The No-Nose Club

Abstract

English manners in the eighteenth century had undergone a revolution. With Puritanism defeated, the bawdy culture of the Restoration surfed in on a tidal wave of smut, scat, and scabies. For the next century, both coarseness and wit would be intertwined with a jaded cynicism and scepticism for all things radical. Markers of the new English liberty included the gin craze, the South Sea Bubble, and a spread of venereal disease rising to near-epidemic levels. Noelle Gallagher’s new book, Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination, is a surprising and gripping study of this dark century, both its humour and its discontents. Its focus, venereal disease, is a common enough subject among writers and satirists, but never has it been so perceptively interrogated as in Gallagher’s study. By focusing on the ‘imagination’ – meaning novels, drama, poetry, and satires both written and visual – Gallagher moves beyond the typical medical humanities approach that seeks to unearth the empirical truth of infection, and instead embraces the many raucous and contradictory social attitudes that underwrite the depiction of VD, and particularly syphilis, during the period.