Theorizing Orality and Performance in Literary Anecdote and History: Boswell's Diaries

In memory of Morris Brownell (1933-2007)¹

The diaries of the eighteenth-century literary figure James Boswell supply a rich source of materials useful not only for delving into period songs and their role in daily life, but also for interrogating our theoretical framework for reading such materials. Boswell's renderings of popular singing and song culture in the course of his activities—literary, political, amorous, familial, domestic, traveling, business, leisure—demonstrate in example after example the mixing of oral and written, of belles lettres and popular culture, in the life and discursive self-fashioning of one lively eighteenth-century gentleman. Recent theoretical framings propose that we rethink those assumptions and inclinations in the study of songs and oral performance that have often inclined to separate the oral and orality from literature and the literary. Such a conceptual division skirts the truly interpolated character of expressive modes, especially those that are customary and quotidian. In addition, the study of cultural expression came into being with a history of conceptualizing "folk" music in terms of misleading notions of a "purer" oral culture, in contrast to a less "authentic" realm of literacy, print, and media-infused popular culture. A further tendency in some studies of orality has at times been a focus on the present with a lack of historical depth in analysis, which gives less access to understanding the oral dimension of the arts and experience of the past. The anecdotes that Boswell recorded prompt us to take up newer models and tools for analysis as we explore his detailed panorama of oral contexts, informal musical performance, and collective cultural reference and experience in eighteenth-century Britain.

In March of 1776 James Boswell, Scottish barrister and literary figure, reports a rowdy coach ride through Oxfordshire. In his rendition, the rambunctious scene resembles a William

Hogarth painting (Boswell 1963:253):

There were two outside passengers, who sung and roared and swore as [the coachman] did. My nerves were hurt at first; but considering it to have no offensive meaning whatever, and to be just the vocal expression of the beings, I was not fretted. They sang "And a-Hunting We will Go," and I joined the chorus. I then sung "Hearts of Oak," "Gee Ho Dobbin," "The Roast Beef of Old England," and they chorused. We made a prodigious jovial noise going through Welwyn and other villages.

Reporting anxiety for his own safety in this vehicle which that very day "had been robbed by footpads in the morning near London," Boswell notes that he swapped songs "upon the coach-box," in a solidarity-inducing chorusing to ease his fear. For us the account supplies a momentary glimpse of oral interaction in Georgian England, carried out in the form of conversation and singing. This essay explores several dimensions of orality and popular song culture as these are revealed by entries in the diaries of James Boswell (1740-95), Scottish gentleman, lawyer, and writer.²

From the moment he arrived in London from Scotland in 1762, the then-young Boswell kept diaries about his life and contacts with the people around him. This detailed log indicates that he collected, quoted, alluded to, commented upon, sang, and composed popular songs on every conceivable occasion. As already noted, he sang on top of coaches. Elsewhere in the diaries he describes himself intoning, through the course of his life, in an array of settings: on horseback, in London taverns, in Edinburgh coffeehouses, in parliament, in court, on a skiff in the Hebrides, among soldiers and peasants in Sicily, at election dinners in Scotland, and at the Lord Mayor's feast in London. In addition, throughout his reported conversations he mentions songs, clearly invoking lyrics and (implicitly) tunes as shared touchstones of sociocultural reference and meaning. Boswell's journals present a panorama of conversational and singing contexts that serve the study of orality and performance, particularly as contextualized by social discourse. The very literate and literary Boswell represents conversations and activities that range from commonplace to formal and ceremonial. Especially as these accounts involve songs—both as references and as performances—they...