Excerpt: 'Veritable Dunghills': Professor Child and the Broadside
by Roy Palmer
Folk Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1996), pp. 155-166
Child did not set out merely to accumulate as many versions as possible of his chosen ballads, or if he did it was only to select those which came closest to the criteria he had established. Had he been so minded, he could have studied the extent to which the 'vulgar press' disseminated items from his canon during a particular period, in a particular place, or in the work of a particular printer. For example, 'Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight' (Child 4) has as its E version 'the common English stall copy' entitled 'The Outlandish Knight'.[43] H. O. Nygard has suggested with reference to this ballad that 'the entire tradition in England and Scotland is influenced by the broadside press, which seems to have given the song its currency'.[44] As early as 1827 J. H. Dixon wrote:
A friend of mine, who resided for some years on the borders, used to amuse himself by collecting old ballads, printed on halfpenny sheets, and hawked up and down by itinerant minstrels. In his common-place book I found one, entitled 'The Outlandish Knight', evidently, from the style, of considerable antiquity, which appears to have escaped the notice of Percy and other collectors. Since then I have met with a printed one, from the popular press of Mr Pitts, the six-yards-fora-penny song-publisher, who informs me that he has printed it 'ever since he was a printer [1802], and that Mr Marshall, his predecessor, printed it before him'.[45]
In offering the text, Dixon felt that he had to 'expunge', as he put it, certain 'expressions contra bonos mores' (the vulgar press again) which seem to have boiled down to the scandalous expressions 'silken stays' and 'naked woman'. In further reticence he left the letter unsigned but felt it desirable to add 'a few stanzas, wherein I have endeavoured to preserve the simplicity of the original', this being the putative better-quality article which existed before Marshall and Pitts got their inky hands on it. One verse will suffice as an example. It comes after the 'damoselle', as Dixon styles her, has pushed the knight into the sea:
That ocean wave was the false one's grave,
For he sunk right hastily;
Though with dying voice faint, he pray'd to his saint,
And utter'd an Ave Marie.[46]
Dixon had the good sense to drop his own verses in 1846 when he published the 'common English stall copy' of 'The Outlandish Knight',[47] presumably from Pitts.[48] Later still, in 1868, he acknowledged his "juvenile' letter of 1827, adding this information:
My visit to Mr Pitts led to an intimacy between us. He was at that time quite blind. I was somewhat surprised to find in the ballad-printer of Seven Dials a gentlemanly, well-educated man, with a wonderful store of information on ballad and chapbook literature.[49]
The ballad was also issued in London by Birt, Catnach, Disley, Fortey, and Such, as well as by Pitts, which gives an indication of its popularity.[50] Further afield, editions 'Veritable Dunghills': Professor Child and the Broadside appeared in Birmingham (printed respectively by J. Russell and W. Wright), Brighton (Hook), Edinburgh (Charles Sanderson), Manchester (Pearson), Portsea [Portsmouth] (Williams), Worcester (Sefton), and probably elsewhere.[51] It would thus be possible to plot the spread of the ballad in space and also in time, given the dating of the printers, and the Sanderson firm in Edinburgh was in existence as late as the 1940s.
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45 William Hone, The E very-day B ook, o r, Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements, 3 vols (London: Tegg, 1827), iII, col. 129; reprinted in John Pitts: Ballad Printer of Seven Dials, London, 1765-1844, by Leslie Shepard (London: Private Libraries Association, 1969), p. 36. Of Pitts's predecessor, Shepard writes: 'As Richard Marshall died in 1779, this is more likely his son John Marshall for whom Pitts worked in Aldermary Church Yard. However, Pitts actually first set up in business on his own account in 1802, twenty-one years before the death of John Marshall in 1823' (p. 37).
46 Hone, col. 131.
47 Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, coll. and ed. by J. H. Dixon, Early
Enghish Poetry, 17 (London: Percy Society, 1846), pp. 74-77.
8 The Pitts sheet is reproduced in facsimile in Shepard, p. 38.
49 Notesa nd Queries4, th series, 1 (April 1868), 344-45.
50 Steve Roud, FolksonIgn dex,v ersion2 , ElectronicI ndexes,1 (EnfieldL ock:H isarlikP ress,f orthcoming),
no. 21. I am indebted to Steve Roud for sending me (a computer illiterate) a print-out of his
information on 'The Outlandish Knight'.
51 See note 50