked to the laughing audiences he delighted. Through this, it breaks new ground in uncovering the richness and vitality of commercial satire, which is important on its own terms, and for what it reveals about culture and society in eighteenth-century Britain.