Introduction

Abstract

This book is an attempt to claim for the popular ballads of the Victorian period a place in the mainstream of the great ballad tradition. I do not mean by this that I have sought out the last rags of orally-transmitted rural balladry which survived in the nineteenth century, nor that I have pursued ancient tunes and texts into the unlikely corners which were their last resting-places after they had died out of the popular memory. Far from it; for while the remnants of the ancient conventions of ballad singing did undoubtedly survive into the Victorian period, and beyond it, they were not the most common nor, I would argue, the best folksong and popular poetry it produced. The great urban communities of the nineteenth century did not know them; but these were not a people without a culture, and the habit of singing and of verse did not die out with the old songs. The remnants of the old ballads were submerged, and subsumed, in a new upsurge of poetry and song which expresses the feeling and is the creation of the Victorian people. It is this huge, unexplored though often denigrated body of verse which I wish to establish as the Victorian popular ballad. Departing from the critical practice of seeking genuine folk poetry only in rural, or at the least in closed, tightly-knit industrial communities, I have sought out that poetry of the Victorian period which had an audience of tens of thousands, in concert rooms, village halls and the streets of London, and examined it to see whether that may not be the ‘folk-song’ of the nineteenth century.