Joe Miller's Jests; or, the Wits Vade-mecum

xix, 70 pp. A Facsimile of the Original "Joe Miller" (1739), the Most Popular Humor Book of All Time. "In these pages the reader meets every type of person found in 18th-century London: pious parsons, foppish courtiers, beggars along the Strand, fishmongers, coachmen, fat landlords, young wives who cuckolded their old husbands, Cavaliers, Roundheads, Tories, Whigs, playwrights, barristers, scholars, poets and journalists (a new breed at the time). The settings of the jokes reflect the favorite pastimes of the age: the playhouse, the drawing-room, the tavern, the gambling-hall, the coffee house, St. James' Park, the shops around Charing Cross."--Rear wrapper