The Joys of Young Werther (1775)
A year after Goethe’s tale of teenage angst and suicide came this satire giving it a Hollywood ending….more
Books
Nineteenth-Century Textspeak
Poems from the Victorian era and before which anticipated 21st-century textspeak….more
Pepys’s Ghost (1899)
In this strangest of diaries, the author and adventurer Edwin Emerson Jr voices one year in his life through the mouth of Samuel Pepys….more
Ye Butcher, Ye Baker, Ye Candlestick-Maker (1908)
In the style of an 18th-century ballad chapbook, a comic look at various professions and there roles both old and new….more
Bon-Mots of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century (1897)
Compilation of some of the best conversational witticisms of the 18th and 19th centuries, including Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, and Lord Byron, and…more
The Diverting History of John Gilpin: Shewing how he Went Further than he Intended, and Came Safe Home Again (1782)
A 1906 edition of William Cowper’s famous ballad, illustrated with brilliantly comic woodcuts from Robert Seaver….more
Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote (1867)
From whole multi-paragraph excerpts to single lines, this wonderful little book dedicates itself, as the title declares, to presenting the wit and wisdom to be foun…more
Guess Me (1879)
Illustrated by George Cruikshank among others, a collection of word, number, and picture puzzles in the form of enigmas, conundrums, acrostics, and a series of incr…more
Fables for the Frivolous (1899)
One of the earliest works by the American parodist Guy Wetmore Carryl, this collection of fables are adapted from Jean de La Fontaine’s Aesop-style originals from m…more
Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760)
One of the first of the immensely popular 18th-century “it-narratives”, the tale of coin and the human intrigue to which it finds itself bearing witness….more
Pictures of Life and Character from the collection of Mr Punch (1887)
A collection of the English illustrator and caricaturist John Leech’s cartoons for Punch, the humorous and satirical magazine founded in 1841 by Henry Mayhew….more
The Cynic’s Word Book (1906)
A satirical dictionary written by American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce (1842-ca.1914), a man whose savage wit apparently earned him the nickname “Bitter Bi…more
