In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Ballads, Songs and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-Century Realist Prose
  • Gerald Porter
Ballads, Songs and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-Century Realist Prose. By C. M. Jackson-Houlston. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Pp. 221, Appendix.)

One way of looking at a song is to see it as taking part in numerous dialogues; primarily, of course, with the singer and with its listeners, but also with other performances, and with other songs and texts. The dialogue is not only, or even primarily, on the verbal level. We should include the cultural and generic as well as the verbal, since most songs engage at some level with authority (Puritanism or patriarchy, for example). This continuum has not always been recognized, and the Child-like attempt to regard songs as in some way autonomous, or part of a closed system, can be compared to the canonization of certain literary texts. Jackson Houlston's book is an excellent study of the relation between songs and literary texts.

From the time of Sir Walter Scott, folk songs have been incorporated into literary works on a large scale, mostly by direct allusion or quotation. Perhaps because songs are authorial, they generally draw attention to themselves, networking and being reinterpreted in their new contexts in ways similar to the links that all readers make with their own milieu. Reinterpretations of this kind are particularly noticeable in 20th-century drama. Brecht and Arden used a metatext of songs and song fragments to undercut the authority of the powerful, while the constant presence of local songs in Irish drama, for example, breaks ontological boundaries between the fictional and the real world.

Ballads, Songs and Snatches is concerned with similar processes in British 19th-century realist prose. As an active performer (she is a member of the Mellstock Band) and a literary researcher, Jackson-Houlston is well placed for her task. She trawls through the 19th-century novel for folk song references, but not just for the sake of listing them. She does not accept quotations at face value as transparent evidence of performance or social history, but does a thorough job of analyzing the way they have been manipulated to serve different purposes and the role they play in the work of individual novelists (Scott and his contemporaries, Borrow, Kingsley, Hughes, Jefferies, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, and Hardy). She examines how they functioned as in-tertexts, "reaffirm[ing] a sense of cultural solidarity" with readers and so letting them "occupy the position of active and successful candidates for admission to high culture" (p. 3). At the same time, the quotation of songs that were in no way a part of high culture was a practice that could rebound on the middle-class reader, creating a sense of class guilt.

The presence of passages of verse, including scraps of song, in the middle of prose narratives emphasizes how multivoiced these realist texts are, even as they are professing to represent a single version of "the truth" (p. 9). However, quotations are not merely illustrative but may produce contradictions of their own. For example, in Scott's novels their fakery tends to undermine the reality of what is being affirmed by the elaborate historical settings and apparatus of notes. Jackson-Houlston emphasizes that he uses songs to unify his work. She is good on the way melodies and quotation in Redgauntlet suggest a whole community of culture, not only between his characters but with Scott's readers as well; he takes great care to quote just enough (p. 35). Charles Kingsley, too, invented a proletarian oral culture to fit his agenda of robustness and moral seriousness. On the other hand, Thomas Hughes, with a greater awareness of the actual tradition, "mediates his material in ways that turn it into a consumer item, a cultural cul-de-sac for condescending colonization for readers with a different background" (p. 86). For Elizabeth Gaskell, English ballads were part of literary, not oral culture, which was reserved for Scottish and other "outlandish" areas. Her text of the dialect song "The Oldham Weaver" in Mary Barton shows many signs of...

pdf

Share