Afterword

As several contributors to the current issue of Victorian Poetry observe, no full-length study of Victorian ballads has appeared since 1975, when J. S. Bratton’s The Victorian Popular Ballad appeared and ended the fourteen-year hiatus since Albert Friedman’s book on popular and “sophisticated” ballads had been published.¹ In view of the relative paucity of prior scholarship, this special issue—organized, edited, and introduced by Letitia Henville—has particular force and timeliness, especially in the wake of newer approaches to historical prosody and the lyric. Most of the essays address ballads by major authors, including Thomas Moore, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. In her introduction, Letitia Henville adds discussion of Francis Newman’s “ballad” translation of the Iliad and recounts the fascinating permutations of “The Ballad of Lord Bateman,” which was reworked and repurposed by George Cruikshank, Charles Dickens, and W. M. Thackeray, then recovered and published as a “traditional” ballad by Francis James Child. For most of the pornographic ballads analyzed by Thomas Joudrey, no authors can be identified, much less “recovered.”

All of the contributors engage, in one way or another, with “‘Imperfectly Civilized’: Ballads, Nations, and Histories of Form” by Meredith Martin, who is thus a significant presence in the issue, though she contributes no essay. Her 2015 article in ELH explores the literary history of ballads as an ongoing construction and demonstrates that the conventional characteristics we today associate with the literary ballad—alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines in an abcb rhyme scheme—were not really put in place until the twentieth century. (For nineteenth-century poets, as Henville reminds us, conceptualizations of the ballad were far more “fluid.”) Martin’s identification of the “ballad-theory of civilization” is an especially significant part of her argument. Exponents of this theory (e.g., Barthold Georg Niebuhr) asserted a universal historical process whereby primitive societies, whose most characteristic literary form was the ballad recounting wild adventures of a wild people, gave way, through a process of refinement and development, to modern civilizations best exemplified by modern poetry. This scenario was of course a constructed fiction projected backward and, in Thomas Macaulay’s hands, could be appropriated to laud and justify colonialism by “advanced” nations of more “primitive” societies such as India. In Martin’s words, “Ballads were at once imagined to be the authentic record of a nation’s earliest poets as well as evidence of early songs that appeared at the beginning of every culture. Now collections of fragments, authentic ballads had to be in some way corrupted or faded so that their re-creation [in modern collections of ballads] could accommodate the nostalgic projection onto the past of a purer form of connected society, via poetry.” Rather than focusing on a ballad “revival,” Martin historicizes “ballad discourse.”²

This special issue usefully complicates Martin’s “ballad-theory of civilization,” especially in the essays by Michael Hansen, Elizabeth Helsinger, and Thomas Joudrey. Though in Irish Melodies Thomas Moore deployed the smooth mellifluousness that distinguished highly “civilized” poetry, the number of Anacreontic ballads that featured a “broken lyre,” Hansen argues, functioned to remind Irish readers of the violence wrought by Britain upon its colony of Ireland. In so doing, Moore’s Irish ballads fissured Britain’s civilizing narrative and its claims to advanced literary and moral authority. Helsinger, in contrast, demonstrates that Swinburne’s initial selection of Northumbrian materials for a projected edition of ballads and his invention of ballads for his novel Lesbia Brandon deliberately juxtaposed modern lyric pleasures and archaic or “primitive” rhythms and language that shattered surface smoothness and aimed to create unease and extreme historical self-consciousness rather than gratulatory Englishness in readers. Pornography, of course, blatantly resisted the imperial virtues that were often aligned with the ballad, such as community, patriotism, and domestic affection. Joudrey points out the surprising number of ballads in the pornographic journal The Pearl and reads these as well as Swinburne’s flagellant poems as political interventions that resist nineteenth-century literary histories as well as established power and authority.

Helsinger also devotes attention to the aesthetics of Swinburne’s ballads through her...