Child's Gallant Army of Auxiliaries
by Mary Ellen Brown
Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 43, No. 2 (May - Aug., 2006), pp. 89-108
Child's Gallant Army of Auxiliaries
Mary Ellen Brown
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Francis James Child's lifework, did not spring full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus. In fact, without the many precursor collections of ballads and related literary forms Child found in the Harvard College Library, he would not even have thought to make an edition of the ballads. His first attempt at such an edition eventuated in eight volumes, published between 1857 and 1859 (and republished with additions in 1860 and 1866), titled simply English and Scottish Ballads: these volumes were based exclusively on the printed gatherings that had gone before, even quoting them
lavishly to create a work of pastiche scholarship. Dismissing the edition later in a letter to the Danish ballad scholar Svend Grundtvig as a kind of "job - forming part of one of those senseless huge collections of British Poets" (26 March 1872, Hustvedt 1930:246), Child made clear that he had long wanted to do a more thorough study, something in fact similar to the edition Grundtvig was publishing on Danish ballads.
One of the things that had held up any new project was his lack of
access to the Percy Folio manuscript, the famous pages that served as
the basis for The Reliques of English Poetry (1765); and when a printed
edition of the Percy Folio was published in 1867-68, he felt he was in
the position to plan a critical edition. This new edition would need
to look for texts closer to their original forms than the printed collec?
tions and include not only manuscripts, but also oral tradition. Since
he was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and most of those materials were
inconveniently in England and Scotland, he would need the help of
individuals nearer the source. In the early 1870s, he began to write
persons he thought might be ideally situated to make his project pos?
sible. One of his early letters was written to the Scottish antiquarian
David Laing for help in finding the manuscripts Walter Scott had
mentioned using/seeing in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802,
1803). In that letter Child offered one of the first articulations of what
he hoped his new work would do:
I propose to make, if life and health are spared me, a complete and
critical collection of the English 8c Scottish Ballads. I wish to embrace all
the genuine ballads that have been preserved, as well as any that may still
by chance be recovered, and all the versions, and to give them in a form
as near as possible to that in which they first came to knowledge?always
resorting to the original manuscripts, when they have been preserved in
manuscripts of some antiquity, or to the copy nearest to the mouth of the
people, when they have been derived from some recent oral tradition.
(Laing: 21 August 1872)
Ten years later when he issued a Prospectus for The English and
Scottish Popular Ballads (hereafter ESPB), he reiterated that goal and
added another: "It is almost superfluous to add that not even the
already known and published versions of the English and Scottish
ballads have ever been brought together, to be studied in conjunction
with each other and with kindred ballads of other nations" (Macmath,
volume II). He proposed to add this comparative dimension, to make
his work a lasting "critical edition." The work we know today, nearly
completed when he died in 1896, sought to fulfill those goals, though
he recognized its flawed nature and had once anticipated a second
edition to get things right. Even so, ESPB continues to be reckoned
with and republished in print and digital form.
Child sought help and advice from British, Continental, and North
American scholars in making his edition, engaging well over two
hundred individuals by the end of the process. One Scottish corre?
spondent dubbed Harvard College the Headquarters for the Ballads.
Certainly the academic environment at Harvard College nurtured his
work, valued the philological tradition, and supported Child's gath?
ering of books and manuscripts from afar. Many of those books and
manuscripts remain at the Houghton Library, Harvard's rare book
and manuscript depository, where there is also a physical reminder
of the community of scholars who provided the environment for his
work: a portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer bears the inscription "A gift from Charles Eliot Norton in Memory of two lovers of Chaucer?-James
Russell Lowell and Francis James Child." These three men?Child,
Lowell, and Norton?connected today by that inscription, were dear
friends and boon companions; and Norton and Lowell provided the
close community out of which Child's ESPB came.
The network at home and abroad made Child's work possible and
in many instances the connections were entirely epistolary. Given
that Child's hand is often all but illegible, it is amazing that so many
of his correspondents took the time to decipher his handwriting. Yet
they did and thus helped to provide the texts he sought, especially
from the manuscripts behind the printed editions, as well as giving
information toward the elaborate comparative and historical notes
that introduce each of the 305 ballads chosen for inclusion. Most of
these letters are found at the Houghton Library where George Lyman
Kittredge, another figure in the Harvard history of Child's ballads,
arranged thirty-three manuscript volumes after Child's death. There
are also ten volumes recording the correspondence of Child with the
Scottish legal clerk William Macmath housed at the Hornel Library in
Kirkcudbright, Scotland. These forty-three volumes together contain
much of the epistolary account of the making of Child's great work.
Even Child's connection with Norton and Lowell is revealed primarily through their correspondence: both Norton and Lowell were
often away from Cambridge- Lowell as United States Minister in
Spain and then at the Court of Saint James in London- and Norton
in Europe, Newport, or western Massachusetts. Of all the extant correspondence, that between Child and his two friends and Harvard
colleagues is among the most humanly rich, touching on a wide variety
of topics familial, political, academic, and personal in addition,
from time to time, to ballads.
Norton is a particularly important figure in the story of Frank Child:
both Harvard class of 1846, they became intimate friends in the years
immediately after graduation, when Child became a much welcomed
supernumerary member of the Norton family. Building on the world
he had entered at Boston Latin and then at Harvard, the Norton world
of intellectual exchange, with its talk of books and politics, literature,
and the arts, helped Child make the transition from his natal environ?
ment on the Boston wharves.
His father was a successful enough sailmaker to help finance
Child's Harvard education, and the sails he made were an essential
component of the merchant ships that sailed from Boston Harbor to
far flung parts of the world. The wealth those merchants accrued, us?
ing some of Joseph Child's sails no doubt, helped to form and sustain
the cultural institutions of Boston and Cambridge.
While Child's voyage to Cambridge was far shorter in distance than
these merchant voyages, emotionally and intellectually it was the most
intense voyage/transformation of his life. Successfully completing
it, he became a Harvard and Cambridge institution, even in his own
day, when June was known locally for Child's roses. Adoption into the
Norton clan was crucial to that transformation.
Norton?who in time became editor and translator of Dante, art
historian, and initiator of the study of Western Civilization?served
throughout Child's life as his close friend and confidant: he received
periodic updates on the progress of the ballads from the early edi?
tion to the edition we know today. These progress reports aid in the
reconstruction of Child's working procedure; they tell of letters he
wrote, information he received, and advice offered him. Norton was
both interested and encouraging. He and his family happened to be
living in London during the crucial period of 1872-73 when Child
was turning his attention in a serious way to the production of the
ballads as we now know them and Norton had a wide circle of friends
who in turn interested themselves in Child's work. Among these was
Thomas Carlyle who told Norton, in fact, that Child's earlier edition
was "far the best wark o' the kind we have in English" (20 December
1872). It was Carlyle who provided a list of schoolmasters in Scotland
to whom 1300 circulars were addressed?circulars based on Child's
4 January 1873 Notes & Queries appeal for help in collecting and
gathering ballads and ballad manuscripts. Norton, by then a widower
(his wife Sue was second cousin to Child's wife Lizzie), was in London
with his family, including six children and his mother. Together they
sent out Child's appeal. On 2 February 1873, Norton?"Charlie" of
the letters?wrote:
About 1300 have now gone out to the Scotch schoolmasters, and perhaps
100 more to miscellaneous people. I have still some 500 or 600 to send out,
and shall divide them I think, among the ministers, the editors of papers
8c magazines.?My Mother has amused and pleased herself with directing
many of them 8c Eliot 8c Sally [two of his children] have done a good deal
of folding 8c stamping. The work has been easily done 8c everybody had
liked to do it for your sake.
In fact, he told Child "some one person in every town or village in
Scotland will have a Circular" (25 January 1873). Then he went on
to urge Child to send Carlyle a copy of the earlier edition with an
accompanying note,
. . . thanking him for his interest in the new work. It was through him, as
I think I told you that I got a list of schoolmasters. His sympathies are so
quick that he likes sympathetic expression from others, 8c it would please
him to know that you cared for his interest in the matter.
The latter was not the only instance in which certain niceties were
suggested to Child, perhaps hinting that such acts of politessewere not
a part of his natal environment. But Norton's hint was more than that:
it was his way of introducing Frank into the larger world of which he
was a part, of making him known, and hoping he would be in com?
munication with his London connections.
Later in the 1870s, writing to James Russell Lowell, who was then
in Spain, Norton conspiratorially reported:
Child and I walked home together last evening from Faculty meeting.
He was as good as ever. He has been doing a vast deal of work this last six
months of a sort that I begrudge, as it takes him from work he alone can
do, and which he has already put off doing too long. . . . When you write
to him I wish you would spur him up about his "Ballads," I want him to
begin to print. He ought not to delay. (19 May 1878)
When the first part of what became ten (or the five volumes we know
today) was published, the penultimate and final acknowledgements
are to these Harvard friends and colleagues:
Acknowledgements not well despatched in a phrase are due to many
others who have promoted my objects. [Ending the list of twenty-four
scholars at home and abroad are] to Mr James Russell Lowell, Minister
of the United States at London; to Professor Charles Eliot Norton, for
such 'pains and benefits' as I could ask only of a life-long friend. (ESPB
I:viii)
Child's relationship with Lowell was of a different sort: they became
friends when Lowell joined the Harvard faculty in the mid 1850s. Both
were of short stature and sometimes mistaken for one another. Their
friendship was collegial and close, even if not possessing the personal
intimacy found between Charlie and Frank. Nevertheless, the letters
published by Howe and Cottrell as The ScholarEriends in 1952 reveal their
shared intellectual interests and their deep collegial friendship. "Jamie" or "Carissimum caput" and "Ciarli"?the pronunciation of Child by an
Italian beggar he adopted as nom deplumefor these letters?came at the
same subjects, but often from different perspectives. This is nowhere
clearer than in Lowell's 1855 lectures before the Lowell Institute, one
of which was on ballads (Am 183.33). In it Lowell spoke of ballads as
popular memory and looked especially to the poets?naturally enough,
as he himself was a poet. The ballad poet did not so much make the
ballad, but was possessed by it, expressing "the common mother-earth
of the universal sentiment that the foot of the past must touch, through
which shall steal up to heart and brain that fine virtue which puts him
in sympathy, not with his class but with his kind." Designating ballads
the first national poetry, he claimed them as America's heritage as well
as Britain's, interrogating the idea of national literatures. His concrete
knowledge of the ballads, however, undoubtedly provided an opening
for great conversations with Child who, at the time of the lecture, was
himself preparing his first edition of ballads. In describing his great loss
after Lowell's death in 1891, he mentioned the ballads and Lowell's
ability to "take the fine points in a ballad" (quoted in Howe 1920), only
natural for one whose mother was of Scottish heritage and claimed to
be a descendant of Sir Patrick Spens!
If ballads brought them together and provided one of their recurring topics of discussion, there were other topics of mutual concern.
There was Chaucer, of course, and Lowell's essay on Chaucer, included
in his 1870 collection of essays dedicated to Child, My Study Windows.
Lowell too was a Harvard man, class of 1838, and like Child he was
anti-slavery. Also like Child, he had periodic attacks of gout, a form of
inflammatory arthritis often said to afflict the well-off, as well as great
figures such as Charlemagne, Henry VJII, Benjamin Franklin, and
Voltaire, among others (although that short list would have provided
no solace to Lowell and Child). Their shared appreciation of things
Italian was surely more upbeat and they collaborated on the mock
comic opera // Pesceballo, adapting the widespread legend about the
starving, impecunious student with only money enough for a half
order offish-balls to stave off hunger: Child wrote the Italian libretto,
Lowell made the English translation, and "Rossibelli-Donimozarti"
provided the music.
Lowell too aided Child in definitive ways in preparing ESPB. He
collected a version of "The Sweet Trinity" (Child 286) from George
du Maurier; he intervened in gettingjohn Francis Campbell in touch with Child through his brother-in-law Lord Granville Leveson-Gower,
second Earl Granville; he sent Child manuscripts by diplomatic pouch;
he vouched for Child with the Due d'Aumale, possessor of a rare
volume Child thought might include a precursor to the Thomas the
Rhymer story; he sent Child books. He was also, like Norton, one of the
persons who received periodic updates of the work's progress?news
of the publication of the Percy folio, of Kristensen's successful col?
lecting in Jutland, of an Odinic song from Shetland. On 17 May 1887
Child wrote Lowell that he had 400 roses in bloom and that he had
"taken out Adam Bell [Child 116] to polish him up for court." Earlier,
on 2 February 1883, Lowell had written Child on receipt of the first
Part of the ballad book:
I have been reading it ['your beautiful book'] with delight 8c wonder.
The former you will understand better than anybody; the latter, called
forth by the enormous labor you have spent on it you will be modestly
incredulous about. You have really built an imperishable monument &
I rejoice as heartily as the love I bear you gives me the right in having
lived to see its completion.
No matter where he was- at his home Elmwood, at Harvard College
where he was Professor of French and Spanish, in Spain, or in London
as statesman?he was Child's friend, advocate, and helper.
Norton and Lowell and other colleagues connected with Harvard
provided a supportive environment and they did all they could to
help Child. More than anything, they were interested in what he was
doing, knew what he was up to, and stepped in to smooth the way
whenever they could. There were others, however, further away, who
are far more central to Child's work, without whom the work could not
have proceeded. S.B. Hustvedt's publication of the correspondence
between Child and the great Danish scholar Svend Grundtvig gives
us a concrete sense of the state of Child's knowledge when he began
work on ESPB, his grappling with the boundaries of the collection, and
the difficulties of the organizational principles. That correspondence
reveals Child's many concrete and conceptual debts to Grundtvig. In
his second letter to Child (2 June 1872), Grundtvig had urged him
to be in touch with relevant persons in Scotland, and he named "Mr.
John Stuart of H.M. general Registrar office, Edinburgh." That turned
out to be an amazingly prescient tip. Child did write Stuart, who, not
being able to offer help himself, sent Child's letter on to Norval Clyne,
an Aberdeen lawyer.
Clyne is one of a triumvirate of Child's Scottish contributors (of
whom there were many, many others) without whom ESPB would not
have been the work it became. These were gifted, informed gentlemen
scholars and enthusiasts, not academicians. Looking back, Clyne's
response to Stuart, forwarded to Child, actually gave Child an imme?
diate plan, directed his next steps, and really set the stage for Child's
work. Clyne had written Stuart:
I feel much obliged by your shewing me Professor Child's Letter. Any one
having any taste for our truly national literature, the traditionary Poetry
of Scotland and England, must wish him all success, and look forward
eagerly to the publication of a genuine Ballad Book under so able an
Editor. The difficulties in the way are I fear considerable, the materials
being much scattered and many of the original Collectors' M.S.S. hav?
ing themselves become somewhat ancient. Were Mr. Child to spend a
summer in Britain his project might be greatly facilitated. Meantime the
best suggestion I can offer is, that he should send to Notes and Queries a
letter explaining it and requesting information as to the whereabouts of
the desired materials. We/He could see to get his communication copied
into various newspapers, and I trust with a substantial result.
Mr Child might write to Mr Kinloch if you think well of his being
applied to about his own M.S.s. or information as to Motherwell's. . . .
Although the pieces for which we are indebted to "Mrs Brown" were
chiefly written down by "Professor Scott of Aberdeen", I don't know any
body here likely to aid in tracing them. A set of Peter Buchan's MSS. is
said to be deposited at Logie at Elphinstone, and no doubt our friend
Mr. Charles Dalrymple can say something about them. If you are writing
him soon, you can enquire. No doubt Buchan's original copies would be
more faithful than his printed mss. Mr. Child's enquiries will be of little
avail if they lead only to the recovery of the M.S.S. of published Volumes,
and not the Collectors' notes of recited pieces. (30 September 1872)
This letter gave Child specific direction: he did spend a summer in
Britain (in part for health reasons, related to severe overwork), aided
admirably by Frederick J. Furnivall (with whom he had long been in
contact and who had earlier been persuaded to edit, with John Hales,
the Percy folio manuscript in 1867-68?a first step in getting to the
manuscript sources behind the published editions which had greatly
influenced Child's earlier edition, especially in its first incarnation);
he published an announcement in Notes & Queries on 4 January 1873
(individual copies of that Appeal became the circulars Norton and
his family addressed and mailed); and he began, with correspondents
especially in Scotland, the search for manuscripts (and this led cumu-
latively to a Scottish predominance in the collection). He followed up
on leads, largely dependent on the offices of individuals like those
mentioned in Clyne's letter to Stuart. Clyne's initial suggestions, once
followed, of course led to other leads, other correspondents, and
sometimes hundreds of letters in search of a manuscript.
The Clyne letter with its vital suggestions was not placed by Kittredge
in the thirty-three main volumes, but was rather placed in a volume
relating to the Harris manuscripts, which were mentioned by William
E. Aytoun. Clyne was instrumental in tracking this manuscript down for
Child, even entertaining the Misses Harris in his home. Additionally,
Clyne ascertained that Peter Buchan's manuscripts were at the British
Museum where Child was able to see them; he wrote extensively on
Buchan, giving contradicting testimony as to his trustworthiness. It was
Clyne who told Child of the trick played on Buchan by John Hill Bur?
ton and Joseph Robertson, presumably "to take the measure of Peter's
honesty. [Child Ether] was sent to him in shattered fragments, but he
was so successful as to get it completed among the Buchan peasantry!"
(see Buchan 1972). Child also took this part of the account, perhaps,
without reflecting on Hill Burton's further analysis of the situation,
also in Clyne's letter:
All Collections of Ballads I believe to be more or less dressed, but for
bungling dishonest patching I would be inclined to back Peter's against
any others to be found. Scott touched his cautiously and gracefully, but
Peter pitched in his rubbish in the mass. When I speak of all the ballads
being dressed, I mean that they are always in a state of transition when
unprinted, and have to be fixed down by the first Editor. Scott, when he
got a ballad, knew that it had been altered by the Pedlar who gave it him
and had been altered by the Poacher who gave it to the pedlar. So he
cleaned and dressed it as well as he so well could. (February 1873)
The processes of transmission and oral tradition were, by and
large, not questions that made much sense to Child: he tended to
lump the changes as editorial interventions. Many of his Scottish cor?
respondents, however, knew continuity and change experientially.
Some Scots, Clyne among them, were also interested in the historic?
ity of the ballads?something that became one concern of Child's,
largely through his correspondent William Macmath. In the north?
east of Scotland "The Battle of Harlaw" (Child 163) served and still
serves as a topic of interest. Clyne became intermediary for Charles
Elphinstone Dalrymple's version of "Harlaw," thus initiating Child's
correspondence with another Scot. He had also circulated copies of
Child's appeal to various regional newspapers. No wonder Child felt
the loss when Clyne died and was delighted when William Walker
stepped in, expanding what Clyne had referred to in 1885 as Child's
"gallant army of auxiliaries."
Child's initial focus was clearly on acquiring authentic texts. To
that end, he searched for manuscripts, most of which were found by
others and through whose mediation he was able to have copies made.
Child also made contact with individuals who were actively collecting.
Certainly one of the most colorful was John Francis Campbell of Islay,
whose Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860-62 and subsequent
volumes) gave Britain and Scotland their own Grimm. The English?
man Furnivall and the American Lowell each played a part in getting
Campbell in touch with Child, who in turn acknowledged Campbell in
the first part of ESPB: "for later transcriptions from Scottish tradition I
am indebted to Mr J.F. Campbell of Islay, whose edition and rendering
of the racy West Highland tales is marked by the rarest appreciation
of the popular genius." Campbell not only collected himself, but also
employed others to help him and gathered far more materials than he
ever published, mostly in Gaelic, although some were in English; and
he kept urging Child to come over and look at the latter. Collecting was
really his avocation. By the time he was corresponding with Child, he
was nearing the end of his life and moving between London, Scotland,
and Cannes. In an early letter to Child (24June 1881), Campbell ad?
dressed him as a "brother collector of folklore" and sent him materials
he remembered as well as collected. A bit later (16 August 1881) he
said he was not inclined to share his unpublished materials and urged
Child to come over and collect himself:
I have a big English manuscript volume of such rubbish, in all sorts of
dialects, got from all sorts of people, in all ranks of society, from mem?
bers of the Queens' household down to a travelling tinker 8c vagraunts
and tramps. I have wandered about in these Islands, sleeping and living
[in] hovels, feeding scantily, 8c risking rough weather in crosey boats,
amongst these stormy Hebrides; and though I certainly understand
your hunger after writings 8c connections, I prefer to keep mine "for
Scotland and for 'me' as the Song says." ... I have sent you a couple of
ballads and I wish you every success in your undertaking; but I am too
much of a (v?)bagrant to collect for you. I was at Luxor when your first
letter, through somebody reached me 8c shall be off somewhere else by
the time this reaches you.
Despite the implications, however, the correspondence continued
and the subject of collecting continued to be a topic. Early in the cor?
respondence (which ended only with Campbell's death), Campbell
had urged Child to "do in Yankee dooelle dum as I did here . . . for
the people of this old Country are now in the new world" or "if you
must have written collections of old date gathered in these British
Isles, your best plan is to set your minister [Lowell] to gather them,
and to come over yourself
"
(16 August 1881). Later, Campbell re?
turned to Lowell: "If you will glean here [the British Isles] your best
plan is to incite your Minister for the United States to ask every lady
he meets to give him copies of ballads from her private music books;
& from memory" (24 August 1881). He actually sent Child things he
remembered and collected from family members; a version of Child
75, Lord Lovel, was included in ESPB as well as the tune for Child 12,
Lord Randal. On 17 March 1883, he wrote, "I have no doubt that I
can get you the air of Randal. I can't write it, but I can sing it, possibly
through a telephone to you"?an intriguing possibility. Campbell
comes across in the letters as a lively person, almost bigger than life,
and his letters are actually quite playful and entirely different in tone
from most of those Child received.
Campbell was obviously infected with enthusiasm for Child's project
and kept his ears open, made enquiries and, finally, was instrumental
in finding a manuscript for Child. His letters about the possible manu?
script, in the hands of an anonymous "Manuscript Man," no doubt tan?
talized Child. Campbell had written, "I am going to make your mouth
water. A friend of mine, owns an old Scotch house & a Library, in which
are two Manuscript Volumes of Ballads" (1 October 1881). Eventually
these did reach Child, through Lowell's diplomatic pouch.
Like Hill Burton in the Clyne letter, Campbell could not keep
himself from talking about matters that interested him, but which do
not seem to have fit into Child's textual and comparative foci. One
letter describes the process of remembering quite vividly:
These two lines I had forgotten but on reading over the written, I remem?
bered them. This shews how ballads get broken, 8c how men who make a
practice of reciting and singing, can often recover fragments by repeating
as much as they can remember. Old story men out in the Hebrides have
come back to me after a nights work, and have filled in gaps left in songs
dictated to me overnight. They all agree in saying that old stories and
verses learned in boyhood come back to them at night when their minds
are directed to the subject. I find that it is so with my own memory. Give
the first lines of songs which I have learned, and words 8c tunes run off
the reel like a fishing line with a salmon at the end of it [Campbell was
a great fisherman]. (24 August 1881)
He also remarked several times on the question of transmission:
The Queen's Maries is a genuine old ballad which probably was composed
at the time, 8c sung all over the Country, as last speeches 8c confessions
are now, by ballad singers. In the lapse of time the original composition
orally transmitted, has altered, according to natural rules which govern
such things as certainly as changes in language are ruled (n.d.)
In another letter, he wrote: "I find that everybody alters. ... I sup?
pose that my version of this ballad is unique in that I have altered words
emphasis & all manner of details without intention" (11 October 1884).
Child actually did a bit of research for Campbell in return on the water
levels in the Mississippi for the previous thirty years; the letters that ad?
dress this topic are the only ones from Child that Campbell seems to have
chosen to keep, presumably because they touched on a current interest
of his (NLS MS 50.6.7). All of Campbell's advice was good and had Child
followed it, ESPB might well have been a very different work.
As it turned out, however, Child had found a Scottish correspondent
who was very much in tune with his project and whose contributions are
so massive and in sync with Child's plan that, in the end, Child could
not separate their work. This collaborator, this "corresponding editor
from Scotland," was a Scottish legal clerk, William Macmath. A native
of Galloway who spent his working life in Edinburgh, Macmath read
about Child's project in the Notes & Queries appeal already mentioned.
He wasted no time getting in touch in early 1873; with a lapse of several
years, his correspondence with Child?over the course of which he
became effectively Child's partner?lasted for the rest of Child's life
and encompasses over two thousand separate items.
Child's project became Macmath's obsession: he lavished most of
his creative energies on it for almost thirty years. Child acknowledged
his contributions in all of the "Advertisements" (prefaces) he wrote
for the parts of ESPB, with statements such as "Mr Macmath, whose
accuracy is not surpassed by photographic reproduction, has done
me favors of a like kind, and of many kinds," "has been most ready to
respond to every call for aid," "has been prodigal of time and pains,"
"for help of every description," and
A considerable portion of this eighth number is devoted to texts from Abbotsford.
Many of these were used by Sir Walter Scott in the compilation
of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; many, again, not less important
than the others, did not find a place in that collection. They are now
printed either absolutely for the first time, or for the first time without
variation from the form in which they were written. All of them, and others
which were obtained in season for the Seventh Part, were transcribed with
the most conscientious and vigilant care by Mr Macmath, who has also
identified the handwriting, has searched the numerous volumes of letters
addressed to Sir Walter Scott for information relating to the contributors
and for dates, and has examined the humbler editions of printed ballads
in the Abbotsford library; this without remitting other help.
On the face of it, these acknowledgements are generous, but a close
look at the extensive correspondence between the two men reveals that
these kind words do not nearly describe the full extent of Macmath's
work on Child's behalf. Evidences of his many interventions are found
only in the manuscript volumes he put together after Child's death.
What then are the specific ways in which Macmath helped Child?
Because of Macmath, the Scottish materials came to dominate. He
found manuscripts, collected texts, copied those manuscripts, and
he sometimes served as middleman in purchase arrangements. His
interventions, the barrage of notes and references he sent, led to the
historicizing turn of many prefatory notes?the attempts to locate
the narrative strand in the historical record, to discover the events
which formed their basis, and even to identify the historical person?
ages. Macmath was instrumental in recognizing the importance of
identifying and knowing about the reciters of the materials: in fact
the materials Macmath gathered, using his skills as a legal clerk, about
Mrs. Brown of Falkland?biographical or genealogical materials, bap?
tismal records and witnesses, etc.?have been mined by subsequent
scholars. Additionally, Macmath understood the mind-set of various
situations and participants, often advising Child on how to proceed.
To bolster Child's ability to include historical materials, he sent him
massive amounts of information, often in little folded notes bound
with thread. Once he wrote, "my theory is that you should have before
you, or at least be cognizant of, every scrap, good, bad and indifferent,
that has been published regarding the Ballads up to the moment of
your going to press" (12 August 1873). He laboriously copied historical
notes from various sources in a beautiful, clear hand and sent Child
book references and page numbers, enabling Child to build up the
library collections at Harvard. He frequently urged Child to avoid
secondary sources as invariably incorrect. Among the most extensive
and extraordinary copying he did on Child's behalf was at Abbotsford,
where he spent parts of his summer holidays for three years identifying
texts and letters of relevance to Child's project?so in tune with it and
so aware of Child's concerns and priorities! Toward the concluding
parts of ESPB, Child would in fact send Macmath lists of materials to be
included in the next part: Macmath would then search for additional
texts, remind Child where to find versions among the materials he had
already sent, and send relevant historical documentation. Macmath
read each part as it appeared, sending Child pages of corrections and
suggestions, most involving corrections at the word level, indicating
the detail with which he read.
Over time, the two men developed a partnership, a way of working
together. There was never any explicit discussion of this, which may explain why Child failed to realize its extent. They talked back and forth
across the Atlantic about various issues, large and small, often about
inclusion. Macmath made his own sentiments known, writing in 1893:
I have the strongest feeling that you are more likely to be censured for
sins of omission than for those of inclusion, at least among general read?
ers and British and American critics. I grant the case may be different
with the Ballad authorities of the Continent of Europe, who may know
better what a Popular Ballad is, and in whose eyes you wish to appear as
knowing as well as they do! (21 October 1893)
Macmath could in fact be even more grandiose:
In after times, indefinitely onwards from now, all those with any knowledge at all who wish to find anything that was ever, at any time, or by an
person, called a 'Ballad,' will look for it in your Work,?and in the majority
of cases ought to be able to find it, or at least some mention of it, there.
The names of such pieces as you do not print should be passed through
a General Index, and a statement made regarding them, either singly, or
collectively, or in batches, why they do not appear,?the why naturally be?
ing that they are not, in your judgment, Popular Ballads (20 July 1893).
Both men worked through letters, the epistolary methodology providing them with a means of gathering and sharing information. Child
had a big picture in mind and supplemented letters with books and
the library; he was the orderer, the maker of lists, and the assimilator.
Macmath focused on the small details, gathering information through
letters as well as face to face. He was on the ground, sometimes even
in "the field." Child once wrote Macmath that he believed that the two
of them were "more interested in british ballads than the rest of the
world" and in another, moaned, that "if you and I could have begun
just a hundred years ago what a different show we might have made of
ballads" (Hornel, 20 September 1880, in Macmath n.d.). The men talked
of the "ballad cause." They were in it together. Yet Child was clearly the
final authority and Macmath was sometimes annoyed when some of his
opinions and information were ignored. It is, however, impossible to
over-estimate Macmath's role in the making of Child's ballads.
ESPB was nearly complete when Child died. His student, colleague,
and friend George Lyman Kittredge, who had for years been adding
bulk to the comparative materials surrounding individual ballads, was
his chosen successor. Not only did he complete ESPB, most particularly
the tenth and final part, but he also wrote the biographical sketch
printed in Volume I, an early version of which had been published
in the Atlantic Monthly. As Child's chosen literary executor, he spent
some twenty years arranging the remaining manuscript materials into
thirty-three primary volumes (and many auxiliary ones) that reveal his
understanding of Child's plan and process. At Harvard he was heir to
Child's leadership role in the Department of Modern Languages, to
courses, and in library acquisitions, and he established, with others, the
Child Memorial Library. Together with Child's eldest daughter Helen
he edited the one-volume edition known as the Sargent & Kittredge
handbook in 1904. To it he attached his own view of balladry, a statement
greatly influenced by his classmate, another former student of Child,
Francis B. Gummere. Kittredge became the arbiter of the ballad and
folksong world: he encouraged collecting and became a clearinghouse
for collections and a broker for publications.
Kittredge may well have begun to help Child with comparative
materials when he was a student. There are many evidences of his
interventions, most in the Additions & Corrections, and most marked
with the initials G.L.K. In all, he provided materials for almost fifty of
Child's 305 ballads, offering information for some numbers multiple
times. Often he provided the Child number, followed by the parallel
materials, then an appropriate quotation, and concluded by giving
the source. The identification of the comparative material by short?
hand suggests the motific and thematic systems later worked on and
developed by one of his students, Stith Thompson. We find "fighting on stumps" (which he traces to the English Charlemagne Romances),
"disenchantment by kissing a serpent," "soporific effect of harping,"
and many others identified in the ballads and then shown to exist in
other literatures.
In arranging Child's papers he ordered the material in such a way
as to reveal the multiple and simultaneous tasks with which Child
was involved in ESPB: chief among these were the gathering of the
texts and the related task of winnowing the true from the false, the
authentic from the inauthentic. Additionally, he had to explore the
ballad and similar literatures of related linguistic traditions for parallel
narrative material. Kittredge's arrangement illustrates these foci and
the role played by correspondence, in multiple languages, with an
international and informal network of scholars interested in aspects
of this project.
When he worked with Child's daughter Helen on the handbook,
he was concerned that the one volume afford "a conspectus of Eng?
lish and Scottish ballad literature" and hoped that his introduction
would "sum up, as simply and judicially as may be, the present state of
a very complicated discussion." His summary statement about ballad
authorship is instructive:
The characteristic method of ballad authorship . . . [is] improvisation in
the presence of a sympathetic company which may even, at times partici?
pate in the process. ... It makes no difference whether a given ballad
was in fact composed (or even written) in solitude, provided the author
belonged to the folk, derived his material from popular sources, made
his ballad under the inherited influence of the method described, and
gave it to the folk as soon as he had made it,?and provided, moreover,
the folk accepted the gift and subjected it to that course of oral tradition
which we have seen, is essential to the production of a genuine ballad. . . .
The popular ballad is a fluid and unstable thing.
These comments anticipate the work of Harvard students Phillips
Barry and Albert Lord. Throughout the first third of the twentieth
century, Kittredge and Harvard were recognized as "a center of folk
song activity in this country" (letter from Herbert Halpert, 10 March
1937, under W=Works Progress Administration). No longer limited to
ballads, the field was expanded to include folksongs in general and a
number of students shifted from poetic narrative to the study of prose
narrative. Yet ballads were never entirely forgotten and a quotation he
used multiply, from Cotton Mather, illustrates Kittredge's continued
awareness of balladry and his attachment to New England, where he
always lived:
I am informed, that the Minds and Manners of many People about the
Countrey are much corrupted, by foolish Songs and Ballads, which the
Hawkers and pedlars carry into all parts of the Countrey. Byway of Anti?
dote, I would procure poetical Composures full of Piety, and such as may
have a Tendency to advance Truth and Goodness, to be published, and
scattered into all Corners of the land. (4 October 1713)
Among Kittredge's correspondence there is ample evidence, how?
ever, that Harvard students, whatever their foci, continued to make con?
nections with European academic centers and scholars as they pursued
the comparative studies that Child had earlier made a hallmark of his
ballad work. In doing so, they were definitely following in the footsteps
of Francis James Child, even making contact with some of the Conti?
nental scholars who had provided Child with comparative materials.
Child's connection with them, their shared intellectual interests and
Zeitgeist, help to reveal how connected ESPB was to European foci.
Kaarle Krohn, Guiseppe Pitre, Axel Olrik, Alekandr Veselovskii, and
Henri Gaidoz were among his correspondents; they, like Child, were
involved in a cultural, literary project to study and preserve popular
materials of their own individual regions or countries, but which often
had much in common with other regional and national literatures; they
shared the comparative method, valued the philological tradition and
worked especially with the spoken and written word (that preserved
from the past) from the folk, which was designated as "popular," "popolari,"
and various cognates. They embraced one another's work,
forming an international support network sending references and
parallel materials from their own researches. They published reviews
and notices of one another's work; they exchanged publications and
photographs and engaged in a variety of acts of scholarly kindness
despite the upheavals of the larger world.
Child's many correspondents, the epistolary web he created both
at home and abroad, yielded valuable help and information. More
importantly, copies of ESPB were shared through this correspondence
network and Child was able to expand the critical audience for his
work. European scholars, in particular, were in the position to see how
Child's work fit into the larger scholarly endeavor of which they were
all a part. Child's Scottish correspondent/collaborator Macmath had
presciently recognized this reception as perhaps the central one when
he wrote that Child clearly wanted the approbation of the "Ballad
authorities of the Continent of Europe, who may know better what a
Popular Ballad is, and in whose eyes you wish to appear as knowing
as well as they do!" Child was one participant in the production of
knowledge in the second half of the nineteenth century that marks,
in some ways, the heyday of the formation of the disciplinary focus
on the "popular."
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Francis James Child's enduring, if flawed, work, was the work of many men, whose contributions
varied according to their abilities and knowledge. Child took all their in?
terventions and formed them into the five-volume work that continues
to be used: there is a new reprint edition and a digital edition; and we
still reference a ballad as a Child ballad. Child's ballad work is also linked
historically to earlier interests of our shared disciplinary formation:
the interest in antiquity?here texts, their de- and recontextualization;
the focus on that antiquity's textuality, its oral, vernacular and popular
character; the attention to language as providing the underlying unity
of the textual body in English, thus connecting to the great philologi?
cal tradition. These issues remain a part of our intellectual DNA and
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, as a representative product, by
its survival and resurgence, exhibits the vitality of the intellectual pro?
cesses and premises that brought it forth. As Bauman and Briggs say
of the Grimms, one might also say of Child: he "helped to transform
symbolic forms that had been, in . . . [his] view, tied to particular places
and social identities and transform them in such a way that they could
circulate in a free textual market" (2003:217).
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana
Acknowledgments
An earlier, oral version of this article was delivered as the Phillips Barry Lecture at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in Atlanta in October, 2005. Research for this article, part of a larger project on the making of Child's ballad collection, was made possible by initial support from the Houghton Library, Harvard College with a Joan Nordell Fellowship, and the College of Arts and
Sciences Humanities Institute, Indiana University, and sustained support from
the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. I gratefully acknowledge that support.
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