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

Ballads, Songs and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-Century Realist Prose. By C. M. Jackson-Houlston. (Nineteenth Century.) Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1999. [221 p. ISBN 1-84014-296-0. $74.95.]

In this book, C. M. Jackson-Houlston is concerned less with folk music itself than with allusions to folk songs in the writings of nineteenth-century British novelists. She emphasizes the importance of performance in the transmission of traditional folk songs, and she insists that song "is dependent on the affective power of music as well as on its words" (p. 176), but her attention is usually restricted to lyrics and texts, and aside from a few pages on early collections of ballads and songs, she focuses almost entirely on literary materials.

Jackson-Houlston covers a dozen different writers in all, arguing that in their allusions to folk music, these writers tended to misrepresent the vital working-class culture from which the music arose. She tries to show that working-class singers and musicians were often dismissed or mocked, as in the novels of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, and to prove that folk songs were themselves toned and cleaned up, stripped not only of their musical settings but also of their radical political messages. In Gaskell's Mary Barton, one of Jackson-Houlston's clearest and most persuasive examples, a quotation from a Lancashire broadside ballad, "The Oldham Weaver," omits a stanza describing an angry exchange between the weaver and his master. Thus, even as the ballad's account of the weaver's plight is preserved, its "note of rebelliousness" is "softened" (p. 108).

Jackson-Houlston contends that in many cases, novelists sought not only to minimize class conflict, but to create a false sense of community between their working-class characters and middle-class readers. Mary Russell Mitford's depictions of village life, for example, use allusions to music as a way of suggesting that working-class characters have "glimmerings of genteel sensibility"; for Mitford, the idea is to show that characters and readers share the same "sentimental taste" (p. 59). Similarly, in Silas Marner, George Eliot "emphasizes those aspects of culture which characters of all classes, and readers, supposedly have in common" (p. 68). Jackson-Houlston recognizes the benevolent motives of these novelists, acknowledging their desire to encourage sympathy for the working class, yet she also insists that their efforts had unintended and even unfortunate consequences. "My argument," she announces, "is that there can be such a thing as misrepresentation, and that if nineteenth-century realist writers misrepresented their subjects, this matters" (p. 10).

How, then, did it matter? And to whom might it have mattered? On these questions, Jackson-Houlston is surprisingly vague. For although she shows that nineteenth-century novelists manipulated their allusions to folk songs in order to "make those whose cause they wished to support appear assimilable to the ruling-class interests they themselves were part of" (p. 175), she does not help us to imagine what might have happened if the novelists had done otherwise. If Gaskell had quoted "The Oldham Weaver" in its entirety, for example, including the angry stanza in which the weaver confronts his master, she might have given her middle-class readers a clearer sense of what the working classes really experienced and felt. But she probably would not have prompted her audience to take workers more seriously or to take action on the workers' behalf. Indeed, she might well have reinforced her readers' prejudices against working-class culture and inflamed their fears of working-class people.

Jackson-Houlston's affection for folk music is evident throughout her book. She identifies herself as a performer as well as a scholar, and she is unapologetically committed to what she describes as a "materialist- historicist perspective" (p. 2). Yet even though her knowledge is impressive and...