ABSTRACT
As a writer, Joseph Woolley was a satirist, or so it has been claimed. He exercised a satiric imagination with his pen in six surviving volumes of diaries and accounts kept between 1800 and 1815. In his writing, satire was a mode, or disposition, not a form, visual or otherwise. The satiric connections between life and literature, between a print, a comic song, a novel, and a workingman’s writing, are framed entirely by the historian’s knowledge of these forms and genres. Except of course in the case of Woolley and Tom Jones. He bought its four volumes, and the evidence of his text, in the high comedy of his justicing room scenes at Gervase Clifton’s house, is that he read it, enjoyed it, and shaped his own writing style by it. That’s the kind of evidence a historian wants.
