- The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878–1903
This volume is the second in a projected series of three that examines folksong collecting from 1820 to 1914. The Late Victorian Folksong Revival centers on three collectors active between 1878 and 1903: Sabine Baring-Gould, Frank Kidson, and Lucy Broadwood. It aims to present in encyclopedic detail the late-Victorian collection of vernacular music (a term E. David Gregory uses to include folksong, national song, broadside ballads, older composed tunes still popular in the oral tradition, and the like—anything not contemporaneously produced as concert music, drawing room music, or popular music). A deeper reading, however, reveals that Gregory has simply presented lists of data framed by more lists of contextual events; there is neither considered explanation of the importance of the data within these lists, nor an overarching narrative for the period under study, nor a new contribution to the debates about Victorian folksong collecting that started in the second half of the twentieth century.
This is a pity, because Gregory’s readers have been here before: these are criticisms noted in Derek Scott’s excellent review of the series’ first volume, Victorian Songhunters: The Recovery and Editing of English Vernacular Ballads and Folk Lyrics, 1820– 1883 (2006) in Music & Letters 88.4 (2007). Scott presented a balanced critique of Gregory’s study, with many suggestions for improvement. The first two chapters of The Late Victorian Folksong Revival seem to be an unacknowledged (and unconvincing) response to Scott’s review, arguing with it without incorporating any of Scott’s suggestions.
Gregory’s apparatus is relatively straightforward. He breaks his period into two smaller units (from 1878 to 1889 and from 1890 to 1903), each of which has a contextual introduction, chapters discussing minor song collectors, and detailed studies of Baring-Gould, Kidson, and Broadwood. Gregory traces the shift in folksong collecting from a predominantly text-centered movement to one preserving both texts and music. In the discussions of each compilation, such as Marianne Harriet Mason’s Nursery Rhymes and [End Page 543] Country Songs (1878), Gregory presents brief biographical background on the compiler or compilers, describes the contents of the compilation by presenting typical examples from the volume (in this case, eight tunes and texts out of fifty-seven), notes where the items had been published before (primarily in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections), and discusses the significance of the collection (in this case, that it “drew exclusively upon oral tradition, and it respected folksongs as holistic fusions of text and melody” [67]).
The problems with The Late Victorian Folksong Revival are many and varied. First, there is a basic difficulty with the explanation of its ideology: Gregory continually refers to the late-twentieth-century folksong debates started by Dave Harker and Georgina Boyes, but always in a derisive manner, and he never fully explains his objections to them. Unless intimately familiar with Harker and Boyes and the discussions their work engendered, most readers will not understand Gregory’s revisionist take on the subject. Second, much of Gregory’s secondary source material is at least twenty years old. This is particularly egregious within his framing contextual chapters (3 and 9), which present a reading of political, social, artistic, and musical trends of the era relevant to the middle classes, but not connected explicitly with his book’s subject. His lack of currency will likely alienate readers familiar with the recent renaissance in late-nineteenth-century British cultural studies.
Perhaps the most conspicuous problem with The Late Victorian Folksong Revival, however, is Gregory’s treatment of music. Gregory uses music only as examples of typical tunes collected by his compilers, without substantive comment. Even so, the volume might have been useful as a compendium, since a number of the 311 examples are from obscure sources. Yet Gregory does not faithfully reproduce what his collectors published. Many of his examples were printed with piano harmonizations and expression marks. While their removal might be warranted...