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Don Duncan Origins: Round the Bay of Mexico (24) RE: Bay of Mexico 11 Aug 99


To revisit the original topic - here's a quote from the introduction to John Ashton's 1882 book "Chapbooks of the 18th Century". [Chapbooks were black-letter single-sheets, folded into 8 (16 pages) or 12 (24 pages), and were sold by Chapmen (pack peddlers) throughout the country; they constituted the primary reading material of the poor before cheap magazines appeared in the 19th century.]

After dividing the material he's presenting into classes, he states:

[quote] Naturally, however, the Humourous stories were the prime favourites. The Jest-books, pure and simple, are, from their extremely coarse witticisms, utterly incapable of being reproduced for general reading nowadays, and the whole of them are more or less highly spiced.... In reding these books we mustnot, however look upon them from our present point of view. Whether men and women are better now than they used to be, is a moot point, but things used to be spoken of openly, which are now never whispered, and no harm was done, nor offence taken; so the broad humour of the jest-books was, after all, only exuberant fun, and many of the /bonnes histoire/ are extremely laughable, though to our own thinking equally indelicate. [end quote]

So, of course, he didn't include them in the book.


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