Routledge Revivals: The Literary Humour of the Urban Northeast 1830-1890 (1983)

Book excerpt: The Literary Humour of the Urban Northeast brings together works by such writers as Mark Twain, P.T. Barnum, Marietta Holley, and the literary comedians Artemus Ward and Josh Billings. The northern writers chronicled a fast-moving world, dominated by government and business. In this anthology, David Sloane recovers satiric writings of the north-eastern humourists of the nineteenth century, a literary school that was formed in the crucible of the daily newspaper. Written to appeal to a newly urbanized audience experiencing the impact of the Industrial Revolution, these humorous articles, sketches and ballads responded to a rapidly changing nation still clinging to rural preconceptions but at the same time beginning to know a sharper more precarious kind of existence.