Street Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century: Producers, Sellers, Consumers ed. by David Atkinson, Steve Roud (review)

The editors of this important collection of essays are both well established in the field of street literature and folklore history. They have brought together an impressive range of contributors, all of whom bring their own insights into this rather amorphous field of study. At one time, street literature would hardly have been regarded as a field worthy of scholarly attention. Most literary scholars, bibliographers, and librarians regarded chapbooks, ballads, song-sheets, and broadsides with disdain. In many libraries (with some notable exceptions) such apparently ephemeral material is not even catalogued, being kept in boxes of miscellaneous items or in bound volumes of pamphlets and small booklets. This is changing, and scholars have in recent decades begun to take serious notice of street literature, approaching it from various angles: book history, cultural history, and literary studies, as well as folklore and, where appropriate, traditional music. This variety of approaches is entirely appropriate for such a diverse range of publications—‘street literature’ being a handy catch-all frame of reference—and is reflected in this collection of essays.

Previous publications about street literature have tended to concentrate on the eighteenth century, and even earlier, but the focus of this volume is firmly on the ‘long nineteenth century’, defined by the editors as ‘roughly, the end of the eighteenth century up until the First World War’ (p. xiv). The introductory matter, more than sixty pages of it, is very helpful. A short first section defines the terminology of street literature and lists relevant websites and other resources. There follows a short preface, exploring more fully the definition of street literature. The editors then provide a thorough introduction to the field: David Atkinson outlines street literature to 1774 and Steve Roud covers, in more depth, the nineteenth century, ranging widely through contemporary viewpoints and subsequent scholarship, the street literature trade (its scale and geography), printers and print technology, and the variety of types of street literature. The introductory essay makes many useful points about aspects of street literature and, importantly, about the trade in this diverse material. For example: ‘The street literature trade was not an unchanging monolithic structure in the nineteenth century, nor did it function in a cultural vacuum. This was a period of rapid change in society in general and in the print trade in particular’ (p. 26). This statement forms a kind of rubric for the whole collection. The editors and their contributors place street literature firmly in its cultural context as well as discussing the trade itself (production, distribution, and ‘consumption’). This dual focus is a great strength of the volume.

The Introduction also explains that the nineteenth century may conveniently be divided into three main phases: 1800–1830 (the era of the prolific, mostly London-based, broadside printers such as Catnach and Pitts), the 1830s–60s (when the trade began to flourish in provincial towns but also had to face competition from new media, including cheap fiction published in parts and popular magazines), and the last third of the century, when technological change led to reduced prices and an even broader range of popular print accessible to all but the very poorest classes.

The topics of the essays in this volume, and their authors, are well chosen and complement each other effectively—not always the case in edited collections. David Stoker sets the scene with an informative essay on the dominance of London producers of street literature during the eighteenth century, notably by the Dicey/Marshall partnership and John Pitts. However, towards the end of the century there was growing competition from provincial printers who produced chapbooks and suchlike alongside jobbing printing. Moving into the nineteenth century, Isabel Corfe and Vic Gammon make good use of tantalizingly sparse evidence in their entertaining essays on contemporary accounts of the ballad trade and the sellers...