I love Victorian humour writing so I'm thinking of reading Gilbert Beckett's Comic History of Rome. I know it's meant to be silly and is far from scholarly, but is it accurate enough that I as someone who knows relatively little about Roman history can safely assume that anything in it that isn't obviously a joke is generally true, or has our knowledge of Roman history changed enough since the 1840s that I should read it as essentially historical fiction?
Considering that Beckett was not a Classicist and was writing when Classics as an academic study was still in its infancy, I wouldn't expect very much accuracy from it. I haven't read it personally, but 1852 is well before pretty much all of the fundamental scholarship on Roman history. Hell, it's two years before the publication of Mommsen's history of Rome (and nearly three decades before most of his important academic work) and it's almost a hundred years earlier than people like Syme or Cary who pretty much totally replaced Mommsen's work. Mommsen was outdated even by Syme's day, and though he and his contemporaries laid the groundwork for real academic study their work is largely irrelevant to modern scholars now. Hell, even scholars like Syme, on whom the orthodox view of the late Republic is based, are no longer totally up-to-date. A lot of scholarship has happened since 1939, when Syme wrote The Roman Revolution, and even more has passed since Mommsen and Beckett. Already by the 50s we knew and understood infinitely more than the Victorians ever did--in the study of the late Republic alone such crucial concepts as the precise meaning of the nobiles (not properly until Gelzer's studies on the later Republican magistracies) and even the way elections worked were not understood in 1852.