Musical Notation Page

This page of musical notation represents a survival from the seventeenth-century tradition of embedding satirical and humorous content in unexpected formats. Rather than a visual caricature in the Hogarth or Gillray manner, humor here operates through incongruity—the placement of musical notation in a compendium of 'Humour, Wit, & Satire.' Such verbal and textual wit formed a parallel strand to the visual caricature tradition that would flourish in the Georgian era. The compilation itself, assembled by J. Ashton in 1883, reflects Victorian antiquarian interest in recovering and cataloging earlier forms of popular mockery and entertainment, establishing a genealogy connecting seventeenth-century jest-books and wordplay to the emerging visual languages of nineteenth-century comic illustration.