Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800-1925, by Daniel Karlin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925 by Daniel Karlin Lee Behlman (bio) Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925, by Daniel Karlin; pp. xii + 195. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, $44.95, $43.99 ebook. In Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925, Daniel Karlin tracks the incursions into poetry and fiction of the extraordinarily vivid and now-lost musical soundscapes of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century London, Dublin, Paris, Florence, and New York. In seven chapters, four of which were Clarendon lectures at an earlier stage, we are introduced to writers' persistent fixations on aural street performances as works ripe for appropriation and restaging as dramatic tableaux. In selecting his examples, Karlin seeks to go "beyond mere reference," or that which only "adds local colour to a realist fiction"; rather, he investigates works in which a song "plays a specific part in an artistic design" (7). As this decision suggests—thematic connections across its chapters notwithstanding—this book as a whole is not thesis-driven. Elizabeth Helsinger's related Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015) (which Karlin does not cite) is a useful point of contrast. While Helsinger reflects at length, via Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's aesthetic theory, on both "ideas about song" and "song as a possible model for understanding how poems can be said to think," Karlin resists larger claims about how his writers understand song as a rival or coequal to the lyric, let alone as a crucible for intellection ([University of Virginia Press], 2). He limits himself to actual existing street songs—or made-up ones—that made their way, as subject matter and quoted content, into poems and novels, while leaving unexamined the headier subject of how literary works might function as "song" and the implications of that gesture. He stays close to the ground of his chosen texts in resourceful readings of familiar and lesser-known poems by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Walt Whitman, as well as major twentieth-century novels by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. As with his earlier The Figure of the Singer (2013), Karlin's critical voice here is charmingly warm and direct, fast on the move but unhurried, as he teases out implications and chains of association. In the opening chapter, for example, he uses Robert Herrick's "Cherrie-Ripe" (1648), which famously incorporates an actual street seller's cry, as the point of departure for reflections on Thomas Campion, Lord Byron, Christina Rossetti, the "migrations" of songs into visual art, and then back to poetry with Wordsworth's "Power of Music" (1807), to which much of the chapter is devoted (4). In discussing that poem, Karlin shows Wordsworth's middle-class spectator celebrating a solo violinist's performance before a rapturous working-class crowd, and distracting them from the cacophony of competing street sounds; as he keenly notes, this Orpheus figure "consciously or [End Page 338] unconsciously recalls" William Hogarth's etching The Enrag'd Musician (1741), a comic representation of street music and street life overwhelming a frustrated professional musician (16). (Wordsworth characteristically plays it straight, though.) Karlin later juxtaposes Wordsworth's poem with George Gissing's 1889 novel The Nether World to demonstrate how, in both, the surrounding street sounds constitute an assault on the senses that poses challenges to aesthetic reception and public order. Throughout the book, Karlin's avowed emphasis is not on street songs in their original cultural contexts but rather on how his authors repurposed them for divergent aesthetic and ideological purposes. A standout chapter focuses on Barrett Browning's use of street singers, children and adults in a range of late works that respond to the fluctuating fortunes of the Risorgimento in the late 1840s and early 1850s, including both parts of Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and "The King's Gift" (1862). In the former work, the child singer in the poem's second part "is there not by accident, 'overheard' as he passes beneath the speaker's window," but instead has been obviously planted there in a patently "improbable" gesture (46). The...