Stage, Street, Garden, or Parlour: The Ubiquitous Popular Songs of Late Georgian England

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ubiquity of popular songs across print traditions, performance venues, and social classes in England during the late Georgian era. It examines the formatting and presentation of an eighteenth-century chapbook, contextualizing it within contemporaneous print cultures before exploring how the songs in this item of cheap literature relate to music from English comic operas, pleasure garden entertainments, and domestic spaces. Through this case study, the article aims to illuminate a compelling era of English song before the “elite” became exclusive of the “popular,” when songs moved fluidly between social contexts and print traditions and were heard, known, and performed by multiple classes of English society.

KEYWORDS:

• Broadside ballad
• English music
• music printing
• popular music
• street song

The late Walter Newton Henry Harding (1883–1973) was an English pianist who spent the majority of his working life in Chicago, performing at cinemas and music halls; he was also the unlikely compiler of one of the most impressive private collections of sheet music and musical ephemera in the world (the term “ephemera” denotes printed materials that have a short life-cycle in culture, including newspapers, concert programs, ticket stubs, and broadside ballads). Upon his death, Harding left his entire collection to the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, including more than 14,000 items of street literature (Bergel et al.).

England’s long and prolific street-literature tradition was established in the sixteenth century—after Gutenberg’s printing technology had spread across Europe—and remained an important form of English popular culture for the following four hundred years. The most traditional form of street literature was the “broadside ballad,” a cheaply printed sheet that featured a ballad song (or multiple songs) and a woodcut illustration. Broadside sheets were produced en masse by low-end printers in cities and towns across the country (but particularly in London) as a form of literary and musical entertainment; they were usually sold by ballad singers to passersby on the street. In the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the broadside was still being sung on English streets, but it had become diverse in its physical manifestations: Some “broadsides” were single broadsheets as per tradition, printed on only one side; some were “slip ballads,” which were broadsheets that had been printed with two ballads in long columns, divided in half vertically, and sold separately; some were “long song sheets,” containing dozens of ballads on a reel of paper that could be a yard or more long; and some were “chapbooks,” broadsheets that were designed to be folded and sewn into multipage booklets by their sellers or purchasers.

In the course of my doctoral research into English street literature, I had the fortune to stumble across a collection of ninety-seven of these chapbooks bequeathed by Harding to the Bodleian: I say “stumble across” because, as the chapbooks have been bound together into three hardback volumes, they are cataloged in the Bodleian’s collection not as ephemera or street literature but as veritable books.¹ Of course, the practice of pasting broadsides and ephemeral materials into bound volumes is not unprecedented: Broadside collectors as early as Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) did as much, and now almost the entirety of the Bodleian’s many broadside collections has been taped into library volumes for preservation and accessibility. In the case of these chapbooks, it is not clear whether Harding collected and bound them himself, or whether he purchased them from another collector who had done so; it is also unclear why they were bound in the first place and whether Harding considered them to be integral to his impressive collection of conventional broadside ballads, or distinct from it. In any case, this collection of chapbooks has become separated from Harding’s vast street-literature collection in the Bodleian’s cataloging system and was therefore excluded from the library’s brilliant Broadside Ballads Online database, whilst similar items from other collectors were included in it (Bergel et al.).² Why have these particular chapbooks—individually and as a collection—been preserved, and therefore understood, outside of the tradition of broadside balladry? Is it simply a matter of bindings, or does a more interesting reason lurk beneath their covers?

In this article, I will consider the original print formatting and subsequent curation of this collection, using the chapbooks as case studies through which to explore the interaction between street literature of the nineteenth century and other contemporaneous print cultures; I will then examine the chapbooks’ contents to explore how popular songs forged links between diverse performance spaces and musical traditions in England, crossing social classes. Through this examination, I will engage with prevailing narratives about the divergence of “popular” and “elite” musics in England. According to Peter Burke, in the sixteenth century—the century in which the English broadside tradition was properly established—European “popular culture was everyone’s culture; a second culture for the educated and the only culture for everyone else” (270). In other words, while the elite classes had access to additional cultures of entertainment, art, music, and literature, they still engaged with a commonly owned popular culture that was shared across socioeconomic groups. However, Burke goes on to say that “by 1800 the clergy, the nobility, the merchants, the professional men—and their wives—had abandoned popular culture to the lower classes” (270). The division between “popular” and “elite” music is an undeniable—if complex—feature of European cultural history that fundamentally changed the landscape of Western music in the nineteenth century. However, I think we need to closely reconsider Burke’s assertion that this divide had—for the most part—taken place by 1800: Harding’s collection of humble chapbooks tells something of a different story, as we will find.

The ninety-seven chapbooks in question have been bound into three consecutive volumes that now form a part of Harding’s book collection at the Bodleian: Harding A 574, 575, and 576 (the contents of each volume are noted in Table 1 below).

Table 1. Contents of Harding A 574–76.

Volume	No. of Chapbooks
Harding A 574	41
Harding A 575	21
Harding A 576	35

The chapbooks seem to be grouped by printer, but inconsistently so (chapbooks of the Evans press appear in all three volumes, for instance), suggesting that they were grouped and bound progressively as the collection grew. The chapbooks date from the 1770s through the 1820s and include items printed by well-established street-literature printers Thomas Batchelar and John Pitts, among others. With only two exceptions, they consist of four double-sided leaves (eight pages total) with two columns of text on the inside pages and often text on the back cover as well. Each front cover includes a title, a woodcut illustration, and—notably—a table of contents, listing between one and forty-eight songs, with an average of twenty per chapbook. Most of the tables of contents are accurate, but there are a few chapbooks that claim to include one more song than they actually do.

The booklike format of these chapbooks gives them a visual gravitas that we do not associate with typical “broadside ballads,” and the inclusion of a numbered contents list takes them one step further from conventional street literature of the day. A contents list on a print item that includes more than twenty songs is a helpful and sensible addition, no doubt; but printers of other forms of multisong cheap print—like long song sheets, which often included upwards of thirty nigh-illegible ballads in condensed pearl type—never saw the need to include them. Why did printers choose to add tables of contents to these items? If we look to other genres of printed song, we may find clues: tables of contents were standard at the fronts of songbooks that would have been used in conjunction with an instrumental score in domestic spaces. Examples of such publications include A Select Collection of Songs; Or, an Appendage to the Piano-forte (1806), published by a printer named Hodgson in Newcastle; other examples would be Hodgson’s National Songster; Or, Encyclopaedia of Harmony (n.d., ca. 1820s–1840s) and The National Minstrel (n.d., ca. 1820s–1840s), both published by a London printer on Fleet Street, coincidentally also named Hodgson. Like the chapbooks in Harding’s collection, these publications included a large selection of songs and an accompanying table of contents, with no printed melodies or instrumental accompaniments. However, their printing was of a much higher quality than that of the Harding chapbooks: they were printed on thicker paper and did not include the woodcut illustrations that were so much associated with street literature and the historic broadside trade. Their size, too, was vast compared with the Harding chapbooks: The National Minstrel included not twenty songs but 400, for example, and such a volume of sheets required proper book bindings from the outset, rather than the folds or simple stitches that held together the Harding chapbooks before they were bound together into books by their collector. And, significantly, though these songbooks did not themselves include musical notation, they were—often explicitly—intended for use in conjunction with an instrumental accompaniment; thus, they were produced for purchasers who would have had access to keyboard or stringed instruments. Placed side by side, these voluminous, relatively expensive songbooks could not be confused with the slight Harding chapbooks, but the format of the latter is designed—I would argue—to bring the former to mind (more on domestic songbooks later).

Many of the printers of these chapbooks were active in the street-literature trade, as noted above. Printing in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was regulated—in theory—by the Stationers’ Company, which was founded in 1403 and received its Royal Charter of Incorporation in 1557. The Company determined the classifications of printed materials and, at its discretion, dispensed printing licenses for each—broadsides included. The reality was, however, that the cheaper and more common the literature, the less the Stationers’ Company cared about it; there is evidence that the street-literature trade thrived almost entirely outside the legal bounds of the Company for most of its tenure, in an industrial “no man’s land,” heavily engaged in literary and musical piracy (Thomson 31). Because cheap literature was largely unregulated, printers of other designations could engage in the field of cheap print as and when they saw fit: For example, the eighteenth-century map printer Samuel Lyne produced “broadside ballad” sheets—albeit with expensive, engraved illustrations and high-quality paper—that were intended for more affluent customers than those who bought the common broadside of the street (“Merry Tale of the Jealous Weaver”). Printers associated most closely with the street-literature trade—John Pitts (1764–1844) and James Catnach (1792–1841), for instance—also produced a range of materials, print and otherwise: As well as street literature, Catnach published children’s books and “cards and bills,” as noted on the broadside “The Vocal Grove; A Variety of Songs” from the Johnson Collection (Johnson Ballads fol. 32, Bodleian Library), while Pitts sold toys from his “wholesale toy and marble warehouse” in the Seven Dials, according to a broadside of “Ben Block” in Harding’s broadside collection (Harding B 17[22a], Bodleian Library).³

Nevertheless, practical limitations formed less-porous boundaries within the printing industry: Considerable capital was required to print by engraving or to produce lithographic images—much more than was needed for typesetting an old-fashioned, hand-pulled press. So, whereas a map printer may have condescended to create elegant would-be “broadside ballads” for pleasure garden customers, a printer whose main products were broadsides probably could not on a similar whim produce a map. Thus, the chapbooks’ association with printers like Pitts, Catnach, and Batchelar suggests that they were closely related to the street-literature trade (encompassing conventional broadside sheets, slip ballads, and long song sheets) and were intended for a similar “class” of customer.

The chapbooks’ price would support this suggestion: They were sold for a penny a piece. This proves to be something of a bargain given that the chapbooks contained upward of a dozen songs and that the contemporaneous market price for a single-ballad sheet was a halfpenny. The reason why these chapbooks were so affordable in comparison to single-page ballad prints remains a bit baffling; but, in any case, their retail price strongly suggests that the market for these chapbooks was of a similar socioeconomic bracket as that for broadside sheets and other forms of cheap literature (though these chapbooks, at double the price of a broadside, would have qualified as something of a “splurge” purchase for such customers). But what was this socioeconomic bracket? The class structure of England is as notorious as it is difficult to define: All social categorizations will inevitably be generalizations, but, as David Cannadine has said, “class, like sex, may indeed take place in the head: but it has never existed solely in the head or in the eyes or the words of the beholder” (17). The historical sociologist W.G. Runciman has grouped English society into four main categories or “classes”: (1) a small elite, (2) professional workers, (3) wage-earners, and (4) the economically deprived (108). Runciman’s model for English social class is helpful to historians of broadside songs and cheap literature because it defines a group of working, nonprofessional Britons (the “wage-earners”) who enjoyed some—though very little—discretionary income that could be spent on entertainment. In reality, the broadside trade engaged with members from all of Runciman’s social categories: Members of the impoverished classes constituted the majority of broadside sellers, and contemporaneous collectors who preserved broadsides as items of ethnographic interest were from the professional or elite classes. However, England’s wage-earners constituted the primary target market for street literature in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was one of the few forms of culture they could actually afford, according to Robert D. Hume.⁴

So, if these chapbooks were printed by broadside printers and sold at street-literature prices, were they just broadside ballads in another form? Was their exclusion from Harding’s broadside collection a simple cataloging fluke? Possibly, but printer or price alone cannot define the genre of “street literature” or “street song.” Street literature is, etymologically as well as practically, tied to the practice of open-air sale; street song is tied to the practice of open-air performance. As either prefolded booklets or large, unfolded sheets, these chapbooks would have been more cumbersome to transport and sell hand-to-hand on the street by peddlers than single-sheets or slip broadsides. For this reason, other forms of multisong street literature (like long-songs) were often sold in stands or by pinners-up, who attached their sheets to walls for display, as described by contemporaneous sources (Mayhew 282).⁵ This particular marketing strategy visually advertised the fact that each sheet included many songs, not just one or two. Performance was—I would suggest—not the ideal advertisement for multisong items: The unique value of chapbooks, for instance, was their multipage layout, weight, booklike format, and breadth of content. The performance of a single song from the chapbook could not convey these distinctive features to passersby. Instead, the booklike format of the chapbooks made them particularly appropriate for display on bookstalls or even in bookshops, where they could be handled, hefted, perused.

In fact, many of the chapbooks in Harding’s collection intentionally dissociate themselves from the street in title as well as form. I have already noted their somewhat self-conscious resemblance to domestic songbooks of the period through the use of tables of contents, but the chapbooks also make explicit references to gentility and private performance in their titles. Interestingly, nine of the chapbooks explicitly identify themselves as “polite” or “genteel”; fourteen are for “gentlemen”; six are for “sportsmen”; eight are for “ladies”; another is intended for use “at home”; several allude to a “vocalist”—a word that implies that the chapbook might function as a music book for someone who possessed a degree of skill, and even an identity, in the act of singing. Were these chapbooks actually bought by gentlemen, sportsmen, ladies, or domestic amateur musicians? It is unlikely, given the quality of their printing, the identity of their printers, and their price brackets: But the chapbooks’ allusions to such figures—along with the frequent references to royalty also found in their titles—would attempt to align them with a class of society to which they would not in fact have belonged.

If these chapbooks were thus advertised for domestic performance, and if they were not—for argument’s sake—actually sold on the street, then we must consider whether they were in fact street literature at all. Did Harding (or an earlier collector) intentionally place them outside the multifarious milieu of English street literature? Whether these chapbooks would fulfill the narrow definition of “street literature” or “street song” described above remains ambiguous: The chapbooks’ prices and printers suggest that they were a part of the street-literature trade, whereas their form and domestic posturing claim the reverse. My conclusion would be this: The chapbooks in Harding’s volumes were examples of cheap (though not necessarily street) literature that were formatted to appeal to audiences who wished to identify with the leisure classes. Possibly they were gathered together as a collection and bound as hardcover books by Harding (or a previous owner) because of their unique framing, as well as their booklike format.

But let me ask a more interesting question: Regardless of whether the chapbooks themselves qualified as street literature, are the songs in them street songs? This question I can answer confidently: yes. In one of Harding’s chapbooks, entitled The Summer’s Amusement. Or an Entertaining Companion to Vauxhall, Ranelaugh, and All Other Places of Public Entertainment (Harding A 574, No. 2), eighteen of the thirty songs listed appear on conventional broadsides and other related forms of street literature in the Bodleian’s collections, and, in some cases, a single song appears on more than twenty broadside editions (or physical printed copies). This particular chapbook is not an outlier: Its musical constitution is representative of the entire collection of ninety-seven chapbooks. Even if they did not qualify as true members of street literature according to my narrow definition, these chapbooks were the broadsides’ pretentious cousins; in their musical DNA, the two families of literature were consanguineous.

Regardless of whether the binding of these chapbooks was the result of Harding’s intentional classification or the result of simple pragmatism, their separation from his broadside collection highlights some important features of cheap literature in England during the Georgian era that can be missed when studying conventional broadsides alone. Firstly, they demonstrate that the market for cheap literature and song was large and heterogenous: Not all buyers of similar socioeconomic brackets had the same interests, social aspirations, or preferred places of purchase, and therefore printers of cheap literature catered for a range of tastes, largely through “packaging” (rather than through content). Cheap literature inevitably interacted with other—and indeed loftier—print cultures, and, for marketing purposes, would mimic them. Secondly and crucially, these chapbooks showcase the ubiquity of popular song in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries across venues, musical traditions, audiences, buyers, and print media. The notable overlap between the songs in these chapbooks and music from the theater, pleasure garden, and domestic sphere is a feature of the collection that I will explore in the remainder of this article. To do so, I will focus on the contents of a single representative chapbook from the collection The Summer’s Amusement, referenced above, using it as a case study through with to examine the ubiquity of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century popular song in England.

In Table 2 above, I have listed the songs included in this chapbook. In this list, we find strong evidence of the migration of stage music into cheap literature and popular song, as twelve of the songs listed come directly from comic opera entertainments from London’s patent theaters. The theatrical landscape of London in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was governed by the “patent system”: Drama had been banned in London during the Commonwealth, but with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, the King began issuing royal “patents” or licenses to theaters to put on drama (often referred to as “spoken drama” or “true drama” as opposed to musical or variety entertainments). This legislation created what was known as a “monopoly” (more accurately, a triopoly) on drama in London that was shared by the three theaters that held royal patents: These included Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and—only during the “off-season” of the summer months—the Theater Royal, Haymarket. The nonpatent theaters of London (the so-called “minor” theaters) that had been established before the Commonwealth and Restoration continued to operate after the patent system came into force, but they were required to incorporate various forms of spectacle into their dramas in order to avoid closure: These included equestrian acts, naumachiae (nautical entertainments featuring model ships on flooded stages), and musical numbers. The importance of the minor theaters grew steadily in the late-eighteenth century, but the patent theaters retained their market advantage until the Theaters Act of 1843, which finally abolished the patent system altogether.

Table 2. Contents of The Summer’s Amusement (Harding A 574, No. 2).

1. Jockey and Jenny’s Trip to the Fair	11. Forsaken Maid	21. Young Jockey is the Lad for Me
2. Young Collin	12. The Lads of the Village	22. The Sailor’s Return
3. Answer to Young Collin	13. Banks of Roses	23. I Had Nought Else to Do
4. Nancy’s Complaint to Her Sweetheart	14. Catch Hold on To-Day	24. Irish Girl
5. Tady Blany	15. Banks of the Dee	25. Arrival of Prince Wm. Henry.
6. Liverpool Prize	16. Willy’s Rare, and Willy’s Fair	26. Ad. Rodney and O.W. Hen. Triumphant
7. The Willow Will	17. He’s Aye Kissing Me	27. Song by General Wolf
8. Poor Tom	18. Miss Roach and Jack Ran	28. The Modest Fair
9. A Lady’s Head and Tail Dress	19. Cobler of Castlebury	29. Rosline Castle
10. Blow High, Blow Low	20. Social Powers	30. Jovial Bacchanals

The first theatrical song found in The Summer’s Amusement is “Tady Blany”—perhaps the most elusive song of the lot. It originated in the entertainment The Touch Stone (n.d.), according to a broadsheet edition in the collections of the British Library (“Tady Blany,” British Library) as well as one in the Bodleian’s collections (“Tady Blany,” Bodleian Library), though I have been unable to find a complete prompt book of this entertainment. According to the broadsheet in the Bodleian’s collections, it was at some point performed by the famed actor John Bannister (1760–1836), who was long associated with Drury Lane. This entertainment was possibly related to the much earlier comedy Eastward Hoe (1605) by George Chapman (ca. 1559–1634), John Marston (bap. 1576–1634), and Ben Jonson (ca. 1572–ca. 1637), as updated by Charlotte Lennox (ca. 1730–1804) and performed in 1775 as Old City Manners: There appears to be character overlap between the missing entertainment and the updated version, but this connection remains unconfirmed. The second theater song is listed here as “The Liverpool Prize,” as that was the name of the entertainment from which it came, but it is more commonly printed under the title “True Blue.” The farce The Liverpool Prize was written by Frederick Pilon with music by Charles Dibdin, Sr. (1745–1814), and Thomas Arne (1710–1778) and was premiered at Covent Garden in 1779. The third song, “Poor Tom,” with the opening line “Then farewell, my trim built wherry,” appeared in Dibdin’s ballad opera The Waterman; Or, the First of August, performed at the Theater Royal, Haymarket in 1774. Though this entertainment was marketed as a “ballad opera,” its music was not in fact drawn from popular airs: Dibdin used the libretto as a vehicle to reuse songs he had written for and performed in pleasure garden entertainments and concerts—a sort of early “jukebox musical.” The fourth song is another of Dibdin’s: “Blow High, Blow Low” was from The Seraglio, performed at Covent Garden in 1776. The fifth, “The Forsaken Maid,” was from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s (1751–1816) The Camp, performed in 1778, with music by Thomas Linley (1756–1778). The sixth, “Lads of the Village,” was sung by Bannister in Dibdin’s The Quaker, performed at Drury Lane in 1775. The seventh, “He’s Aye Kissing Me,” has an unknown writer and composer, but, according to Emmett Langdon Avery, it was performed between acts of full-length entertainments at Drury Lane in 1777 (172). The eighth is “Cobler of Castlebury,” also known by its first line, “‘Twas in a village near Castlebury,” which came from Dibdin’s comic opera The Metamorphosis, performed at the Theater Royal, Haymarket in 1776. The ninth is “Social Powers,” from Lionel and Clarissa; Or, the School for Fathers (1768), written by Isaac Bickerstaffe (1733–ca. 1812) with music from a number of composers, including Thomas Arne and Dibdin. The tenth, “Song by General Wolfe,” is an interesting one: It was supposedly sung by General James Wolfe (1727–1759) before the Battle of Quebec in 1775, but, as noted by the music printer and historian William Chappell (1809–1888), the tune first appeared in Thomas Odell’s (n.d.) play The Patron, or, The Statesman’s Opera at the Theater Royal, Haymarket in 1729 (Chappell, Ballad Literature 669). With updated lyrics, the “Song by General Wolfe” again graced the stage in Frederick Pilon’s musical farce The Siege of Gibraltar at Covent Garden in 1780. The eleventh song, “The Modest Fair,” was purportedly sung by Frances Abington (1737–1815) in Twelfth Night, according to a corresponding broadside edition of the song (“A New Song,” Firth c.18(15), Bodleian Library). I have not found a prompt book for a musical version of Shakespeare’s comedy that includes it; however, I have found a print of Mrs. Abington in the part of Olivia in that same play (“Twelfth Night: Frances Abington as Olivia”). The twelfth and last theatrical song is “Jovial Bacchanals,” also known by its first line, “Come jolly Bacchus god of wine,” which is from Charles Coffey’s (n.d.–1745) The Devil to Pay; Or, the Wives Metamorphosed, a ballad opera performed at Drury Lane in 1731 and reprised throughout the century; according to William Chappell, this song was originally sung to the tune “Charles of Sweden” (Collection of National English Airs 96).

The proportion of songs in this one chapbook that originated in the theater demonstrates the extent to which theater music saturated English popular song of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. London’s patent theaters were venues that welcomed a wide cross-section of English society (Rohr 53; Cunningham 7–8). The playhouses themselves were designed to seat a range of social classes simultaneously, with the upper classes in the boxes, the middle classes in the pit, and the lower classes in the galleries. The audience constitution changed from one performance to the next—concerts were usually priced more highly than plays, for example—but the patent theaters’ huge auditoriums had to be filled to remain profitable, and the seating design was not easily changed to exclude “wage-earners.” Theater managers made attempts to redesign their playhouses so that the lower classes of audience member need not be relied upon to fill the space—but their attempts were often notorious failures. After the Covent Garden fire of 1808, manager John Philip Kemble rebuilt the theater, increasing the price of tickets in the pit from 3 shillings 6 to 4 shillings, and—to the public’s dismay—converting the public tier into private boxes. His plan was to increase revenues to cover the rebuild, but this was not a satisfactory solution, according to audience members, who were outraged that there were no longer cheap tickets available. The result was the colorful—and at times violent—Old Price Riots, which lasted from the theater’s reopening in September 1809 until December of that year and only concluded when an apology from Kemble himself was issued to the public (Moody 48–79). Riots at the theater were not infrequent, but in 1809 audiences proved particularly immovable on the issue: The London public would not be denied its theater. Leading into the nineteenth century, the theater and English opera were not yet the exclusive provinces of the “elite”—as the theatrical content of this chapbook demonstrates. Wage-earners and leisure classes alike were exposed to English comic operas from the London stage, and therefore theatrical songs formed an important part of England’s repertoire of truly “popular” music.

Like the theaters, the pleasure gardens of London were performance spaces that were inhabited by a range of social classes. The reign of the pleasure garden in London was long and dynamic; the culture of the gardens and the experience one might have in them varied between venues and evolved with time. For our purposes, the most important features of eighteenth-century pleasure gardens were that they were musical spaces (to greater or lesser degrees) and open to a broad spectrum of social classes (also to greater or lesser degrees). Social intermingling formed part of the appeal of these venues: The upper classes could ogle the lower, and vice versa. To paraphrase Peter Borsay, they provided a space for a temporary abolition of societal barriers, resulting in social connections that only lived—and could only live—in that space (Borsay 70). The social classes that were targeted differed from garden to garden. Ranelagh charged 2 shillings 6 for entrance and was therefore known as the most elite of the large pleasure gardens, while Marylebone and Vauxhall were more readily accessible to wage-earning classes: The former charged 1 shilling, and the latter also charged a shilling until 1792, when admission was doubled (Borsay 65; Corfield 12). Along with the theater, the pleasure garden provided a space in which purchasers of cheap literature were exposed to new songs and their melodies—as were their social superiors.

Six of the songs in this Summer’s Amusement can be certainly associated with pleasure-garden entertainments. Firstly, we have “Young Collin,” also known as “He Stole My Tender Heart Away,” by Robert Burns (1759–1796) with music by Mr. Potter (n.d.); it was sung by Mrs. Frederika Weichsell (ca. 1745–1786) at Vauxhall, according to the engraved songbook New Merry Companion (94). The second, “Catch Hold on To-Day,” was sung by Mrs. Mary Ann Wrighten (1751–1796) at Vauxhall, according to a broadside in the Bodleian’s database (Harding B 22(41), Bodleian Library). The third, “The Lads of the Village,” already discussed above, was sung at Vauxhall by a Mrs. Fitzwilliam—most likely Fanny Fitzwilliam (1801–1854)—according to an existing songbook (Songs, Duets, Trios, Glees back cover). The fourth, “Willy’s Rare and Willy’s Fair,” was also sung by Mrs. Wrighten at Vauxhall and appeared as a Scottish tune in many songbooks, including Francis James Child’s compilation The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (179). The fifth, “He’s Aye Kissing Me,” was also associated with Mrs. Wrighten and Vauxhall, according to The Goldfinch, or New Modern Songster (234). The sixth and last song is “Young Jockey Is the Lad for Me,” which is noted in the entry “Connoisseur: No. 68 Thursday, 15 May 1755” regarding the entertainments of Vauxhall in Lionel Thomas Berguer’s publication The British Essayists (vol. 31, 110). I have been able to make firm connections between these six songs and the gardens, but, in all probability, many of the other popular songs in this chapbook were also performed at the pleasure gardens at some point. In fact, many of the Harding chapbooks have titles that suggest as much (including The Summer’s Amusement): Of the ninety-seven chapbooks in Harding’s three volumes, twenty-five explicitly reference London’s major pleasure gardens as their musical sources (namely Vauxhall, Marylebone, or Ranelagh), thirty-three reference the theater, and thirty-eight mention the more general “places of public entertainment.”

But these chapbooks were not just connected to the public spaces of the street, theater, or pleasure garden: They were connected with domestic performance spaces too, as already noted in relation to their formatting. In her essay on Jane Austen’s music collection, Nicola Pritchard-Pink notes that domestic songbooks printed for the middle classes were often gendered (108–12): We have already found that the Harding chapbooks were as well, many of them featuring explicit references to “politeness,” “ladies,” and the “home” in their titles. These chapbooks suggest that the culture of domestic music-making—which has been so thoughtfully discussed by William Weber in Music and the Middle Class (2003)—may have had a wider relevance in English society than we have assumed. Firstly, the format and framing of these cheap chapbooks indicate that female wage-earners aspired to the practice of music-making in the home even if domestic instruments—or ample leisure hours—were not available to them. Secondly, these chapbooks share a significant proportion of their songs with the middle-class domestic songbooks they mimicked: Despite class differences, wage-earners and middle-class domestic performers were singing the same songs. To return to our example, The Summer’s Amusement, I have found that at least eighteen of the songs included in this chapbook were also printed in hefty songbooks produced for middle-class domestic performance (some of which included printed music and some of which did not).

The gendering of these printed materials affected their contents as well as their marketing. Most of the eighteen songs that are featured in both The Summer’s Amusement and domestic songbooks focus on pastoral love. “Jockey and Jenny’s Trip to the Fair” is one such example:

Twas [sic] on the morn of sweet May-Day,

When nature painted all things gay,

Taught birds to sing and lambs to play,

And gild meadows fair,

Young Jockey early in the morn arose,

And tript [sic] it o’er the lawn,

His Sunday’s coat the youth put on, For Jenny had vow’d to run,

With Jockey to the fair.

The song “Young Collin” paints a similar picture, beginning: “The fields were green, the hills were gay/And birds were singing on each spray.” The song “He’ll Steal Your Young Heart Away in Answer to Young Collin” also features a pastoral setting: “By mossy brook and flow’ry plain/I fondly seek the shepherd swain.” But love was not always pastoral. A more tongue-in-cheek approach can be found in the unromantic song “I Had Nought Else to Do,” in which a farmer decides to marry simply because he had nothing else to think about. The song “Cobler of Castlebury” strikes a different tone entirely, telling the tale of a cobbler who marries his love, then gets drunk and beats her. His wife’s shining good character eventually quells his drunken abuse and jealousies, however, and their relationship is eventually restored. Though the song recounts a distressing instance of spousal abuse, it also depicts the cobbler’s wife as her husband’s moral superior and ultimately the agent of change in their relationship. Interestingly, several of the ballads that are shared between this chapbook and domestic songbooks feature songs that are told from a woman’s perspective and imply some degree of female agency—perhaps reflecting the audience for which they were intended: “Catch a Hold on To-Day” encourages women to achieve matrimony as soon as possible to secure their own happiness; “Willy’s Rare and Willy’s Fair,” “Young Jockey Is the Lad for Me,” and “He’s Aye Kissing Me” are all in a woman’s voice and express their narrator’s determination to choose and secure her own romantic partner. The pleasure-garden song “He’s Aye Kissing Me” is notable in that its tagline, from which the title derives, is clearly sexualized. Though this is not what we might expect from publications that were tailored for “genteel” audiences, the reality was that women (of any class) could not be wholly limited to bowdlerized song repertories—as Pritchard-Pink also notes—because they went to the theater and pleasure gardens (108–12): Pleasure-garden entertainments and English comic operas frequently included songs laden with this sort of innuendo.

Interestingly, The Summer’s Amusement also includes drinking songs (“Social Powers,” for example) and songs of war—many of which were also printed in middle-class songbooks: “Liverpool Prize” is a patriotic song of naval victory; “Poor Tom” is a song about the impressment of a civilian waterman into war; “Blow High, Blow Low” is about a sailor at sea, pining for home and love; “Song of General Wolfe” is a stirring drinking song for the eve of battle. Patriotism was an important force in British popular culture during the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—particularly in song. Charles Dibdin, Sr., developed a robust repertoire of patriotic songs during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars with France that remained loyal but—in David Kennerley’s words—showed “independent judgment” (78), focusing not on aristocratic military leaders but on icons of common Britons, namely John Bull and his sea-going equivalent Jack Tar. These commoners were elevated in their cultural depictions, “ennobled not only in their military role, but given credit for excellent, albeit rough, intelligence, and sensitivity as well,” according to Betty T. Bennett (66). Notably, all of the patriotic war songs discussed above originated at the pleasure garden or theater. In fact, of the eighteen songs in The Summer’s Amusement that also appeared in domestic songbooks, twelve were from the theater or the pleasure garden: “The Lads of the Village” proves to be ultimately ubiquitous, having been performed at both the theater and the pleasure gardens, while also appearing in chapbook, domestic songbook, and conventional broadside ballad form.

In the introduction to Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture, the editors note the changing musical landscape of Britain in the early nineteenth century, when a chasm formed between the popular and the elite (Cox Jensen, Kennerley, and Newman 9–10). Runciman’s “wage-earners” remained reluctant to give up their stake in shared public entertainment well into the nineteenth century—demonstrated most tangibly by the Old Price Riots in 1809—but the rift grew nonetheless, and the demarcation between elite and popular entertainments became more distinct as the century wore on. A shared repertory of popular song was largely dependent on the existence of public entertainment venues that intersected social classes, and one could argue that the separation of popular and elite musics occurred concurrently with the decline of the pleasure gardens and theaters as spaces for class intermingling in England. As we have found, the theatrical stage was a central cog for the intricate musical clockwork of English popular music, spinning neighboring traditions in the pleasure gardens, streets, pubs, and homes of England, while itself being accelerated by their revolutions.

But while the nineteenth century did mark the end of a truly “popular” musical culture in which all social classes participated, Harding’s chapbooks suggest that 1800 was not the year by which this change took place in England. For the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century world in which Harding’s collection of chapbooks was produced was one that was yet culturally interconnected. The dizzying web of links that existed between these chapbooks and other spheres of entertainment—the theater, pleasure garden, street, and home—shows that they were products of an era during which our current concepts of “popular” and “elite” musics were but nascent. In the modern, post-nineteenth-century world, it is difficult for us to imagine a musical landscape in which the songs of beggars and street vendors originated in opera houses, but this collection of chapbooks insists that it did indeed exist: In the latter years of the eighteenth century—and even into the early decades of the nineteenth century—a repertoire of truly “popular” song still lived in England. Harding’s collection of chapbooks immortalizes this era of popular music, demonstrating the remarkable fluidity of song in the late Georgian Era and forging an important historical link between performance and print, domestic and public, high class and low.

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Georgina Bartlett

Georgina Bartlett is a music historian researching the intersections between comic opera, pleasure garden music, domestic entertainment, and street song in England around the turn of the nineteenth century. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Miami, where she studied under Professors Karen Henson and Melissa de Graaf, and she has completed her doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Suzanne Aspden. In 2017 she held a Junior Teaching Fellowship at the Ashmolean Museum, and in 2019 she lectured at Oxford’s Faculty of Music on Foundations in the Study of Music. She is currently a Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at St. Peter’s College, Oxford.

Notes

1. The titles of the chapbooks in each volume are searchable through the Bodleian’s online search engine (SOLO); the individual chapbooks are categorized as “books” in the SOLO system with no indication that they are all in fact bound into one of three hardback volumes.

2. For examples, see the following items in the Bodleian’s broadside collections: “Dibdin’s Humorous Budget of Sea Songs” at Curzon b.20(17), “Great Nelson’s Laurels” at Curzon b.24(98), and “Nelson’s Wreath; Or, British Glory” at Curzon b.24(99), all from the Curzon Collection. These items are available to view through the Broadside Ballads Online database (Bergel et al.).

3. The wares of broadside printers are also discussed by Charles Hindley (94).

4. Robert D. Hume has written a very helpful article on the price of culture from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: In spite of the enormous trove of information he presents, he concludes that it is nearly impossible for modern scholars to precisely judge the contemporaneous monetary value of theater tickets, books, and art. The actual prices of many of these items can be found through records and archives, but translating the economic worth of their contemporaneous currency is a very different matter. Firstly, inflation was extremely variable throughout the eighteenth century, with wild peaks and ebbs during the Napoleonic Era, depending on Britain’s contemporaneous geopolitical standing. But annualized, in the 1790s, inflation was 4.53%—a considerable figure when judging the cost of cultural luxuries across the social classes (Hume 376). Thus, Hume uses a range of multipliers in each period to give scholars flexible estimates of what the monetary value of an item might have equated to in a given year: For example, he uses a conversion multiplier of 100–150 for British currency during the Napoleonic Era, or 1795–1815 (Hume 380). Secondly, the worth of money has changed because, proportionally, there are many more people in the “middle class” now than there were during the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this period, the gap between the “upper classes” and the “lower classes” (to use a binary model of social hierarchy) was much wider, and the number of people who had significant discretionary income was far smaller: Applied to Runciman’s four-part social model, this would mean that there were fewer people in the professional and wage-earning brackets than there would be in Britain today—and more who would be described as economically deprived (Runciman 108). Therefore, something that cost 1 schilling and sixpence would be nothing at all to some members of society but utterly unaffordable to the majority (Hume 381). Despite the difficulties Hume identified in understanding the relative worth of British currency during this period, he concludes that most culture was actually unaffordable to the contemporaneous working classes during the whole era in question. Paintings, most concerts, and continental opera were simply out of the reach of any but the wealthiest social classes—around 3% of the population at the beginning of the nineteenth century: In London, this would have accounted for roughly 30,000 people (Hume 377). However, according to Hume’s calculations, tickets to certain theatrical entertainments—though not widely accessible—were feasible splurges: A second gallery seat at the patent theaters could cost 1 schilling for a performance of a comic opera or musical play (380). According to Adam Smith’s estimate in 1776, the London worker received on average 18 pence per day, making the theater a costly luxury, but not entirely out of reach (Hume 380; Smith 92).

5. Henry Mayhew (1812–1887) was a journalist and social reformer who took his journalistic skills to the streets of London in the mid-nineteenth century, interviewing scores of workers and beggars, writing their stories (supposedly) verbatim, and compiling them for publication in three volumes, printed in 1851, with another volume being added in 1861. His ethnographic approach to recording the lives and experiences of the impoverished and wage-earning classes contrasted sharply with that of most of his contemporaries, who almost invariably veered into moralism, paternalism, or sentimentalism. Though it was written as a social exposé, Mayhew’s work has proved very helpful to street-literature historians, as he interviewed many people working in and around the street-literature trade.