Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History of the Songster ed. by Paul Watt, Derek B. Scott, and Patrick Spedding (review)

The origins of this essay collection lie in the publication of Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, a four-volume work that made more widely available a large repository of popular songbooks, often known as 'songsters', that had originally been published in the 1830s and 1840s, many of which had associations with the song-and-supper clubs of late regency and early Victorian London. As the editors point out in their introduction, this edition was 'data rich' but 'context poor' (p. 1), consisting of the words to thousands of popular songs; with necessarily brief editorial apparatus and little scholarship to build on, these volumes offered only a hint of the songbooks' possible meanings and significance. The present volume, among other things, is an attempt to contextualize those songsters and offer ways to interpret them, as well as the many hundreds of similar, neglected cheap songbooks that were published in the nineteenth century.

What is immediately obvious is how very rich and under-utilized a resource songsters are for understanding a certain strand of historical pleasure in music–rich, not least because of their abundance throughout the Anglophone world. Essays in this collection consider songsters from America, England, Ireland, and Scotland, with a particularly fertile series of essays on Australian songsters. Also readily apparent is the difficulty of deciding on what exactly the object of study is here. The introduction defines songsters as 'pocket-sized anthologies of popular songs'. They are also cheap, partly because they contained only words, not music, and 'could be distributed by musicians, itinerant chapman, and hawkers everywhere, especially in rapidly expanding urban spaces' (p. 1). However, later in the same paragraph the editors have expanded this description, admitting that later in the nineteenth century songsters were available in a wide variety of formats, with variations in size, content, and purpose, notably including printed music.

This latitude in terminology is necessary to account for changes in the form across the century, but also because, as Paul Pickering notes in an excellent chapter on the appearance of 'God Save the Queen/King' in songbooks across two hundred and fifty years, 'the form was so fluid that it is difficult to decide where to draw the line between songsters, song sheets, and slip ballads' (p. 115). And indeed, across the chapters of the collection different authors seem to have quite different ideas about what songsters might be. In a chapter on American songsters, Norm Cohen pointedly leaves out collections of religious songs on the assumption that these books had 'a different repertoire, purpose and audience' (p. 12). Elsewhere, such as in Paul Watt's discussion of the Prefaces found in songsters, religious songs are considered fair game, raising the (unanswered) question of what the relationship between songsters and hymnbooks and other religious song collections might be.

The most striking example of this definitional latitude is the inclusion of Sarah McCleave's detailed analysis of the publication history of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies, which she claims is 'arguably the most successful songster of the nineteenth century' (p. 47). It is notable that after this opening statement McCleave carefully avoids using the word 'songster', preferring instead the term 'song-book'. Indeed, it is unclear what Moore's relatively expensive and elegantly engraved Melodies, aimed at an elite audience, have to do with either the songster as it is more traditionally understood or the 'cheap print' of the volume's title. The introduction suggests that the definition of songster expands throughout the century, but Moore's Melodies were printed in the early years of the century, when the definition of songster is more restricted. McCleave's chapter is fascinating, providing wonderful detail about Moore's working method, the relationships between Moore and his publishers and engravers...