"The Manufacture and Lingua-facture of Ballad-Making ": Broadside Ballads in Long Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse

Abstract

1.As Tessa Watt has observed, Any study of impact of printing in England must take account of fact that one of first widespread and widely affordable forms of printed word was song. Ballads were among earliest products of press, and they were also among largest classes of printed materials. Some three thousand distinct were printed 1550 and 1600, and number of circulating during this period may have reached as high as between 3 and 4 million.1 In 1557, Stationers' Company received its royal charter of incorporation, and from about 1586, a small number of stationers began buying up newly created rights to copy ballads. In 1612, printing of became exclusive right of five printers, and in 1624, this consolidation of rights culminated in formation of a syndicate called partners.2 Because it was more profitable to reprint for which one already held copyright than to acquire new materials, economic imperatives in effect made these stationers custodian[s] of tradition.3 Their warehouse of stock would influence market... for next three hundred years.4 By late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when scholars first began collecting from oral recitation rather than from print and manuscript sources, many of that they transcribed from the mouths of people may have owe[d] their survival to reinforcement of printed word.5The eighteenth century saw vast expansion of print trades throughout Britain. It also saw emergence of a substantial printed discourse about ballads. In commentaries in periodicals, in prefaces to printed collections of ballads, in essays printed in these collections, and elsewhere, a wide variety of authors commented both negatively and positively on balladry as a hybrid oral and textual practice. Today, many scholars follow great nineteenth-century scholar Francis James Child (1825-1896) in dividing into two principal categories, traditional (or popular) and broadside ballads, but in early eighteenth century this conceptual division did not exist. As Albert B. Friedman observes:The traditional (Sir Patrick Spens, Edward, and like)... canonized in Professor Child's monumental collection ... [were] not even tentatively differentiated from other until well along in eighteenth century. Before that time, a ballad, so far as either men of letters or plain citizens were concerned, was a doggerel poem written to a familiar tune, printed on a folio sheet or long slip, and sold at bookstalls or hawked about streets by ballad-singers.6For many eighteenth-century commentators, term ballad implicitly referred to a broadside ballad. In a 1735 letter to The Grub-street Journal, one Democritus condemned scandalous practice of ballad-singing as:the bane of all good manners and morals ... a continual nursery for idlers, whores, and pick-pockets; a school for scandal, smut, and debauchery; where our youth of either sex (of lower class especially) receive first taint, which by degrees so contaminates mind, that, with every slight temptation, they become abandoned, lewd, and strangers to all shame.He then argued that printers of (that is, broadside ballads) should have to pay stamp taxes as newspaper printers had to do:I am not so much of a lawyer, as to determine, whether come under stamp act, tho' it seems reasonable to suppose it. ... And pray, what reason can there be, that your Journal, and all other news-papers, should pay a duty to government, and yet every filthy ballad, that tends to nothing but poisoning minds of our youth, should pay no duty at all?7For Democritus, ballads are a hybrid oral and textual form linked to commercial printing. They are also associated with the middle sort and the lower class especially rather than with elites. …