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

1.

As Tessa Watt has observed, "Any study of the impact of printing in England must take account of the fact that one of the first widespread and widely affordable forms of the printed word was the song." Ballads were among the earliest products of the press, and they were also among the largest classes of printed materials. Some three thousand distinct ballads were printed between 1550 and 1600, and the number of ballads circulating during this period may have reached as high as "between 3 and 4 million."¹ In 1557, the 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, the printing of ballads became the exclusive right of five printers, and in 1624, this consolidation of rights culminated in the formation of a syndicate called the "ballad partners."² Because it was more profitable to reprint ballads for which one already held the copyright than to acquire new materials, economic imperatives in effect made these stationers "custodian[s] of tradition."³ Their warehouse of stock ballads would "influence the ballad market . . . for the next three hundred years."⁴ By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when ballad scholars first began collecting ballads from oral recitation rather than from print and manuscript sources, many of the ballads that they transcribed from "the mouths of the people" may have "owe[d] their survival to the reinforcement of the printed word."⁵

The eighteenth century saw the vast expansion of the print trades throughout Britain. It also saw the 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 ballad scholars follow the great nineteenth-century scholar Francis James Child (1825–1896) in dividing ballads into two principal categories, traditional (or "popular") and broadside ballads, but in the early eighteenth century this conceptual division did not exist. As Albert B. Friedman observes:

The traditional ballads ("Sir Patrick Spens," "Edward," and the like) . . . canonized in Professor Child's monumental collection . . . [were] not even tentatively differentiated from other ballads until well along in the 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 the streets by ballad-singers.⁶

For many eighteenth-century commentators, the term "ballad" implicitly referred to a broadside ballad. In a 1735 letter to The Grub-street Journal, one "Democritus" condemned the "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 the lower class especially) receive the first taint, which by degrees so contaminates the mind, that, with every slight temptation, they become abandoned, lewd, and strangers to all shame.

He then argued that the printers of ballads (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 ballads come under the 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 the government, and yet every filthy ballad, that tends to nothing but poisoning the minds of our youth, should pay no duty at all?⁷

For "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. But by the end of the century, the "ballad revival" (or polite rediscovery of ballads) and especially the rise of ballad...