The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian London
Oskar Cox Jensen
Cambridge University Press 2021
Hb, 280pp, £75, ISBN 97811088350560
If you want to reach out to a crowd, the simplest, most direct way is to sing. Before the music industry as we know it, in the rowdy capital of 1714-1901, the street was the ballad singer’s stage. Anyone with the skills could be one; they frequently came from the bottom of society’s pile. Their precarious existence was as reliant on pitch, stagecraft, and an ear for the popular as it was on musical talent. Yet, as Oskar Cox Jensen explores, they acted as both entertainment and a news channel, bringing together the sensations of Grub Street with those of the music hall. As such, they could wield powerful influence.
In July 1815, 22-year-old housemaid Eliza Fenning was
hanged for attempting to murder her employers with arsenic-laced dumplings. Her arrest and trial were a sensation, the proceedings running roughly concurrent with the Hundred Days (following Napoleon’s return from exile) and providing as much coverage from pamphleteers – an estimated 10,000 attended her funeral, convinced of her innocence. Two weeks later, another 22-year-old domestic, Mary Bailey, was found dead. She had taken her own life – cutting her throat with a carving knife – after hearing a ballad singer’s mournful rendition of Eliza Fenning’s plight.
Politicians hired ballad singers to praise candidates and whip up crowds – though their intentions could easily be foiled by the ensuing hullaballoo. The Spectator relates uproar at the General Election hustings in Covent Garden on 9 July 1852, whence came the ballad “Lord Viscount Maidstone’s Address”, a proto- Private Eye satirical attack on the hopeless Tory nominee.
Or they could be political in themselves. “The Storm” was a Napoleonic broadside regularly performed by Joseph Johnson at Tower Hill in the 1820s. Cutting an extraordinary figure, the tall, black ex-merchant seaman sang with a model of a brig, complete with sails, hull and rigging, perched jauntily on top of his head. Though the lyrics spoke of current affairs, the tune was refashioned from one that had caught the ear of Handel at least 80 years previously, which he set as the sixth of his English Songs, “The Sailor’s Complaint”. Johnson’s rendering was restyled by the ballad printers of Seven Dials in Covent Garden, the Tin Pan Alley of Georgian London. As ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax put it, the song “shouts across a social space and across human time as well.”
This book comes with recordings of the songs at www.cambridge.org/ballads and illustrations from the world of Hogarth, Mayhew and Dickens. My only complaint is that its price will probably keep it within academic circles, when this is a ballad so many music fans would have liked to hear.
Cathi Unsworth
★★★★