The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800 9780199600809, 0199600805

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The Oxford Handbook of

BRITISH POETRY, 1660–​1 800

 

 

The Oxford Handbook of

BRITISH POETRY, 1660–​1 800 Edited by

JAC K  LY N C H

1

 

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2016 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944778 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​960080–​9 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

 

Contents

List of Illustrations  Notes on Contributors  Introduction 

ix xi xix

PA RT I   P OE M S I N S O C IA L SE T T I N G S 1. Poems on the Streets  William Donaldson

3

2. Poems on the Stage  Cynthia Wall

23

3. Poems in Print  James McLaverty

40

4. Poems in Magazines  Jennifer Batt

55

5. Poems in the Novel  Thomas Keymer

72

6. Poems in the Nursery  Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul

88

7. Poems in the Lecture Hall  Richard Terry

108

PA RT I I   P OE T IC I DE N T I T I E S 8. The Poet as Clubman  Moyra Haslett

127

9. The Poet as Professional  Brean Hammond

144

 

vi   Contents

10. The Poet as Laborer  Bridget Keegan

162

11. The Poet as Teacher  Lorna Clymer

179

12. The Poet as Man of Feeling  Rivka Swenson

195

13. The Poet as Genius  Marshall Brown

210

14. The Poet as Fraud  Nick Groom

227

15. The Poet as Poetess  Isobel Grundy

247

PA RT I I I   P OE T IC SU B J E C T S 16. Poems on Poetry  David F. Venturo

269

17. Poems on Politics  Christine Gerrard

286

18. Poems on Nation and Empire  Leith Davis

303

19. Poems on Science and Philosophy  Pat Rogers

320

20. Poems on Place  Donna Landry

335

21. Poems on the Sexes  Catherine Ingrassia

356

PA RT I V   P OE T IC  F OR M 22. Couplets  J. Paul Hunter

373

 

Contents   vii

23. Blank Verse  Conrad Brunström

386

24. Stanzas  Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

405

25. Free Verse and Prose Poetry  Richard Bradford

422

PA RT V   P OE T IC  G E N R E S 26. Pastoral  David Hill Radcliffe

441

27. Georgic  David Fairer

457

28. Epic  Anna M. Foy

473

29. Satire  Ashley Marshall

495

30. Ode  Sandro Jung

510

31. Elegy  James D. Garrison

528

32. Ballad  Ruth Perry

547

33. Devotional Poetry  Emma Mason

563

34. Lyric  Jennifer Keith

579

35. Translation  Tanya Caldwell

596

 

viii   Contents

PA RT V I   P OE T IC DE V IC E S 36. Imagery  Timothy Erwin

617

37. Metaphor  Blanford Parker

632

38. Allusion  Marcus Walsh

649

39. Irony  Jack Lynch

668

PA RT V I I   C R I T IC I SM 40. Scholarship  Adam Rounce

685

41. Histories  Philip Smallwood

701

42. Reviews  Antonia Forster

716

43. Honors  Daniel J. Ennis

732

Index 

747

 

List of Illustrations

6.1 The rope dancer card from Jane Johnson, Manuscript Nursery Library, Elisabeth Ball Collection. Reproduced by permission of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. 

97

6.2 The trumpeter. Silvia Cole Ms., pp. 38–​9. Reproduced courtesy of the Osborne Collection, Toronto Public Library. 

101

6.3 Silvia in the street. Silvia Cole Ms., pp. 40–​1. Reproduced by permission of the Toronto Public Library, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. 

101

6.4 Dick criticizes his friend’s delivery. Dorothy Kilner, Poems (London, 1785), p. 66. Reproduced by permission of the Toronto Public Library, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. 

104

12.1 A literalized “sonnet lady,” from Charles Sorel, The Extravagant Shepherd; or the History of the Shepherd Lysis, trans. John Davies (London, 1654). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

199

 

 

Notes on Contributors

Jennifer Batt is Lecturer in Eighteenth-​Century English Literature at the University of Bristol, and was formerly Postdoctoral Project Coordinator of the Digital Miscellanies Index project (http://​digitalmiscellaniesindex.org) at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. She has published on laboring-​class poetry and eighteenth-​century miscellany culture, and her essay on eighteenth-​century lyric verse won the Review of English Studies essay prize in 2010. She is completing a monograph on the iconic laboring-​class poet, Stephen Duck. Richard Bradford is Research Professor of English at Ulster University. He has published twenty-​seven books. He recently published Is Shakespeare Any Good? And Other Questions on How We Evaluate Literature (Wiley-​Blackwell, 2015), along with The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs (Frances Lincoln, 2015). Marshall Brown is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington and editor of Modern Language Quarterly. His books include The Shape of German Romanticism (Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), Preromanticism (Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions (Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), The Gothic Text (Stanford Univ. Press, 2004), “The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul”: Essays on Music and Poetry (Univ. of Washington Press, 2010), and, as editor, the Romanticism volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000). Conrad Brunström is Lecturer in English at Maynooth University. He has published two monographs on the poetry of William Cowper (2004) and the oratory of Thomas Sheridan (2011). He has also published and presented papers internationally on topics as diverse as religious literature, poetic form, theater history, political rhetoric, and Queer Studies and on authors as varied as Samuel Johnson, James Beattie, Charles Churchill, Matthew Prior, and Frances Burney. He is researching Irish and Canadian nationalisms and the role of speech-​ making in the formation of a sense of collective political identity. Tanya Caldwell is Professor of English and Associate Graduate Director at Georgia State University. She has published widely on various topics across the eighteenth century. Her most significant works on the classics in translation include Time to Begin Anew: Dryden’s Georgics and Aeneis (Bucknell Univ. Press, 2000) and Virgil Made English: The Decline of Classical Authority (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Her most recent work focuses on drama. She has published the anthology Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Broadview, 2011) and is working on a biography of Hannah Cowley. Lorna Clymer is Professor of English, Emerita, California State University, Bakersfield. She is an independent scholar in Washington, D.C. Leith Davis, Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University in Greater Vancouver, is author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation

 

xii   Notes on Contributors (Stanford Univ. Press, 1998)  and Music, Postcolonialism and Gender:  The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1725–​1875 (Notre Dame Univ. Press, 2005), as well as co-​editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004) and Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate, 2012). Her current book project examines the articulation of cultural memory through print culture in the early eighteenth century. She serves as the Director of Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Scottish Studies. William Donaldson is author of numerous books on Scottish literature and music, including Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland (Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1986), The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1988), and The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society (Tuckwell, 2000). He worked for many years in the Open University, and now teaches in the Literature Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is now engaged in two substantial projects: a history of Scottish song and its links with the wider definition of Scottish culture, and a variorum online edition of ceol mor, the classical music of the Highland bagpipe. Rodney Stenning Edgecombe lectures in English literature at the University of Cape Town, and holds one of its Distinguished Teacher Awards. He took his MA with distinction at Rhodes University, where he won the Royal Society of St. George Prize for English, and his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded the Members’ English Prize, 1978/​79. He has published 11 books—​the most recent being on Thomas Hood—​and 400 articles on topics that range from Shakespeare to nineteenth-​century ballet and opera. Daniel J. Ennis serves as Dean of the Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts at Coastal Carolina University. He is the author of Enter the Press-​Gang:  Representations of Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-​Century British Literature (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2002) and edited, with Judith B. Slagle, a collection entitled Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-​ Raisers and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-​Century London Stage (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2007). He also edited, with Jack DeRochi, the collection Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context (Bucknell Univ. Press, 2013). He has published essays on John Dryden, Christopher Smart, and Lord Byron among others. Timothy Erwin, Professor of English and former Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, works on the interdisciplinary relations of literature and art and is the author of Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-​Century British Culture (Bucknell Univ. Press, 2015). David Fairer is Professor of Eighteenth-​Century English Literature at the University of Leeds. His most recent book, Organising Poetry:  The Coleridge Circle 1790–​1798 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), traces poetry’s development during the 1790s, building on the concerns of his previous comprehensive study, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–​1789 (Longman, 2003). He is also the author of Pope’s Imagination (Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), The Poetry of Alexander Pope (Penguin, 1989), and editor of Pope: New Contexts (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). He has edited The Correspondence of Thomas Warton (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995) and the first complete printing of Warton’s History of English Poetry (Routledge, 1998). With Christine Gerrard he has edited Eighteenth-​Century Poetry:  An Annotated Anthology (Wiley-​Blackwell, 3rd ed. 2015). His reading of the ecological potential of georgic

 

Notes on Contributors    xiii writing has been developed in a recent article, “ ‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’: The World of Eco-​Georgic.” Antonia Forster is Professor of English at the University of Akron. Her publications include an edition of Taming of the Shrew for Sourcebooks in 2008, Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749–​1774 (Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1990) and Index to Book Reviews in England, 1775–​1800 (British Library, 1997). Vol. 1 (1770–​1799) of The English Novel, 1770–​ 1829:  A  Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (with James Raven) was published by Oxford University Press in 2000. Anna M. Foy is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She is at work on a book examining Restoration and eighteenth-​century conceptions of poetry’s civic utility. James D. Garrison is the author of A Dangerous Liberty: Translating Gray’s Elegy (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2009). Christine Gerrard is Professor of English at Oxford University and the Barbara Scott Fellow in English at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford. She has recently edited the first volume of The Complete Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), and has co-​edited with David Fairer Eighteenth-​Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Wiley-​ Blackwell, 3rd ed., 2015). She is working on a study of eighteenth-​century women poets. Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter. He is a leading authority on Percy’s Reliques (the subject of his first monograph, published by Clarendon Press in 1999) and Thomas Chatterton, on whom he has written many articles and essays. Among his books are The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (Picador, 2002), The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), and The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year (Atlantic, 2013), and he has edited Chatterton’s poetry (Cyder Press, 2003), as well as Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’s Monk (Oxford World’s Classics, 2014 and 2016, respectively). Isobel Grundy, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, was until 2003 Henry Marshall Tory Professor in that university’s Department of English. She holds a DPhil from Oxford University (St. Anne’s College) and taught at Queen Mary, London University, 1971–​90. She is author of Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), and (with Virginia Blain and Patricia Clements) The Feminist Companion to Literature in English:  Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (Yale Univ. Press, 1990). She has edited various texts by Montagu, and Secresy (1795) by Eliza Fenwick. She is a Patron of Chawton House Library, and co-​editor (with Susan Brown and Patricia Clements) of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, http://​orlando.cambridge.org. Brean Hammond is Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of many books and articles ranging from Shakespeare’s period to the Romantics, as well as on modern theater. His best-​known publications are Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–​1740: “Hackney for Bread” (Clarendon Press, 1997),

 

xiv   Notes on Contributors and an edition of Shakespeare’s “lost play,” Double Falsehood (Methuen, 2010), for the Arden Shakespeare. Moyra Haslett is Professor in Eighteenth-​Century and Romantic Literature in the School of English, Queen’s University Belfast. Among her publications is a book-​length study of ideas of community and conversation in the eighteenth century, Pope to Burney, Scriblerians to Bluestockings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and several essays on poetry and club culture: “Becoming Bluestockings: Contextualising Hannah More’s ‘The Bas Bleu,’ ” and “Swift and Conversational Culture.” A  recent essay on the culture of song in early eighteenth-​ century Dublin is also forthcoming: “Singing at the Club: Songs on the Wood’s Halfpence Affair, Dublin 1724–​25.” J. Paul Hunter has taught at Williams, Emory, Rochester, and Virginia, and he is now Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His Before Novels (Norton, 1990) won the Gottschalk Prize, and he has published widely on the British novel and (more recently) on early modern and eighteenth-​century poetry. He is the longtime author of The Norton Introduction to Poetry, now in its 9th edition. Andrea Immel is the Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library in the Princeton University Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. She contributed chapters to the fifth and sixth volumes of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009) and the Oxford Companion to the History of the Book (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010). Immel was also a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006) and co-​editor of four volumes: (with M. Witmore) Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2006); (with E. Goodenough) Under Fire: Childhood in Shadow of War (Wayne State Univ. Press, 2008); (with M. O. Grenby) The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009); and (with Emer O’Sullivan) Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children (forthcoming). Her most recent publication was a scholarly facsimile edition of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-​Book (Cotsen Occasional Press, 2013), the first collection of English nursery rhymes. Catherine Ingrassia is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her publications on the literature and culture of the eighteenth century include Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Eighteenth-​Century Culture (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), Anti-​Pamela and Shamela (editor, Broadview, 2004), and British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century (co-​editor, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2009). She is a past editor of Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture, and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015). Sandro Jung is Director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Ghent University, President of the East-​Central American Society for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, and EURIAS Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Advanced Studies. He is the author, among other publications, of David Mallet, Anglo-​Scot: Poetry, Politics, and Patronage in the Age of Union (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2008), The Fragmentary Poetic: Eighteenth-​ Century Uses of an Experimental Mode (Lehigh Univ. Press, 2009), and James Thomson’s “The Seasons,” Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730–​1842 (Lehigh Univ. Press, 2015). He edited the English Association’s 2013 Essays and Studies volume on British Literature and

 

Notes on Contributors    xv Print Culture, and co-​edited the 2015 number of Yearbook of English Studies on the History of the Book. Bridget Keegan is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at Creighton University. She is the author of British Labouring-​Class Nature Poetry, 1730–​1837 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and has published numerous articles on laboring-​ class writing, and edited several collections of essays devoted to the topic. She also served as an editor for the anthologies Eighteenth-​Century English Labouring-​Class Poets (Pickering & Chatto, 2003) and Nineteenth-​Century English Labouring-​Class Poets (Pickering & Chatto, 2006). With John Goodridge she is editing the forthcoming Cambridge History of British Working-​Class Literature. Jennifer Keith is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has edited, with Claudia Thomas Kairoff, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, comprising Volume 1: Early Manuscript Books and Volume 2: Later Collections, Print and Manuscript (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016). The Anne Finch Digital Archive http://​library.uncg.edu/​dp/​annefinch provides selected digitized manuscript and print images and contexts that complement the scholarly edition. Keith is also author of Poetry and the Feminine from Behn to Cowper (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2005) and essays on eighteenth-​century poetry and poetics. Thomas Keymer is University Professor and Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he directs the university’s Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture. His publications include Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-​Century Reader (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), Pamela in the Marketplace:  Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005, with Peter Sabor), and numerous edited volumes. He is completing Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–​1830 for Oxford Univ. Press’s Clarendon Lectures in English series. Donna Landry is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Kent, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. She is the author of The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-​ Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–​1796 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990; 2005)  and The Invention of the Countryside:  Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–​1831 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), and the co-​editor of The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–​1850, with Gerald MacLean and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999; 2006). Her most recent book is Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2009). Landry is a founder-​member of the Evliya Çelebi Way Project, a team of scholars and equestrians who rode across western Anatolia on horseback following the great Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi, establishing a UNESCO Cultural Route. Project website:  http://​www.kent.ac.uk/​ english/​evliya/​index.html Jack Lynch is Professor of English at Rutgers University–​Newark, and author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) and Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Ashgate, 2008). With John T. Scanlan he edits The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual.

 

xvi   Notes on Contributors James McLaverty is Emeritus Professor of Textual Criticism at Keele University. He is the author of Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) and of essays on Swift, Pope, Johnson, and the theory of textual criticism. He serves as one of the general editors of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. Ashley Marshall is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–​1770 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2013) and of Swift and History: Politics and the English Past (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), as well as articles in Modern Philology, Review of English Studies, The Library, Huntington Library Quarterly, Philological Quarterly, Eighteenth-​Century Life, Swift Studies, and other journals. Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Recent publications include Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2014), Elizabeth Jennings:  The Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012), and The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). She is a co-​editor of On Human Flourishing: A Poetry Anthology (McFarland, 2015), The Oxford Handbook to the Reception History of the Bible (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), and The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (Blackwell, 2009). With Mark Knight, she edits Bloomsbury’s series New Directions in Religion and Literature. Blanford Parker is Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University. He previously taught at the CUNY Graduate Center and College of Staten Island and New York University. His book, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998) was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, Review of English Studies, Eighteenth-​Century Studies, The Age of Johnson, Philological Quarterly, and elsewhere. Lissa Paul is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Her most recent monograph, The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century, was published in 2011. She is also an Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (Norton, 2005) and co-​editor (with Philip Nel) of Keywords for Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2011). Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War (co-​edited with Rosemary Rose Johnston and Emma Short) is in press with Routledge. Her current work in progress, a biography, Hunting for Mrs. Fenwick (1766–​1840): An Eighteenth-​Century Life for the Twenty-​First Century, is to be published by the University of Toronto Press. Ruth Perry was past President of the American Society for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, a founder of the Boston Graduate Consortium of Women’s Studies, and founding Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at MIT, where she is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities. Her most recent monograph is Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–​1818 (Cambridge Univ. Press) and her most recent edited volume an edition of Charlotte Lennox’s Henrietta (1758) co-​edited with Susan Carlile for the University of Kentucky Press. She is writing a biography of Anna Gordon Brown, an eighteenth-​century Scotswoman who preserved our finest ballads. She is herself a folksinger and teaches courses on folk music. David Hill Radcliffe is Professor of English and co-​director of the Center for Applied Technologies at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Forms of Reflection (Johns Hopkins Univ.

 

Notes on Contributors    xvii Press, 1993) and Edmund Spenser: A Reception History (Camden House, 1996) and the editor of two digital archives, Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry, 1579–​1830 (2006) and Lord Byron and His Times (2008–​). He is the technical editor for The Thomas L. Gravell Watermark Archive (1996–​) and the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (2014). Pat Rogers is Distinguished University Professor and DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts, University of South Florida, and the author of books and editions relating to Pope, Johnson, Boswell, Swift, Austen, Defoe, Fielding, Reynolds, Thackeray, and others. His recent work includes The Life and Times of Thomas, Lord Coningsby: The Whig Hangman and his Victims (Continuum, 2011–​13) and Documenting Eighteenth-​Century Satire:  Pope, Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot in Historical Context (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). He is now completing, with Paul Baines, A Catalogue of the Publications of Edmund Curll, 1706–​1747. He has written on topics ranging from the beginnings of weight-​watching and the evolution of draughts (checkers) to gout, the quest for the longitude, and the history of surveying. Adam Rounce is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on various seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century writers, including Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Johnson. His monograph on literary culture and lack of success in the long eighteenth century, Fame and Failure, 1720–​1800: The Unfulfilled Literary Life, was published by Cambridge Univ. Press in 2013. Philip Smallwood is Emeritus Professor of English at Birmingham City University and Visiting Fellow in the School of Humanities at Bristol University. He has written widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-​century literary criticism and is the author of monographs on Pope and on Johnson. Smallwood is the editor of several volumes of collected essays and is co-​editor (with Greg Clingham) of Samuel Johnson After 300 Years (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009). He is also co-​editor of the previously unpublished literary, critical, and cultural manuscripts of the British philosopher of history, R. G. Collingwood (2005). Smallwood’s latest monograph, Critical Occasions, was published by AMS Press in 2011, and his hybrid anthology of critical mockery, Ridiculous Critics (with Min Wild), was published by Bucknell Univ. Press in 2014. Rivka Swenson is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Recent and forthcoming work includes Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-​ Scottish Literature, 1660–​1832 (Bucknell), essays for The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789, The Cambridge Companion to “Robinson Crusoe,” and the MLA volume on Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding, as well as a Broadview Press edition of The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (co-​edited with John Richetti) and a guest-​edited special issue of The Eighteenth ​Century: Theory and Interpretation (co-​ edited with Manushag N. Powell) on “Sensational Subjects.” Richard Terry is Professor of Eighteenth-​Century English Literature at Northumbria University, having worked for many years previously at the University of Sunderland. He has written numerous articles on aspects of eighteenth-​century literature. His monograph Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–​1781 was published by Oxford Univ. Press in 2001. His most recent book is The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). David F. Venturo, Professor of English at The College of New Jersey, author of Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of Samuel Johnson (Univ. of Delaware Press, 1999), and editor of The

 

xviii   Notes on Contributors School of the Eucharist . . . With a Preface Concerning the Testimony of Miracles (AMS Press, 2007), writes about and teaches British literature, 1600–​1850, poetry, baseball and American culture, and the Beatles and popular culture. An editor of ECCB: The Eighteenth-​Century Current Bibliography and The Scriblerian, he is writing a book on epic, mock-​epic, and growing skepticism about heroic ideals in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century literature. Cynthia Wall is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006; Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Award) and The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), as well as the editor of Pope’s Rape of the Lock (Bedford Cultural Editions, 1998), Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin, 2003), and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Norton, 2009). She is also the editor of the forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Drama. Marcus Walsh, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, has published on Christopher Smart, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, and Edmond Malone; on the theory, practice, and history of literary editing; on eighteenth-​century poetry, poetics, and poetic language; and on biblical interpretation and scholarship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He edited two volumes of the Poetical Works of Christopher Smart (Oxford Univ. Press, 1983, 1987), and A Tale of a Tub for the new edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). He is an Associate Editor of the Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010). His monograph Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Editing was published by Cambridge Univ. Press in 1997.

 

Introduction Jack Lynch Eighty years ago Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Thomas Gray were riding high—​ they were the very models of great poets. Through the middle of the twentieth century, from at least the 1930s to the 1960s, the poetry of the eighteenth century was adored by critics, and received not only the tribute of large-​scale scholarly projects—​the Twickenham Edition of Pope, say, and Harold Williams’s edition of Swift’s prose—​but even attention in primary and secondary schools. Anyone with pretensions to education could repeat tags from An Essay on Criticism or An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. For much of their history, though, both before and after this golden age, the poets of the Restoration and eighteenth century have struggled for respectability. Already by the 1750s there were complaints that their poetry was not poetic enough. Joseph Warton’s Essay on Pope (1756), for instance, defined poetry so as to exclude the most famous poet of his own century: “The sublime and the Pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine poesy. What is there sublime or very Pathetic in Pope?” He was willing to grant that “In that species of poetry wherein Pope excelled, he is superior to all mankind,” but could not help adding that “this species of poetry is not the most excellent one of the art.”1 For William Wordsworth a few decades later, the eighteenth century’s problem was “vicious diction.” With his “curiously elaborate” language, Gray had worked “to widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition,” and the result—​not merely for Gray, but for Pope, Johnson, and Cowper as well—​was affectation, and therefore at odds with true poetry.2 Eighty years later still, and the problem was just the opposite—​instead of being too flashily poetic, eighteenth-​century poets were too prosaic. “Though they may write in verse,” Matthew Arnold declared in 1880, “though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose.”3 A Handbook of British Poetry, 1660–​1800 takes for granted that Dryden, Swift, Pope, Gray, and company are very much classics of our poetry, and should be discussed as such. The book is not a chronologically organized literary history, nor an encyclopedia, nor a collection of thematically related essays; rather it is an attempt to provide a systematic overview of the poetry of the age, and to restore it to a position of centrality in modern criticism. This Handbook is concerned with the English-​language poetry of the British Isles during the 1 

Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756), vol. i, p. iv. Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–​1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 749, 764. 3  The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. Robert H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960–​77), vol. ix, p. 181. 2 

 

xx   Introduction “long eighteenth century,” 1660–​1800, though these boundaries are tested on occasion. The focus on Britain does not systematically rule out verse from elsewhere; Latin, French, and Gaelic verse make brief appearances; and the volume inevitably includes glances backward to the 1640s and 1650s, and forward into the 1800s and 1810s. Still, the focus is generally on the period from the Restoration through the end of the eighteenth century, between the age of Sir John Denham, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton in the middle of the seventeenth century and the age of Charlotte Smith, William Blake, and William Wordsworth at the end of the eighteenth. The purpose is not to repeat conventional wisdom, but to survey the current trends in scholarship and, I hope, to set a research agenda. The volume is organized in seven large parts. The first, “Poems in social settings,” considers the sociology of poetic production and reception, from marketplaces and bibliography through education and oral tradition. Our unspoken understanding of eighteenth-​century poetry involves carefully prepared texts of “literary” authors, and our editions strive to make that experience available to us. But in fact eighteenth-​century audiences for poetry—​“readers” is too limiting a term, for even the illiterate encountered poems—​were accustomed to getting their poetry in very different packages. The Handbook therefore opens by looking into some of the places where verse might be encountered: not merely in the clean pages of a Tonson quarto, but also on the streets of Edinburgh, in the pit at Drury Lane, in the cramped type of monthly magazines, and in the middle of novels. This is also the era when vernacular poetry was becoming a mainstay of education, from young children first learning their ABCs through the lecture halls of Dissenting academies and even the universities. Perhaps one reason some later critics have had trouble appreciating eighteenth-​century poetry is that other ages have had narrowly circumscribed conceptions of who could be a poet and what poetry could be about. The eighteenth century helped to create several archetypes of the poet that have since become clichés: the impecunious hack starving in a drafty garret, the rebellious genius rejected by an uncaring critical establishment. But the range of identities open to the eighteenth-​century poet was vast. Poets were reclusive and sociable, wealthy establishment figures and destitute rebels, shrewd entrepreneurs and dreamy flâneurs. They could be teachers and preachers, sentimentalists and geniuses, dukes and milkmaids and slaves. And the poetry they wrote could be about traditionally “poetic” topics like martial valor and lovers’ eyes, but more often it was about Newtonian optics and tariffs, dildos and the reproductive processes of flowering plants. The Handbook’s second part, “Poetic identities,” considers these diverse subject positions open to eighteenth-​century poets—​the poet as clubman, the poet as professional, the poet as laborer—​while part III, “Poetic subjects,” surveys some of the major topics that exercised the minds of eighteenth-​ century poets, including empire, science, and poetry itself. Parts IV through VI—​“Poetic form,” “Poetic genres,” and “Poetic devices”—​tell the stories of various formal features over the course of the long eighteenth century, and give the lie to the notion that eighteenth-​century verse begins and ends with satire in heroic couplets. Formalism has been accused of promoting sterility; late in the twentieth century it became critical code for being hermetically sealed from the outside world. In recent years, though, formalist studies have experienced a rebirth, and there is much talk of “new formalisms.” Poetic forms, after all, carry with them histories and associations, present to every eighteenth-​century poet and reader, and much of the best recent scholarship manages to combine formalism with historical awareness. These chapters are organized around formal, generic, and technical questions, but never lose sight of the social and political meanings of

 

Introduction   xxi various modes of poetic expression—​even pastoral, which may seem on the surface to be a retreat from society, is inevitably engaged with the world. The result is more pages on formal and generic questions than in any book on eighteenth-​century literature in many years. Finally part VII, “Criticism,” treats literary criticism as an integral part of the subject of eighteenth-​century poetry. Eighteenth-​century poets had a genuinely symbiotic relationship with critics: critics responded to poets, but also shaped poetic concerns, and therefore poetic practice. The number of major poets who were also major critics—​Dryden, Johnson, Warton, and others—​is high. During the Restoration and eighteenth century the methods of scholarship were applied to modern, vernacular poetry for the first time; the first histories of English poetry were written, part of what Lawrence Lipking has called “the ordering of the arts”;4 the book review as we know it came into being; and the Oxford Professorship of Poetry and dozens of prizes for poetry came into being. The forty-four contributors to this volume—​senior scholars from the US, UK, Canada, Republic of Ireland, Belgium, and South Africa—​have paid attention to the entire era, from 1660 to 1800, and noted developments over the course of the period. They engage with a mix of canonical and unfamiliar poets and critics, men and women, English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish poets, and so on, and offer a range of specific examples from the poetry of the period. Most important, they have accepted the challenge both to summarize conventional wisdom and to go beyond it. The result is the most comprehensive overview to date of the poetry of the long eighteenth century.

4  See Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-​Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970).

 

 

Pa rt  I

P OE M S I N  S O C IA L SE T T I N G S

 

 

Chapter 1

P OEM S on th e St re ets William Donaldson The class system in England is a byword for its ubiquity, its prescriptive power, and—​to an outsider at least—​its almost bewildering complexity and nuance. No area of life seems untouched by it, least of all “literature,” where rigid divisions into high and low, canonical and noncanonical, have divided the literary sheep from the goats at least since the eighteenth century. It has long been acknowledged that the modern canon—​centering on poetry, fiction, and drama—​is based on a narrow segment of a book market that was itself an elite commodity beyond the reach of most people until at least the early years of the twentieth century—​the culture, in other words, of an elite within an elite.1 This did not mean that ordinary people failed to read, of course; just that most of them had long gotten their recreational reading matter in places other than books, and the mental landscape they occupied by virtue of this fact was a world away from Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. In the centuries following the introduction of printing, the production of cheap reading matter for the general market greatly surpassed the high-​art domain in terms of volume. It has been estimated, for example, that by the dawn of the eighteenth century there may have been more than ten thousand broadside ballads alone in circulation, with numbers of chapbooks and pamphlets probably at least as great again. This merely counts titles: the cumulative print runs must have been enormous. The ability of such popular cultural material to reach its market, carried by a legion of professional ballad-​singers and traveling peddlers, must have been considerably greater than that achievable by booksellers and circulating libraries, a disparity increasing as literacy levels grew. This in turn was only the tip of an encompassing oral culture which must have been very much larger still.

1  It was well into the twentieth century, for example, before most British families could afford to buy even a cheap six-​shilling novel—​then the standard format—​on a regular basis. See Frank Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875–​1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), pp. 405–​8.

 

4   William Donaldson

The General Picture In the eighteenth century, the street was a showground as well as a thoroughfare. On market and fair days, ballad-​sellers and chapbook-​patterers, ubiquitous and mighty-​lunged, made the streets of Britain ring with poetry, most of it sung. Poetry was more frequently encountered on the street corner than in many a drawing room. Yet when we turn to the textbooks for an account of this, we find it strangely absent. In a typical recent example, Christine Gerrard’s Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (2006), we search in vain for a reference to “broadside,” “ballad,” or “chapbook” in the index; the single piece which ostensibly deals with popular culture is devoted to the Gentleman’s Magazine.2 Clearly we need an explanation which might begin to integrate this material more effectively into our existing view of literary history. Popular literature in England lies at the unhallowed crossroads dividing literary studies from folklore and history, and nobody seems quite sure what to do with the body. Folklorists grub about for traces of more prized oral material, while social historians mine the popular press, sometimes rather half-​heartedly, for popular attitudes and political beliefs—​their uncertainty stemming from doubts about whether what the common people thought mattered at all, or whether the content of popular literature genuinely reflected their values and beliefs. Cultural differences within the United Kingdom add a further difficulty. While the Scots have placed popular song near the center of their national canon since at least the earlier years of the eighteenth century, the English have been slow to acknowledge it as a significant medium; the Irish experience has, generally speaking, only recently begun to contribute to wider perspectives as students have looked beyond the popular art-​song of Tom Moore and his followers to the genuine poetry of the street. Meanwhile a great mass of material lies there, undigested, indigestible. The general picture, in terms of form at least, is tolerably clear. The beginning of the eighteenth century marked the high-​water mark—​just as its end marked the virtual demise—​of the classic black-letter broadside, except, perhaps, in Ireland, where it is said to have lingered on for almost another century.3 During the eighteenth century black letter was replaced and the old broadside sheets themselves, which had swelled many a ballad-​seller’s satchel and adorned walls for upward of two centuries, were replaced by smaller-​scale forms such as the song-​slip and the penny garland, in which forms the popular printed tradition descended into the nineteenth century. In England the trade was long dominated by London, and the interlinked Dicey and Cluer families based at the Maiden-​Head in Bow Churchyard and elsewhere in the provinces. Theirs was a highly miscellaneous business operating in various sectors of the market, which was probably one secret of their success, and they issued newspapers, prints, and novelties

2  A similar compilation—​John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001)—​barely mentions popular poetry in the sense of the poetry of the streets, the stuff that most people actually read, or had read—​or sung—​to them. 3  Colin Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads: Performers and Performances,” Folk Music Journal, 6, no. 2 (1991), 209–​22, at p. 209.

 

Poems on the Streets    5 as well as broadside ballads.4 The trade was evidently profitable, at least for the printers and booksellers, and it flourished also in a number of provincial centers such as Newcastle-​ upon-​Tyne, York, Tewkesbury, and Bath.5 In a similar manner, the broadside trade in Ireland was not focused exclusively on Dublin and Belfast. A recent study draws our attention to William Goggin, who was active in Limerick during the last third of the eighteenth century. His output included penny histories, manuals, spelling books, primers, prints, and “a large assortment of ballads.”6 We see here, as elsewhere in Britain, a typically regional pattern of distribution, Goggin’s territory—​defined by the routes of the packmen and peddlers who worked with him—​covering the counties of Limerick, Cork, Clare, and Galway. There were, in theory, various checks and restraints on what could be published. In England, every title was supposed to be registered with the Stationers’ Company, which enjoyed a regulatory monopoly from 1557. It is thought, however, that only a small percentage of printed songs were actually recorded, presumably to avoid the fee. Hence, the records of the Company give only a partial view of what was published, by whom, and when. Because of the informal nature of the trade, its many small units of production, and widely distributed geographical base, the popular press in England may have largely escaped regulation and control. The remit of the Stationers’ Company did not extend uniformly throughout the United Kingdom. In Scotland, general oversight of the press was the responsibility of the Privy Council, which in February 1684 forbade the printing of new material without prior license by “the Bishop of the dioces for anything in divinity, the Dean of Facultie for the law, the President of the Coledge of Phisicians for phisick, and the clerks of Councill to licence for anything els.”7 Presumably at least part of this fell void at the Revolution of 1688–​9, when the Episcopalian Church in Scotland was disestablished. Censorship probably continued to be exercised at burghal level. In Aberdeen, for example, there was a printing monopoly in the gift of the town council throughout the eighteenth century. It is not clear how effective this kind of oversight was in regulating the many small presses responsible for the production of popular poetry and song.

Broadside Content Broadside content was extremely diverse, covering a wide range of political and social concerns, with a heavy emphasis on topicality and a range of preoccupations not unlike a modern popular newspaper: “Royalty, Murders, Topical News, Politics, Sport, Humour and Advertisements.”8 Texts were typically printed on one side of a broadside sheet in battered 4 

V. E. Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide (London: Woburn Press, 1977), pp. 108–​22. Leslie Shepard, The History of Street Literature: The Story of Broadside Ballads, Chapbooks, Proclamations, News-​Sheets, Election Bills, Tracts, Pamphlets, Cocks, Catchpennies, and Other Ephemera (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), pp. 62–​4. 6  Marc Caball and Andrew Carpenter (eds.), Oral and Print Cultures in Ireland, 1600–​1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 33–​4. 7  P. Hume Brown (ed.), The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 3rd series, no. 8 (Edinburgh: H. M. General Register House, 1915), p. 384. 8  Leslie Shepard, The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962). 5 

 

6   William Donaldson secondhand type, adorned with crude woodcut illustrations and more or less aligned decorative borders. The verses tended to be similarly reach-​me-​down, often knocked together on the printing house floor from pre-​existing verbal bits and pieces. It is impossible to give more than a hint of the style, but the following examples give some idea of the typical broadside manner. Here, for example, is a characteristic piece inspired by contemporary political issues, “The Brags of Washington,” dating from the American War of Independence in the later 1770s. We note the “come-​all-​ye” introductory formula, the verse strung together in loosely rhymed quatrains, well adapted for a quick-​moving, casually structured narrative, the damn-​your-​eyes English pugnacity, and the idea of fighting for personal gain as much as patriotic zeal, all of them entirely typical of the form: Come all you brave seamen and landsmen likewise, That have got an inclination your fortunes to rise, That have got an inclination to fight the proud Bostonians, And soon we’ll let you know that we are the sons of Britain. Fal lal. ………………………… As for the brags of Washington we care not a pin, We will fire at his breast-​works, and make him let us in, Our bomb shells and cannons shall roar like mighty thunder, And by our constant firing we will make them to surrender. Fal lal. And when the wars are over, if fortune saves our lives, We will bring great store of riches to our sweethearts and our wives, And drink a health unto the lad that has a heart to enter, That man can never gain a prize that is afraid to venture. Fal lal.9

The most obvious feature of all, of course, is the high topicality of the subject matter. But some broadside verses touched more ancient and pervasive themes, their general tone of carefree hedonism tempered by the melancholy fate of those who “went a-​roving” once too often, and a little too heedlessly. Here is a version of the “young man cut down in his prime” motif (lamenting a young man, sometimes a young woman, brought to a miserable end by the ravages of venereal disease) from mid-​eighteenth-​century London: As I was walking down Covent Garden, Listen awhile, and the truth I’ll relate, Who should I meet but my dearest comrade, Wrapped up in flannel, so hard was his fate. Had I but known what his disorder was, Had I but known it, and took it in time, I’d took pila cotia, all sorts of white mercury, But now I’m cut off in the height of my prime. ………………………… When I am dead wrap me up in funeral fine, Pinks and fine roses adorning my head, 9  John Holloway and Joan Black (eds.), Later English Broadside Ballads (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 38–​9.

 

Poems on the Streets    7 Come all gallows whores that do mourn after me, Let them all follow me unto my grave.10

Versions of this have been found throughout the English-​speaking world. Gavin Greig and James Bruce Duncan encountered several in early twentieth-​century Aberdeenshire: “Had she told me when she disordered me, | Had she told me of it in time; | I might have been cured by the peels of white mercury | But now I’m a young man cut down in my prime.”11 Readers may also recollect the American version, “The Cowboy’s Lament,” published by John Lomax in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910): “As I walked out in the streets of Laredo, | As I walked out in Laredo one day, | I spied a young cowboy wrapped up in white linen, | Wrapped up in white linen as cold as the clay.”12 One could find on broadside sheets the kind of material later collected from oral sources and described as “folk songs,” in forms little different from their later guise: The lark in the morning she rises from her nest, And mounts in the air with the dew round her breast, And with the jolly Plowman she’ll whistle and sing, And at night she’ll drop into her nest again.13

There were a number of stock motifs: songs of true lovers trepanned by press gangs, and of returning sweethearts unrecognized after long absence; songs of city lowlife, with prostitutes and flash girls tricking (or being tricked by) innumerable “Johnny-​raws”; of women dressing as men to follow their lovers; songs of cuckoldry and the woes of marriage; songs of crime and punishment, with gallant poachers and highwaymen braving the perils of transportation and the gallows tree; songs of great sporting occasions; of battles and sea fights; and political songs of every description.

Poems in Performance The tunes to which the songs were to be sung were usually specified only by their titles. This was natural enough when music engraving was expensive and the melodies were already familiar, but there is disappointingly little direct evidence about the performance tradition, i.e., exactly how the street singers presented their material. The Aberdeenshire ballad-​seller Charles Leslie (c.1677–​1782), known as “Mussel Mou’d Charlie,” is noted as singing in a characteristic “deep hollow roar,”14 which may have been fairly typical of male singers whose voices had to contend with the hubbub of the street, especially on fair days when they might expect to do their best business.

10 Ibid., p. 48. 11 

Patrick Shuldham-​Shaw, Emily B. Lyle, et al. (eds.), The Greig-​Duncan Folk Song Collection, 8 vols. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press; Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1981–​2002), pp. vii, 252. 12  John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1910), pp. 74–​6. 13  Holloway and Black (eds.), p. 213. 14  “‘Biographia Lesleyana,’ or Life of Charles Lesley, the Aberdeen Ballad-​Singer,” in The Ballad Book, ed. G. R. Kinloch (privately printed, 1827), pp. iii–​viii.

 

8   William Donaldson The writer and ballad-​collector William Allingham preserves an Irish example, which sounds intriguingly different: The minstrel is found to be a tall, sad, stooping man, about thirty-​five; his song, to the very favourite tune of “Youghal Harbour,” is about two faithful lovers; his vocal excellence consists in that he twirls every word several times round his tongue, wrapt in the notes of a soft, husky, tremulous voice. In this style of gracing—​which is considered highly artistic, and for which I believe, “humouring” is the country phrase—​the words are delivered somewhat as follows: This pay-​air discoo-​oocyoor-​cered with sich foo-​oocy-​oorce o’ ray-​ayizin, Ther may-​aynin they ay-​apee-​ayx-​esprayss’d so-​hoo-​o-​o clearrrr, That fau-​hor to lae—​ssen too-​oo ther caw-​aw-​he-​on-​vairsay-​ay-​ashin, My ehe-​ee-​in-​clinay-​sheeay-​ashin was for too-​oo-​hoo-​hoo draw-​aw-​haw-​ee-​aw-​a-​nearrrr. that is to say: This pair discoursed with such force of reasoning, Their meaning they expressed so clear, That for to listen to their conversation, My inclination was for to draw near. This singer earned high praise from his listeners. In fact, Allingham reports one listener describing the singer as the best he has heard for twenty years, while another in the crowd said, “In troth, it’s worth a ha’penny to hear him go over it, let alone the paper.”15

Allingham’s orthography implies much use of showy rubato and a highly decorated line—​ which of course would have to be reflected in the melody, as words and music were obviously closely integrated in performance—​the articulation being shaped so extravagantly as to bear only a distant resemblance to standard English. Of course, this is merely a single example, although a suggestive one. We must not suppose a uniform street performance style throughout the United Kingdom. In Ireland, we know, there were broad regional differences: the Northern style, for example, was considered remarkably “plain.” We possess at least some information about the people who performed and sold this material. Paula McDowell’s Women of Grub Street draws attention to the squalid lives of the women, often disabled and elderly, who sold political ballads in the streets of London, and how dangerous a pastime this could be, with recurring episodes of arrest and imprisonment.16 In Ireland, however, ballad-​singers and sellers could be quite well remunerated.17 In Scotland, “Mussel-​Mou’d Charlie” was well known throughout the North East during much of the eighteenth century. He was born in the Garioch in central Aberdeenshire, the illegitimate son, it was said, of a local laird. He was notable not only for selling ballads but for

15 

Quoted in Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads,” p. 219. Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–​1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 58–​62; see also Tim Fulford, “Fallen Ladies and Cruel Mothers: Ballad Singers and Ballad Heroines in the Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 47, nos. 2–​3 (Summer–​Fall 2006), 309–​29, at pp. 317–​18. I am indebted for these references to Ruth Perry. 17  The Irish evidence suggests that ballad singers there could earn a good deal more than laborers: see Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads,” p. 213. 16 

 

Poems on the Streets    9 composing them too and, although based in the city of Aberdeen and surrounding districts, his “pitch” was virtually the whole east coast of Scotland. A small oil portrait of him survives, showing a rakishly angular figure with long lugubrious features and a small pursed mouth (hence his nickname). He is described as a remarkable, thin-​made man, about 5 feet ten inches high, with small red, fiery eyes, a long chin, reddish hair, and carried a long pike staff, with a large harden bag slung over his shoulders to hold his ballads, and a small pocket covered Bible, with a long string to it. He was a devoted Jacobite, and so popular in Aberdeen that he enjoyed in that city a sort of monopoly of the minstrel calling, no other person being allowed, under any pretence, to chant ballads on the causeway or planestanes of “the brave burgh.”18

He seems to have been a walking treasury of folklore and genealogy as well as an unfailing source of the latest news, and the writer and ballad-​collector Peter Buchan, our main source for Leslie’s life, notes that, “When he knew of any to be hanged at Edinburgh, he was sure to be there that day for their last speech and dying words.”19 Leslie represents an interesting example of a popular poet whose work was shaped by the political predilections of his audience. The North East was the heartland of the Jacobite movement in Lowland Scotland. Leslie himself had been “out” in the Rising of 1715 and again in 1745, and this was very evident from the kind of material he performed on the streets: The magistrates of Aberdeen were very ill-​natured to him: they often put him into jail for singing, and asked him what for he did it? “Why,” says Charlie, “for a bit of bread.”—​“Why,” says the provost, “cannot you sing other songs than that rebellious ones?” “Oh, aye,” says Charlie, “but they winna buy them.”20

Charles Leslie, although latterly blind apparently, practiced his trade till within a few weeks of his death at the reputed age of 105.

Broadside-​Buyers A wide variety of people bought such material. We know of gentleman collectors like Samuel Pepys and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, whose agent was the bookseller and antiquary John Bagford. We know, too, that popular printed material was consumed by every social class (upper-​class children being particularly susceptible to the fairytales circulated by the chapbook trade).21 But there seems to be relatively little direct evidence about how the products of the popular press were received by those intended to form the mainstay of their audience,

18 

“Notes to Jacobite Ballads,” Scottish Notes and Queries, 3rd series, 4, no. 9 (Sept. 1926), 157. Peter Buchan, An Interesting and Faithful Narrative of the Wanderings of Prince Charles Stuart and Miss Flora MacDonald, after the Battle of Culloden . . . and Several Jacobite Poems and Songs (Glasgow, 1839), pp. 38–​41. 20 Buchan, An Interesting and Faithful Narrative, pp. 38–​41. 21  There is much evidence of the social ubiquity of the ballad tradition in England and Ireland and the links between the English and Irish traditions in Julie Henigan’s important study Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-​Century Irish Song (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012). For upper-​class children reading 19 

 

10   William Donaldson namely the common people, unless they happened themselves to be writers.22 Robert Burns, for example, records the dramatic impact of The Ancient and Renown’d History of the Surprising Life and Adventures and Heroic Actions of Sir William Wallace, a modernized version of the metrical epic by Blind Hary (c.1440–​c.1492) by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (c.1665–​1751), which circulated as a large chapbook, saying, “the story of Wallace poured a Scotish [sic] prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-​gates of life shut in eternal rest.”23 Hamilton was author of the classic vernacular mock-​elegy The Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck, a Famous Grey-​Hound in the Shire of Fife, and a friend and correspondent of Allan Ramsay.24 As an ex-​professional soldier, Hamilton wrote with a knowledgeable eye to the use of ground and the finer points of attack and defense, and he preserved much of Hary’s swashbuckling narrative and rapid heroic couplets. The preface provided a detailed prose account of the Wars of Independence, “the most famous war that ever fell out in the isle of Britain, fought most valiantly for the space of forty years, betwixt the two realms of Scotland and England,”25 focusing strongly on the baseness and treachery of the English King Edward I. It followed the familiar contours of the inherited Scottish worldview which pictured the national past as a heroic struggle for survival of an ancient community against almost-​ overwhelming odds. Hamilton celebrated such illustrious Patriots and bold, Who stoutly did maintain our rights of old, Who their malicious, and inveterate foes, With sword in hand did gallantly oppose; And in their own, and nations just defence, Did briskly check the frequent insolence Of haughty neighbours, enemies profest, Picts, Danes, and Saxons, Scotland’s very pest; Of such, I say, I’ll brag and vaunt so long As I have pow’r to use my pen or tongue; And sound their praises, in such modern strain, As suiteth best a Scot’s poetic vein. First, here I honour in particular, Sir William Wallace, much renown’d in war.26

chapbooks, see John Simons (ed.), Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances: Six Tales from the Popular Literature of Pre-​Industrial England (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 1998), p. 7. 22 

There are a few scraps of testimony from plebeian writers in Neuburg, Popular Literature, pp. 113–​14. 23  T