William Motherwell's Cultural Politics, 1797-1835 (review)

This is a remarkable book about the life of a remarkable person in remarkable times. What is even more remarkable is that this life was compacted into thirty-eight years, a span to be considered very short even at a time when lives in general were shorter. In her own words, the author's chosen approach places "Motherwell at the center and seeks to use wider events not as isolated moments but as a means of opening up aspects of his social world" (p. 6). In many respects, this social world is astonishingly limited—the west of the Scottish central belt, particularly Paisley and Glasgow—but historically it echoes a previous Scotland as an independent kingdom with its own parliament, now a longed-for but unobtainable thing of the past; and in its contemporary constraints it functions against the impact of the recent Napoleonic Wars and such issues as the Irish Question and the Reform Bill of 1832.

Folklorists who tend to know William Motherwell mainly, or solely, as one of Francis James Child's chief sources for his English and Scottish Popular Ballads (225 versions of 108 Child ballads derive from Motherwell, as do many of his titles, even if they do not always become Child's A-texts) may wonder why the (co-)author of the Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern (Glasgow, 1827) deserves to be studied in this wider context, on the one hand, and in the narrower interconnections of his personal life, ambitions, achievements, and social connections, on the other. How revealing is the life story of a ballad collector named William Motherwell regarding the biography of the age in which he lived, and vice versa? In the first place—and this becomes abundantly clear in the volume under review—Motherwell's activities as editor of the Paisley Advertiser and the Glasgow Courier, as well as of the Paisley Magazine, while placing him in a position to shape public opinion and to fight for his own Tory corner in the published debate of important current issues, provided him with the opportunity to advocate many of the principles that also governed his attitude towards the collection and editing of ballads—i.e., an underlying conservatism and aversion to change. Strange as it may seem, these apparently antiquarian principles make him, from our point of view, a very "modern" ballad editor. In the later stages of his handling of his material, after exchanges of opinions with Sir Walter Scott and Peter Buchan, among others, he insists on printing ballad texts without "improvements" or other editorial emendations. He understood them as personal versions of individual singers, equal in value and authenticity to other personal versions of other individual singers, a point of view he reached as a result of his own fieldwork experience. It greatly puzzled Child, and has puzzled others since then, that Motherwell did not seem to adhere to his admirable attitude consistently, but Mary Ellen Brown quite rightly points out that he only reached this position after some fascicles of the Minstrelsy had already been published, in which collation of texts had been still the guiding principle, and that his Ballad Manuscript "was not the source of or a draft for the Minstrelsy, but rather his record of what he—and others—gathered from oral tradition" (p. 88). After all, when he inherited the project of the Minstrelsy he still had much to learn and therefore took great pains to make himself an expert. It is not a contradiction, however, that Motherwell, himself a poet of considerable stature, devoted the fourth volume of his Minstrelsy to ballad imitations composed by individual authors, including himself, thereby keeping with the expectations of the culture of his time.

Brown's portrait of William Motherwell is much more than an account of a ballad collector and editor, and other reviewers may well have...