Abstract
It is no coincidence that they named the Wars after him. Few have ever loomed as large as Napoleon; in the imaginations of the inhabitants of the British Isles, only Hitler (perhaps) and that aggregated individual known as ‘the Pope’ have figured with comparable prominence. No historical figure has taken up so many pages of English-language publications — memoirs, monographs, novels, poems, songs. This introduction is itself written amidst the throes of anniversary, two hundred years on from the Hundred Days. Yet the eloquence of the caricatures once again hanging in the British Museum, in which the big-hatted, small-bodied creation of Gillray and the demonic imagery of Rowlandson figure so affectively, threatens to enshrine one collective memory of Napoleon whilst obliterating all others.1 Indeed, the laudable historical turn to material and visual culture has in the case of Napoleon led to a general focus on officially endorsed propaganda, at the expense of less accessible subaltern memories often preserved, if at all, in a more orally located culture.2 The historical reality is that across the British Isles, both during and especially after the Napoleonic Wars, the eponymous Bonaparte was better loved and respected by the general populace than Wellington, Pitt, or the Prince Regent. Nowhere was this sentiment more strongly expressed, nor more remorselessly challenged, than in the realm of popular song.
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Notes
Not, I should point out, a fault of the British Museum’s commendably evenhanded exhibition as a whole. See Tim Clayton and Sheila O’Connell, Bonaparte and the British: Prints and Satire in the Age of Napoleon (2015).
I am drawing here on ideas of collective memory and official history discussed in the introduction to Alan Forrest et al. (eds), War Memories: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture (Basingstoke, 2012), 16–17; ideas that will be developed further in Chapter 4. I do not wish to insist on any sort of rigid oral/print binary, however, when it comes to song.
Jeffrey N. Cox, Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge, 2014), 160.
Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, 2010), 14.
Kate Horgan, The Politics of Songs in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1723–1795 (2014), 3.
Robert Walser, ‘Popular Music Analysis: Ten Apothegms and Four Instances’, in Allan Moore (ed.), Analysing Popular Music (Cambridge, 2003), 16–38, 22.
‘To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing.’ Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening (Hanover, N.H., 1998), 9.
E.g. Katherine Hambridge, ‘Staging Singing in the Theater of War (Berlin, 1805)’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 68 (2015): 39–98.
As proposed in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (Revised edn, Yale, 2009).
Jane F. Fulcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music (Oxford, 2011), 6–7.
John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2006), 15.
In the British context, a brief selection might include, among others: Alun Howkins and C.I. Dyck, ‘“The Time’s Alteration”: Popular Ballads, Rural Radicalism and William Cobbett’, History Workshop 23 (1987): 20–38.
C.I. Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge, 1992).
James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994)
Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998).
Roy Porter, cited by John Brewer in David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (1989), 9.
Roy Palmer, The Sound of History: Songs and Social Comment (Oxford, 1988)
Katy Barclay, ‘Composing the Self: Gender, Subjectivity and Scottish Balladry’, Cultural and Social History 7 (2010): 337–353
Marcello Sorce Keller, ‘Why Is Music so Ideological, and Why Do Totalitarian States Take It so Seriously? A Personal View from History and the Social Sciences’, Journal of Musicological Research 26 (2007): 91–122.
Michael Bywater, ‘Performing Spaces: Street Music and Public Territory’, Twentieth-Century Music 3 (2007): 97–120.
The comment comes from David Hopkin, Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 2012).
Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2010).
Rosa Salzberg and Massimo Rospocher, ‘Street Singers in Italian Renaissance Urban Culture and Communication’, Cultural and Social History 9 (2012): 9–26.
Colin Neilands, ‘Irish Broadside Ballads: Performers and Performances’, Folk Music Journal 6 (1991): 209–222.
Bernard Ó Madagáin, ‘Functions of Irish Song in the Nineteenth Century’, Béaloideas 53 (1985): 130–216.
In all fairness, these are often reviews or introductions, e.g. Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (eds), Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2009), 18, 29.
Andrew Noble’s introduction in John Kirk et al. (eds), United Islands? The Language of Resistance (2012), 3, 20.
Michael S.C. Smith, ‘Review Article: The French Revolution, British Cultural Politics, and Recent Scholarship across the Disciplines’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 63 (2000): 407–428. One full-length article that fails to deliver is.
Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering, ‘“Songs for the Millions”: Chartist Music and Popular Aural Tradition’, Labour History Review 74 (2009): 44–63.
Helen Burke, ‘The Revolutionary Prelude: The Dublin Stage in the Late 1770s and Early 1780s’, Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 7–18.
Michael T. Davis, ‘“An Evening of Pleasure Rather than Business”: Songs, Subversion and Radical Sub-Culture in the 1790s’, Journal for the Study of British Cultures 12 (2005): 119.
Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010).
Mark Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven, 1981).
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Revised edn, 1991), 145, 444, 611, 616, 782, 787–788.
Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington, 1968), 275.
E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1991), 9.
Matthew Johnson, ‘Muffling Inclusiveness: Some Notes towards an Archaeology of the British’, in Susan Lawrence (ed.), Archaeologies of the British: Explorations of identity in Great Britain and Its Colonies 1600–1945 (2003), 17–30, 21.
Catriona Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2013), 3, 4, 163, 6–7.
J.E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997).
Robin Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 1748–1815 (2000).
Jennifer Mori, ‘Languages of Loyalism: Patriotism, Nationhood and the State in the 1790s’, English Historical Review 118 (2003): 33–58.
Many Protestant Britons even volunteered to serve in the Spanish forces. See Graciela Iglesias Rogers, British Liberators in the Age of Napoleon: Volunteering under the Spanish Flag in the Peninsular War (2013).
Katrina Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815 (Oxford, 2009), 10–11.
Oskar Cox Jensen, ‘The Travels of John Magee: Tracing the Geographies of Britain’s Itinerant Print-Sellers, 1789–1815’, Journal of Cultural and Social History 11 (2014): 195–216.
J.G.A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands (Cambridge, 2006), 29.
Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (Yale, 2004), 7.
Christina Parolin, Radical Spaces: Venues of Popular Politics in London, 1790-c.1845 (Canberra, 2010), esp. 9–10.
E.g. (among others) Alan Forrest et al. (eds), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820 (Basingstoke, 2009).
Jenny Uglow, In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815 (2014).
Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism’, English Historical Review 110 (1995): 65.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), xiii.
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (1755), vol. 2, 201.
George Gregory, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vols (1806), vol. 1, 197.
Roy Palmer (ed.), The Rambling Soldier (2nd edn, Gloucester, 1985), 177–178; Idem (ed.), A Touch on the Times: Songs of Social Change, 1770–1914 (Harmondsworth, 1974), 299.
Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (1841, repr. Oxford, 1984), 237.
Tim Harris, ‘Problematising Popular Culture’, in Tim Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 1995), 1–27.
Pierce Egan, Life in London, or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. (2nd edn, c. 1870).
Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’, 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes, 1985), xii.
Michael Pickering, ‘The Study of Vernacular Song in England’, Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 33 (1988): 95–104.
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Jensen, O.C. (2015). Introduction. In: Napoleon and British Song, 1797–1822. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137555380_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137555380_1
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