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Broadsides on the Trial of Queen Caroline: a Glimpse at Popular Song in 1820

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1980

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Extract

The Trial of Queen Caroline for adultery in 1820 provoked comment in a deluge of songs, satires and caricatures. My aim here is to draw attention to some of the songs produced, and to locate them in relation to the nineteenth-century broadside tradition. This will require some general remarks on the broadside trade in London, which remained the chief centre for this type of literature, and where almost all the songs to be dealt with were printed. The years under discussion in the first part of the paper are, approximately, those between 1810 and 1860. (The precise dating of most broadsides remains difficult.) Inevitably, these limits are fairly arbitrary: the broadside trade, which stretches back to the sixteenth century, does not finally the out until the closing years of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the middle of the century seems to mark the point at which the broadside loses any claim to be considered the principal vehicle for the dissemination of popular songs – yielding on the one hand to the mass-produced songbook, and on the other to the emergent music-hall. And while one cannot discern at any single point in the history of broadside production a very sharp change in taste or style, by the second decade of the century a considerable body of material has appeared which is specifically nineteenth-century in character. Whatever earlier limit is chosen, the persistence of the old alongside the new, characteristic of so much in popular culture, means that any study of popular musical taste in the earlier nineteenth century will, to a large extent, be dealing with material originating in the previous century or even earlier.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

NOTES

1 The most thorough coverage of songs which appeared on broadsides up to 1800 is Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, 1966).Google Scholar

2 British Library 11621 e 2.Google Scholar

3 See, for an outstanding example, The Universal Songster (London, 1825–26), published by John Fairburn senior, and others. Its three volumes contain texts for some 5,000 songs.Google Scholar

4 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (2nd edn., London, 1861), 1, 272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Charles Manby Smith, The Little World of London (London, 1857), 252.Google Scholar

6 For a full account see Fulford, Roger, The Trial of Queen Caroline (London, 1967).Google Scholar

7 The poem and tune were first coupled in George Thompson's A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the Voice, Pan III (Edinburgh, 1802).Google Scholar

8 The music for Savoyard Air and Levi Lion has not yet been traced.Google Scholar

9 In William Wright's anti-Caroline pamphlet The Radical Harmonist.Google Scholar

10 British Library 8135 ccc 29 (10) and (11).Google Scholar

11 Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1974), 611.Google Scholar

12 British Library G 426 dd (34); G 426 cc (18).Google Scholar

13 British Library G 798 (49).Google Scholar

14 William Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time (London, 1859, repr., 1965), ii, 713–14.Google Scholar

15 Cambridge University Library: The Madden Broadside Collection, Section 15, 113.Google Scholar

16 Simpson, op. cit., 172–5.Google Scholar

17 Chappell, op. cit., ii, 720.Google Scholar

18 Thomas Dibdin, Reminiscences (London, 1827), i, 208.Google Scholar

19 See Notes (i) to the Table.Google Scholar