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Victorian Studies 43.4 (2001) 643-644



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Book Review

Ballads, Songs and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-Century Realist Prose


Ballads, Songs and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-Century Realist Prose, by C. M. Jackson-Houlston; pp. 221. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999, £42.50, $74.95.

Probably the best known statement about ballads and print culture is Margaret Laidlaw's complaint to Walter Scott, as reported by her son, James Hogg: "there was never ane o' my songs prentit till ye prentit them yourself, an' ye hae spoilt them a' thegither. They war made for singing, an' no for reading; and they're nouther right spelled nor right setten down" ("Reminiscences of Former Days" in Altrive Tales [1832] I: cxii). Ballads, Songs and Snatches is sympathetic to such a view. Using the twentieth-century notion of cultural appropriation, it develops Laidlaw's statement to its logical end, exploring the ways in which writers "spoil" songs by creative interventions.

The new historicist idea underpinning this book is that "the pursuit of textual cross-referencing in literary studies [. . .] helps to establish the links of influence which constitute literary history," demonstrating "the interdependent nature of all texts" (1). This claim is not particularly illuminating. In considering a diverse and highly sophisticated group of writers--Hogg, Scott, John Galt, Mary Russell Mitford, George Borrow, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Richard Jefferies, and Thomas Hardy--C. M. Jackson-Houlston makes a number of sometimes misleading assumptions.

The categorisation of all these writers as simply "British," for instance, makes no great allowance for distinctive national and regional traditions. Nor does it take much account of the expressions of local identities reflected in the writers' approaches to traditional material. To be fair, Jackson-Houlston does make some highly intelligent remarks, for example on Thomas Hardy's Wessex, showing how his selection and ommission of materials was part of a conscious process of "shaping the outlines of his Wessex: essentially English, looking inward, sufficient unto itself" (146). So, too, the reader is alerted to the Borders conflicts in Redgauntlet (1824). However, because of the book's informing assumption of a homogenous Britishness, these insights are never considered in relation to the layers of identity present in British writing, in the nineteenth century as today.

Furthermore, by concentrating solely on the nineteenth century, Jackson-Houlston gives no sense of where the writers' approaches to songs are rooted. In the Scottish context, for instance, Allan Ramsay's collections are discussed as important influences on writers such as Scott. However, there is no, more pertinent, consideration of Ramsay's treatment of traditional song material in fiction (the dramatic Gentle Shepherd [1725], for instance). Some brief remarks on James Macpherson's Ossianic reconstructions would also have been useful and relevant.

Equally, there is no sense of how approaches to songs change over time. Pursuing the topic into the twentieth century, however briefly, could have been hugely illuminating. To continue with the Scottish example, there could have been remarks on the intelligent celebrations of the song culture of North East Scotland in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's The Scots Quair (1832-34) and Jessie Kesson's The White Bird Passes (1958); Hugh MacDiarmid's seamless working of ballad material into A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926); or Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), where the novel itself becomes a prose ballad.

Patronizing comments also made me bristle. Jackson-Houlston upbraids Hogg, for instance, for a "failure to achieve complete cultural amphibiousness" (54). Hardy is [End Page 643] found guilty of a "rather nervous condescension" (162) in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874). Scott, apparently, "takes ballads seriously, though not uncritically, as historical authorities [. . .] to give colouring to his pictures of the past" (23)--although Wandering Willie's use of song references as part of a living language, in Redgauntlet, contradicts the last observation.

By implying that song is...

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