The Nonsense Club Literature and Popular Culture, 1749-1764 [Hardcover]

The Nonsense Club was a group of five friends and writers--Charles Churchill, Bonnell Thornton, George Colman, William Cowper, and Robert Lloyd--who wrote and edited numerous periodicals, produced a distinctive and often brilliant satirical poetry, engaged in virulent theatrical and literary battles, and participated in the most important domestic political debate of their time. In this first comprehensive study of the group, Lance Bertelsen uses interdisciplinary methods to create a more complex understanding of the relationship between literature and culture in the era of Hogarth, Johnson, and Wilkes.

An admirable work of scholarly criticism and a good 'read' for anyone with a special interest in eighteenth-century English literature. --Albion

Traces the literary activities of writers who belonged to the Nonsense Club (Bonnell Thornton, George Colman, Charles Churchill, William Cowper, and Robert Lloyd), endeavoring to set them in a broader personal, literary, economic, and political context....The enormous virtue of the book is that it helps give us a sense of daily literary life in London, both for some significant secondary figures and for some forgotten ones....[The book] does a quite splendid job of recreating for us the lives, values, and poetry of a significant group of counterculture writers. Special praise is in order for the rich and wide-ranging documentation. --Journal of English and Germanic Philology

He does undertake--and accomplishes splendidly--a study of the individual and collaborative achievements of five writers in whose work we may come to terms directly with life in the later eighteenth century....An intelligent and sensitive book. --Clio