Joseph Albernaz examines how “the modern category of lyric voice is entangled with processes of racialization.” Albernaz focuses on the complaint poem, a subgenre that was especially important to Romantic-era abolitionists, who often ventriloquized enslaved Africans. And yet, Albernaz contends, Romantic poetry, particularly as it is taken up by Black writers, is also capable of refusing the racial logics it has traditionally upheld. In such instances, complaint negates the world as it is and reveals, however briefly, “the collective undersong of No, the depthless well of non-sense from which all sense springs.”

This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

Schubert’s twenty-eight ballads provide an unusual perspective on his approach to writing for the piano for several reasons. First, the role of improvisation within balladeering was much more pronounced, traces of which remain within Schubert’s published works. Second, the piano was used to provide more explicit scene-setting, through the use of scenic effects, than is generally the case in Schubert’s other Lieder. Third, the ballads allow for the re-examination of narrative processes within nineteenth-century Lieder – in other words, how songs told stories.This chapter focuses on three ballads that show Schubert adopting different approaches to rendering poetic imagery in musical terms. It begins with his 1815 settings of Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Der Taucher’, D77, and Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty’s ‘Die Nonne’, D212, considering their use of elaborate ‘Schauder’ or ‘shudder’ effects, which now tend to be dismissed as hackneyed but might instead be considered to offer access to often-overlooked aspects of early nineteenth-century performance culture. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, and of Schubert’s career, comes his simple strophic setting of Gottfried Herder’s ‘Edward’, D923 (1827). Concepts and practices of the ballad shifted over the course of Schubert’s career and would continue to do so for subsequent generations.

Chapter 5 investigates the fifteenth-century ballad A Gest of  Robyn Hode as protest literature set against the encroachment of government centralization on the political autonomy of the North of England. Robin Hood’s theft and murder of government officials ironically informs the outlaw’s own expressed love for the king, calling to mind the relationships between the crown and the northern magnates, such as the Percy earls of Northumberland, in the later Middle Ages. In one striking scene from the Gest, King Edward and Robin Hood ride out of the forest together, dressed in Robin’s livery of Lincoln green. This juxtaposition of the king of England with the king of outlaws implies the complexities with which the poem contemplates law and sovereignty, complexities attendant to the remarkable development of sovereign theory from the early-thirteenth century in western Europe. Foregrounding the exceptional powers of the sovereign that would inform the political theory resonate in the later work of Bodin and Hobbes, the Gest laments the dwindling regional autonomy of the North, with its once-great barons, and the increasing pull of law and authority to London and Westminster.

The chapter examines Walt Whitman’s and Frances Harper’s engagements with vernacular forms, especially ballad stanza and dialect verse, in their Reconstruction-era poetry. For both poets, using such forms marked a departure from usual practice. Whitman turned to the familiar ballad form in moments of national uncertainty, particularly addressing the president’s assassination and issues of race during Reconstruction. The ballad’s conventional racialization of voice, however, represented a challenge for Harper. Before the war, Harper worked primarily in the elevated register of standard written English. Her Aunt Chloe poems, originating in her tour of the south during Reconstruction, mark an important divergence from her earlier work and an important intervention into the ballad tradition. Here she brought a new vernacular voice to an old vernacular form.

Chapter 6 begins with ballad talk (the ballad convention of narration through conversation) as it was adopted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets in verses both popular and literary in response to revived interest in the print mediation of traditional Anglo-Scottish ballads. The chapter pays particular attention to Christina Rossetti’s and Hardy’s ironic reworkings of ballad conventions. Their reliance on the expectations aroused by traditional ballads, the chapter argues, especially in the much harder cases of imagining intimate conversational relations with the silent dead or with God, prepares the depictions of failed intimacy in Hardy’s elegies for his wife Emma and in Rossetti’s devotional colloquies and roundels. There talking with ghosts or with God becomes all too often a disappointed hope of resuming conversations that failed in life (Hardy) or painfully anticipating a silent harmony with God and the saints in paradise through the imperfect approximations of poetry (Rossetti).

This chapter begins with discussions of two early accounts of the sorrow songs, by the African American activist Charlotte Forten and the radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. These early accounts drew on both Romantic approaches to folk song and ballad and scientific or naturalist taxonomies to construct African American song-making as both historical and ahistorical. Folklorists were excited to encounter in these songs an example of a genuine ‘folk’ culture in the United States that exemplified evolutionary theories of poetic development. The chapter discusses the ‘primitive’ ballad and the ‘evolved’ lyric, and moves on to a study of the interactions between Howard Odum, a sociologist of the New South, and the Southern Agrarians, a group of scholars based at Vanderbilt University, many of whom later became part of the movement known as New Criticism. It argues that African American song is the repressed other of the New Critical idea of the lyric, and that many of those ideas are rooted in racist ideology about a pastoral, paternalistic South. It concludes with a close reading of a song whose roots can be traced to sixteenth-century England, adapted to the conditions of American chattel slavery.

Women played an important part in the Irish Revival, only to discover their contributions were not always welcome, after the establishment of the Irish Free State, in the new dispensation they had helped to create. While modernist writing was a marginal presence on the Irish scene, women writers – with some notable, if partial exceptions (Blanaid Salkeld) – were a subset of this subset. One form in which women poets continued to work prolifically was the ballad, as in the work of Temple Lane, which takes refuge in suburban spaces from the schematic backdrops of rural and urban settings alike. For another writer in a similar vein, Kathleen Arnold Price, marginality meant avoiding publication in volume form, while Sheila Wingfield cultivated a performative distance from themes of hearth and home celebrated in her clipped lyrics. Critically at odds with both their Revivalist inheritance and modernist alternatives, Irish women poets of this period carved out a space of their own as modern traditionalists.

The fourth interlude, ‘Old Dog Tray’, discusses one of the ballad-singer’s last great mainstream hits, the sentimental American song ‘Old Dog Tray’. I regard this song as something of a paradox: both an ideal solo ballad, and an indication of the ballad-singer’s failings, considering the song’s harmonic possibilities as realised by performances on keyboard, barrel-organ, or by vocal ensembles – possibilities not available for songs written and sung in the early part of the century.

Chapter 2 is ‘Progress: Ancient Custom in the Modern City’. Here I pursue sociopolitical questions prompted by ballad singing, in an analysis shaped by an understanding of historical time and process whereby the chief tension lay between an early modern conception of order, public space, and neighbourhood, as embodied by the singer, and a self-consciously modern urban programme of improvement and capital, advanced by journalists and the judiciary. I situate debates over ballad singing at the centre of this historical process, the better to understand both issues. I analyse the threats singers were said to represent, in moral and legal writing; the political power accorded to the song by authorities (centring on the endlessly repeated maxim of the early Enlightenment thinker Alexander Fletcher); contemporary medical views on the inflammatory power of music; the vexed question of public space; and the steps taken both to repress and to coerce ballad-singers. I focus on the few documented occasions when a ballad-singer had a demonstrable impact on the actions of a community, from Kennington, to Camden, to Whitechapel market, and I come to see the singer, not as analogous to rough music as such, but as a paradoxical, anachronistic voice of authority within those communities.

Developing the thesis elaborated in the latter part of Chapter 4, I contend that the demise of the ballad-singer was primarily due to a shift in mainstream taste and musical potential, as the masses developed both the appetite for, and access to, a wide range of more sophisticated music. By 1864, when this book ends, the ballad-singer was almost entirely absent from the debate around the Street Music Act championed by Michael Thomas Bass MP, indicating the irrelevance of the ballad-singer to the contemporary street scene. This argument, predicated upon technological change, literacy, economics, and class consciousness, is essentially optimistic, running counter to the rhetoric of decline and nostalgia found in nineteenth-century elite writing on the subject. I contend that the primarily musical transformation by which melodic song became subordinated within a new and totalising conception of music, was itself symptomatic of the great historical forces of reform, education, improvement, and enfranchisement that were at work in Victorian London.

I begin the book with a comprehensive introduction that situates what follows within an interdisciplinary discourse on what is variously conceived of as ephemeral literature, popular culture, or folk song. Accordingly, the Introduction opens with a much-cited letter to John Reeves from 1792 concerning the power of ballads over mass opinion, locating my work within several existing strands of scholarship. After defining my terms and arguing for the importance of the singer to these fields of enquiry, as well as for the particular significance of London, I unpack the problematic idea of ‘music’ as something requiring special expertise, highlighting its accessibility to other disciplines, particularly History and Literature. This methodological exposition should be of especial value beyond the subject matter of the volume. Going on to outline the chronology of my period, to survey the existing field, and to address further the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinarity (with particular reference to the work of the musicologists Georgina Born, Carolyn Abbate, and Gary Tomlinson, which may be unfamiliar but extremely helpful to historians), I conclude with a synopsis of the book’s structure, its chapters, and interludes.

‘Oh! Cruel’, the first interlude, extends my analysis of sources to songs about or purportedly by singers, centring on the song ‘Oh! Cruel’ itself. The performance of this and other songs prompted especial anxieties around issues of charity and class relations. I contend that, though many of these songs share the stock characteristics and prejudices of the representations considered in Chapter 1, their crucial difference is that because they were actually performed by ballad-singers, they afforded the singer a degree of agency and self-expression denied them in other media. It is this sort of autonomous performance that I see as central to the role of the ballad-singer in society.

My third chapter – ‘Performance: The Singer in Action’ – is an extensive consideration of the practice of singing in the streets. Its focus narrows repeatedly upon the act of performance itself: from citywide topography and issues of calendar and clock time; to performance in specific sites; to voice, body, and audience engagement; to the singer’s relationship with the physical ballad sheet in performance. I explore how balladeers overcame numerous challenges – geographic, sonic, social – by means of specific strategies, from the pitch of their voices, to the use of props, to borrowing the psychological weaponry of beggars. The chapter is therefore also in conversation with histories of charity and disability, as well as aspects of human geography. I am especially interested in the creation and maintaining of crowds, the appropriation of public space, the manipulation of codes of moral obligation, and above all in the musical and theatrical aspects of singing: it is central to my argument that we take ballad-singers seriously as being, on some level, artists. This is most evident in my discussion of voice, which – though it borrows heavily from musicology – is unrepentantly historical and leads us inevitably back to issues of class-consciousness.

Chiefly focusing on Swift’s Cowleyan odes and epistles of the 1690s, this chapter demonstrates the author’s early rejection of conventional imitation in favour of a spontaneous form of appropriative writing. Railing against the accumulated habits of his seventeenth-century forebears, Swift repeatedly reveals in the early poems his own thwarted attempts to reinvent poetry for an unheroic age. Temporarily discarding the panegyric mode at the end of the decade, Swift found a new metafictional style that challenged the very medium of poetry. How can we adequately describe whispering or smells? If a table-book could talk would it have anything valuable to say? What would the petition of a barely literate waiting woman sound like? What happens if an overconfident member of your circle finishes one of your unfinishable ballads?

This chapter discusses the use of Gothic convention in four nineteenth-century Scottish writers: Walter Scott, James Hogg, Margaret Oliphant and Robert Louis Stevenson. Proceeding by means of an account of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s recitation of William Taylor’s English translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s supernatural ballad ‘Lenore’ in Edinburgh in 1794, it shows how Scottish writers from this moment onwards were inspired to merge the conventions of Gothic poetry with the balladic and folkloric traditions of their own country. What resulted, the chapter shows, was that distinctive form of textually complex writing that characterises much Scottish Gothic writing of the period, a mode that, in its preoccupations with dialogic voices, splitting and uncanny doubling, enacted some of the political and cultural tensions that lay at the heart of the nation itself.

The nature of empire is that it is always at heart contradictory, suggesting a totalising unity but not homogeneity or equality. This chapter focuses on three very different Irish men of letters, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Moore and Charles Lever, exploring the contradictions at the heart of their engagement with the British Empire and the imperial project generally, and its influence on their writing. It also suggests ways in which these contradictions are later to be found in one of the great imperial novels – Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). Charles Gavan Duffy was an Irish nationalist and a prime minister of a British colony, who saw Thomas Moore’s poetry as the product of an ‘imperial mind’. Moore, in his turn, can be seen as the colonised figure incarnate, beholden to imperial patronage for his livelihood and yet able to find ways to express subversive feeling in his poetry and prose. Charles Lever was perhaps the Empire’s favourite Irish novelist in this period, and yet he seldom wrote about the Empire, and when he did, it was almost always negative in tone. Although he was a moderate Tory in politics, Lever’s work suggested that the Irish could never be good Britons, or successful colonists. In contrast, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, who in so many ways represents the anomalous position of the Irish in imperial terms, is presented as succeeding precisely because of his Irishness, even though he does not know what that is. The contradictions in Kim reflect the ironic relationship between the Irish and the Empire as a whole, and as such the novel can claim to be the greatest ‘Irish’ imperial novel, a term which is itself a contradiction in terms.