This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as centralrather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-lovedVictorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracingthree consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all of the contributors engage with thecrucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aestheticform. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of printculture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone, Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke - both onthe page and the stage - while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider theimpassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end ofthe century.