English Clandestine Satire, 1660-1702

When late seventeenth-century readers wanted to inform themselves about happenings at the centres of power and fashion they had no newspapers or gossip columns to fall back on. Instead they turned to lampoons - frank, malicious, and often highly indecent accounts in verse of the real or fabricated goings on of the court and ruling elite. Harold Love presents the first comprehensive account of the thousands of lampoons and more serious `state poems' that survive from Restoration England and their impact on the life of the nation and the literary practice of satire.