Neo-Victorian Laughter:

A Genealogy

Abstract

This essay has two aims. The first is to assert that paying attention to the genre of critical ‘revisionist’ comedy directed at the Victorians may allow us to push back the chronological parameters of when neo-Victorianism began and to acknowledge its emergence well before the second half of the twentieth century. The second purpose is to suggest that, from the late-twentieth century onwards, there have been three distinct categories of neo-Victorian humour, each one different in its targets and attitudes, and each one reflective of changes in how the present has been positioning itself in relation to the Victorian past.