Sensation and Song: Street Ballad Consumption in Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

Nineteenth-century street ballads have often been identified as an early form of tabloid press that provided news of sensational events—especially murders and executions—in verse form. This association with topical news has led to their comparison with contemporaneous newspapers. In particular, the cheap price of street literature and ballads compared to newspapers in the first half of the century has been cited as a reason for street balladry being popular at this time. A correlation has been made between a population eager to purchase news in a burgeoning public sphere, and its consumption of the only affordable type of newsprint available. As a result of this identification of street ballads with newsprint, there has been a perception that the drop in price of newspapers in the 1850s and 1860s caused a corresponding fall in the consumption of street ballads. The assumption has often been that the subsequent market for street ballads was somehow a nostalgic one—aware of its patronage of a dying textual form.1 The validity of this view of nineteenth-century street-ballad consumption will be explored here primarily through an exploration of the nature of the street ballads themselves.