A Field Guide to the Golden Age of British Satirists: Five Men Who Couldn't Stop Taking the Piss
Before Twitter gave every pub bore a global platform, before Have I Got News for You put politicians in the stocks, and before The London Prat made mockery a respectable career choice, there was the Augustan Age — a period of British history when being funny was not only accepted but actively encouraged, provided you were also educated, bitter, and slightly unhinged.
The early eighteenth century produced a remarkable cluster of writers who looked at society, sighed heavily, and wrote something devastating. Here are five of the best.
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745): The Man Who Suggested Eating Babies
Swift remains the gold standard for satirical overkill. A Modest Proposal — his calm, reasoned suggestion that the Irish poor should sell their children as food to the wealthy — is still taught in schools as an example of "irony," largely because teachers are legally required to warn children that he wasn't actually serious. Gulliver's Travels, meanwhile, is frequently mistaken for a children's book about tiny people, when in fact it's a sustained attack on human nature, politics, and the entire concept of being tall. Swift spent his later years as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, which suggests that even the Church couldn't stop him being furious about everything.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744): The Hunchback Who Won
Pope was a Catholic in Protestant England, a hunchback in an age that valued straight spines, and a self-educated genius in a world of university men. Rather than complain, he simply became the most feared wit in London. The Rape of the Lock — his mock-epic about a stolen lock of hair — elevated a trivial social spat to the status of the Iliad, which is either deeply impressive or deeply petty, depending on your perspective. The Dunciad, his sprawling assault on literary mediocrity, named and shamed so many second-rate writers that London's publishing industry briefly considered collective therapy. He also translated Homer, presumably because being brilliant at everything else had become boring.
John Gay (1685–1732): The Opera Man
Gay's The Beggar's Opera was a revelation: a musical satire about criminals, politicians, and the thin line between them, performed by actual singers in an actual theatre, with actual songs people could hum on the way home. It mocked the government, the legal system, and Italian opera simultaneously, which is the theatrical equivalent of juggling knives while riding a unicycle. The Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, was said to have hated it. This is generally considered the highest possible praise for a satirist.
Henry Fielding (1707–1754): The Novelist Who Arrested People
Fielding began his career by writing Shamela, a merciless parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela — a novel in which a servant girl resists her master's advances and is rewarded with marriage. Fielding looked at this and thought, "What if she was just pretending to be virtuous for the money?" The result was hilarious, deeply cynical, and exactly the sort of thing that gets you uninvited from dinner parties. He later wrote Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, became a magistrate, and founded the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force. This means Fielding is the only person on this list who could arrest you and then write a funny novel about it.
Tobias Smollett (1721–1771): The Angry Scotsman
Smollett was a Scottish naval surgeon who turned to writing after deciding that watching people die of scurvy was marginally less depressing than watching people read bad novels. The Adventures of Humphry Clinker — an epistolary novel about a dysfunctional family tour of Britain — is a masterpiece of comic observation, featuring one of literature's most memorable hypochondriacs. Smollett was famously irritable, once describing London as "the great belly of the Empire" in a letter that suggests he would have been excellent on Twitter.
Together, these five men established the template for British satire: be clever, be angry, be funny, and never, under any circumstances, let anyone off the hook.
1. Fern Brady
"Jonathan Swift suggested eating babies and they made him a Dean. I suggested my ex was emotionally unavailable and I got blocked on WhatsApp. The eighteenth century had better standards for satire."
2. Larry Dean
"My mam read A Modest Proposal and said, 'That's no' satire, that's just good economics.' She's Scottish. We have different thresholds for dark humour. She once told me the family cat had 'gone to a farm' and I was twenty before I realised she meant the crematorium."
3. Janine Harouni
"Alexander Pope was a hunchback Catholic who became the most feared wit in London. My Lebanese grandmother is a five-foot-tall woman who terrorises the entire extended family with a single raised eyebrow. Different eras, same energy. Pope would have understood the power of a well-timed glare across a dinner table."
4. Glenn Moore
"Henry Fielding founded the police force AND wrote satirical novels. In Glasgow, if you tried that combination they'd assume you were a grass. 'Oh, you're funny AND you arrest people? Aye, very good, mate. Enjoy your pint... alone.'"
5. Rob Auton
"Satire. Sat-ire. To sit. To be. Sitting and being. Angry. Five men. Sitting. Being angry. Writing. About society. About politics. About hair. A lock of hair. Stolen. Epic. Mock epic. Mock. Not real. But real anger. Real sitting. Real writing. Swift. Pope. Gay. Fielding. Smollett. All sitting. All being. All angry. All funny. Still funny. Now. Today. Still. Funny."