Mid-century public libraries legislation in Britain was directed mostly at the use of modern books, but some of the larger libraries also built up substantial collections of early books. Specialefforts were made by some to collect local literature of all kinds, as awareness grew also of the importance of the mass of published ephemera that underpinned social activity.

My first chapter, ‘Representations: Seeing the Singer’, addresses perhaps the greatest problem to the historian of song culture, that of its sources, and in so doing serves also as a comprehensive introduction to the ballad-singer and her place in metropolitan life. It is constructed chiefly as an analysis of images of singers, supported by comparison with other media of representation, from plays to novels. I have tried to tackle head on the fact that in the historical record we see the singer almost entirely from above – and almost never hear them. Several key themes emerge: the extent to which ballad-singers were both silenced (or ventriloquised) and stripped of their crowds, thereby diminishing their potential to disturb viewers; the process of Othering whereby singers became synecdochal for an underclass within London, helping to create a domestic narrative of internal colonialism; and above all, the complex articulation of immorality in imagery. This lay less in a focus upon the female body than in the associations of the open mouth – a vulgar, sexualised trope that located vice, not in the singer’s person, but in their song.