Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (review)

This admirable and very human book is an account of the genesis and production of Francis James Child’s edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), which remains to this day the standard edition of English-language ballads, to such an extent that they are generally referred to as the “Child ballads.” Precisely what constitutes one of these ballads, however, was never entirely clear even to Child himself and has remained a subject of debate ever since. It is one of the merits of Mary Ellen Brown’s book that she considers this state of affairs chronologically and empirically without making it into a point of contention.

Child was educated at Harvard College and to all intents and purposes remained there for the rest of his life, becoming successively Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, Professor of Literature, and Professor of English. By 1853 he had taken on the general editorship of a multi-volume series of British Poets, which was to include volumes of ballads that he himself would edit. This would be the first time the ballads had been presented as part of the canon of English literature. These volumes were based on ballad collections already in print. Child, however, wanted to make a significant contribution to scholarly knowledge; he was inspired by Svend Grundtvig, the Danish editor of Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, to undertake an entirely new ballad project which would go beyond the published collections to the underlying manuscripts, thus neatly combining philological integrity with a belief in ballads as early literature. This is what was to become The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

Brown’s method is largely to let Child tell his own story by quoting extensively from swathes of archival material held at Harvard and elsewhere. Child’s project was to a significant degree an epistolary one, conducted by correspondence with scholars and other specialists in England, Scotland, elsewhere in Europe, and America, and the sources are correspondingly rich. But there are family sources as well, and the initial section of the book is biographical. This is important because Popular Ballads was the work of a Victorian scholar working under peculiarly nineteenth-century conditions. Child himself endured poor health, and his wife suffered from one of those unidentified Victorian afflictions which made her an invalid for life. Child’s evident distaste for the more bawdy ballads, which led to their being excluded from Popular Ballads, was again a direct product of his social environment. Yet at the same time, the nineteenth-century scholarly environment permitted him to undertake a lifetime’s project that has endured to the present day, something unimaginable in the academic environment of the twenty-first century.

The book then charts the progress of Popular Ballads, followed by more detailed presentation of some of the most important of the epistolary relationships, especially with the Scottish ballad specialist William Macmath, who appointed himself Child’s unofficial, and largely unpaid, co-editor. It is particularly enlightening to see Child’s ballad concept emerge and change from a philological belief in the primacy of old manuscripts to an assumption of the primacy of memory, always with an uneasy distrust of print. In the final chapter Brown revisits this concept: a fundamentally devolutionary view whereby ballads had arisen among a homogeneous people prior to book culture; as society changed they became the possession of the “unlettered,” who unwittingly changed them while preserving elements of their original integrity (233). It is a confusing (and historically nonsensical) concept, with which Child grappled throughout his scholarly life and which continues to challenge ballad scholars. Brown elicits from the material evidence four qualities that Child used as guidelines in selecting the ballads: age, initial wholeness, traditionality, and mutability.

Brown draws very sparingly on secondary sources, although they are well represented in a substantial bibliography. This might come as a surprise at first, but as one reads on, the merits of...