The Merry-Thought: Or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany: Parts 2, 3 and 4

What if early 18th-century Britain had Instagram, but everyone was brilliantly, profanely witty? This is that feed. Compiled under the delightfully absurd pseudonym Hurlothrumbo (after a popular puppet-show charlatan), The Merry-Thought collects verses found scrawled on tavern windows, latrine walls, and village oddments across England. These aren't refined poems meant for courtly consumption. They're working-class and rowdy, sexually frank, politically savage, and utterly uninterested in polite society's delicate sensibilities. The collection reads like graffiti retrieved from 250 years ago, where anonymous poets took shots at their betters, celebrated drunken revelry, dissected romantic disasters, and commented on the absurdities of class and gender with a coarseness that would make modern sensibilities blush. The prefaces frame these verses as folk art, arguing that what gets inscribed in bodily spaces often reveals truths that polished literature hides. It's uneven, certainly, and occasionally opaque in its period references. But when these anonymous voices land their jokes or land their insults, they land hard. For anyone curious about how ordinary people actually talked when no one was pretending to listen.