Bluegrass Messengers

"The Genuine Ballads of the People": F. J. Child and the Ballad Cause
by Sigrid Rieuwerts
Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 31, No. 1/3, Triple Issue: Ballad Redux (Jan. - Dec.,1994), pp. 1-34

"THE GENUINE BALLADS OF THE PEOPLE": F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
Sigrid Rieuwerts

THE MISSING BALLAD CONCEPT
On April 26, 1896, F.J. Child wrote to William Walker in Aberdeen: "I have promised to print in the Autumn, and I want very much to be done with the business" (1930:33). The "business" Child was referring to was the publication of his monumental collection of the English and Scottish popular ballads. But before the autumn of that year, on the 11th of September 1896, Child died and it was left to George Lyman Kittredge, Child's nominated successor, to see the last part of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads through the press. Kittredge found the manuscript "substantially complete, with the exception of the Bibliography, and nearly ready for the press" (in Child 1882-98, 5:vi), yet even so the final part was not published before January 1898.

Since the ninth part, published in April 1894 by Child himself, completed the collection of ballads, the tenth part contained no ballad texts with the exception of additions and corrections to already published ballads. The last part was intended rather as the key to the whole collection, giving "a list of sources, a full and careful glossary, an index of titles and matters and other indexes, and a general preface" (Child 1882-98, 5:v), as Child's advertisement read in April 1894 for the concluding part ten.

The general preface by Child, which might have explicated his intentions, never saw the light of day: "Among the Child MSS preserved in Harvard College Library there is a piece of yellow notepaper with a single paragraph at the top and several abbreviated notes, mostly references to books, at the bottom. This little scrap Child scribbled out in August 1896 in an effort to begin at last his long-awaited essay on ballad literature. He died almost in the very act of writing it" (Reppert 1974:197).

D. K. Wilgus has argued that for Child's subsequent reputation, "it may be as well that he wrote no more" (1959:6), since in the absence of an authoritative and definitive article on ballad theory, everyone could lay claim to his work without being faced with a contradictory statement made by the most famous ballad scholar himself. As a result, Child has been perceived as having no ballad concept at all: "One hundred years of criticism," observed Michael Bell recently, "have made Francis James Child a hollow man without theory and without place in the great chain of ideas that forms the modern discipline of Folk Studies" (1988:298).

Such a dismissal is all the more surprising s ince to folklorists, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads has long been the standard collection and reference book in ballad studies. Thelma James's famous dictum of 1933 that a "Childballad"- as the English and Scottish popular ballad is often referred to- "means little more than one collected and approved by Professor Child" (1933:59) has been repeated time and again and regrettably, it is still widely accepted today that we have no record of Child's "criteria of selection" (see McCarthy 1990:2).

Given the fact that subsequent scholars have found defining the genre difficult, if not impossible, it is neither "our good fortune" (Andersen 1991:39) nor a matter for regret that Child has left us no clear-cut and easy-to-apply definition of the English and Scottish ballads. Albert Friedman, for example, has argued that it is impossible to define the traditional ballad by anything but example (1961:6-7).' It seems that many scholars have not gone far enough into the materials to realize that Child had specific selection criteria and knew exactly what he wanted to publish: the genuine ballads of the people. Thus, one might say Child ultimately defined the popular ballad not so much in word as in deed, not so much by theorizing as by editing. And although the collector and editor of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads would probably be the first to acknowledge that he may not always have abided by his own distinctions and principles, he offered the popular ballads to the extent of his knowledge of sources. Our discussions of the inclusion of one ballad and the omission of another fall short if they fail to take into account both Child's ballad concept and the availability of the material.

James's highly critical article of 1933, which has since then been basic to most discussions of the ballad, therefore needs to be challenged: the content changes she rightly notes between Child's earlier and later ballad collections, and indeed even between the different editions of one and the same collection, are not indicative of a missing ballad concept, but of a changing one. In the following essay, Child's changing perception of the ballad as a genre will be described in some detail.

THE CHANGING BALLAD CONCEPT
Child edited ballads for more than forty years, and it can hardly come as a surprise that his ideas about ballads changed over that period of time. And yet, many ballad scholars today would not even say that Child had a ballad concept, let alone a changing perception of the genre. It has been argued that all of the information about his concept of the genre are "scattered, often contradictory, observations" (Andersen 1991: 39) mainly to be found in his correspondence, his students' lecture notes, and his headnotes to individual ballads. To make matters worse, only a fraction of the materials is available in printed form: Harvard College Library still houses huge stores of unprinted ballad material relating to Child, such as the Child Manuscripts in thirty-three folio volumes. There is definitely no scarcity of material on Child's ballad concept, but only an urgent need to make his correspondence and notes available.

And yet, even the little in print of Child's thinking on the subject of English and Scottish popular ballads, namely his article "Ballad Poetry," is known only secondhand to most American folklorists (Bell 1988:286): the original article appeared in a now forgotten encyclopedia and is not readily available. Indeed, if "Ballad Poetry" had not been the source for W. M. Hart's study on "Professor Child and the Ballad," it probably would not have been known at all. Bell argues that Child's article deserves much greater attention because "the essay on Ballad Poetry contains a theory of popular culture important in its own right and central to the development of American folklore scholarship in the twentieth century" (1988:298). In his admirable discussion of the article, Bell not only stresses that Child had a formal ballad theory, but also that his essay "Ballad Poetry" is "an accurate, reasonable, if abbreviated, resume of his views on the ballad" (1988:285). Still, Bell fails to realize-as have many before him-that this is only one of a chain of articles the editor of The E nglish and Scottish P opularB allads w rote on ballad poetry. Child's hitherto unknown contributions to ballad theory two articles reprinted here for the first time in order to ensure that not another generation of ballad scholars will be accused of knowing Child's ballad concept only secondhand-are not only important in their own right but also mark a crucial stage in Child's thinking on the popular ballads.

Both are concerned with the publication of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript (1867-68). When we take a closer look at Child's ballad concept and the particular steps leading to The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, it is evident that the publication of the Percy Folio Manuscript was the most important step of all. Child's changing ballad concept will be at the center of our attention and we will be particularly concerned with establishing how and why this American professor came to edit the folk ballads of the Englishspeaking world in the first place, while considering what motivated him and why he did it in the way he did.

TWO ARTICLES IN THE NATION: QUESTIONS OF AUTHORSHIP
It is not difficult to see why in one hundred years of criticism it has almost completely gone unnoticed that Child wrote more than one article on ballad poetry: Child published his views on the popular ballads in The Nation, whose general practice was to print articles anonymously.[2]

The two articles reprinted here are both reviews of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, edited by Frederick J. Furnivall and John W. Hales (1867-68). The first review, entitled "Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript," was published August 29, 1867; the second article, which includes a discussion of James Maidment's Scotish Ballads and Songs (1868), was entitled "Ballad Books" and appeared on September 3, 1868. Child is not listed in the index to The Nation as author of either article, but this was to be expected. As the editor explains in his preface, authors' names were not published and "only the longer articles..., and in many volumes only a small percentage of these" have the contributors' names pencilled against their respective contributions in a partially annotated and incomplete file held in the office of The Nation (Haskell 1951, l:iv).

In the case of the articles on Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, the author's name is absent even from the files. Child is, however, attributed with the authorship of "Ballad Books" in Poole and Fletcher's Index to Periodical Literature (1882:88). In addition, the article corresponds closely with information we have from other sources. For example, the author of "Ballad Books" suggests that the Ballad Society should reverse its decision and publish the manuscript ballads first and the broadside collections later, and we know from Child's letter of March 26, 1872 to Grundtvig (see Hustvedt 1970:246-47), and also from Furnivall's First Report of the Ballad S ociety, that this suggestion had been made by Professor Child (1869:3).

Although Child has never been credited with the earlier review of the first volume of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, the evidence is equally compelling. In the first place, the two reviews are very similar in style and content. And in the second, the review includes detailed information on the Percy Manuscript that only very few people, among them Child, could have had at that time. It is well documented that ever since Ritson's attacks on Percy's integrity and his questioning of the very existence of the folio manuscript (see Furnivall and Hales 1867-68, l:xvii-xxiv), the public had not been allowed even a glimpse of it, let alone access to a list of its contents (Percy 1765, l:lxxxi-lxxxv; Furnivall and Hales 1867-68, l:ix).

Given that the manuscript was shrouded with secrecy until it went on loan to Frederick James Furnivall, his letter to the editor of The Nation in response to the first review is of particular importance:

Sir: In the name of my fellow-editor of the Percy Folio, Mr. Hales, and for myself, I thank y ou heartily for the friendly notice of our workt hata ppearedi n your number of August 29. It is the most appreciativea nd the best review we have had, evidently written by a man who knows his subject better than any one who has noticed in print our work here; and coming as it does from your side of the water, from a writer who evidently knows our old literature so well, it has been a double pleasuret o us to read it. (Furnival1l 867b:279)

Since Furnivall was in charge of the Percy Folio Manuscript, he could not possibly have entertained any doubts as to the author of the first Percy Folio Manuscript review in The Nation. And when Furnivall describes the reviewer as an American who is thoroughly familiar with ballad poetry and old literature, he is clearly pointing in FrancisJames Child's direction. Of all his friends and helpers, the Harvard professor is the only one who matches Furnivall's description.

Indeed, Child is even mentioned by name in connection with Chaucer. The reviewer urges the Early English Text Society "to do something, and do a great deal, for Chaucer, of whom we have still but one text, and who is, critically speaking, unreadable, and will be, until his language has been thoroughly studied in several printed versions" (Child 1867:167). Furnivall responds to this plea by setting up the Chaucer Society and he specifically says that it was for "Professor Child of Harvard" that this society for the printing of Chaucer texts was established in 1868 (Furnivall 1869:3).[3]

CHILD'S EDITORIAL PROJECTS- BRITISH POETS
When we put Child's two articles from The Nation into the context of his
thinking on the subject of ballad poetry, it is important also to realize that
Child first came to publish ballads in his role as general editor of a huge
series of reprints of British poetry. In the mid-nineteenth century, English
literature was very popular in America, but it proved difficult to obtain
copies of the original editions, especially of the older English literature.
Thus, the market for reprints flourished, and Child's list of publications
indicates that he seems to have taken a particular interest in meeting this
demand: 'The text carefully revised, and illustrated with notes, original and
selected, by Francis J. Child" is the subtitle of The Poetical Works of Edmund
Spenseri,s sued by Child in 1855, but it is applicable to almost all his works.
The first book Child published, at the age of just twenty-three, was a new
edition of Four Old Plays (1848). According to Kittredge, 'This was a remarkably
competent performance. The texts are edited with judgment and
accuracy; the introduction shows literary discrimination as well as sound
scholarship, and the glossary and brief notes are thoroughly good. There
are no signs of immaturity in the book, and it is still valued by students of our
early drama" (in Child 1882-98, l:xxiv). Kittredge's praise of the young
Child's sound scholarship, however, contrasts sharply with a contemporary
review of Four Old Plays. Child presented a copy of the book to J. Payne
Collier, the first chairman of the Percy Society, who welcomed it as "a most
creditable and well-edited republication" (1850:209), but thanked him at
the same time by pointing out important errors and inaccuracies. He uses
Child's book "to impress upon editors in this country the necessity of
accuracy, not only for the sake of readers and critics here, but for the sake of
those abroad, because Mr Child's work illustrates especially the disadvantage
of the want of that accuracy" (Collier 1850:209). Collier acknowledged
5
Sigrid Rieuwerts
that Child was "in no way responsible" for the poor re-publication, since he
used a defective reprint in England for his own reprint in America (1850:210).
However, his scathing review leaves the reader in no doubt that Child's book
is no piece of sound scholarship:
UnfortunatelyM, r.C hild reprintedi n Americaf rom this defectiver eprinti n
England; but his sagacity prevented him from falling into some of the blunders,
although it could not supply him with the wanting line; and his notes are
extremelyc leara nd pertinent.I shall not go over the thirty-nineo ther errors.
(Collier 1850:209)
Child set particular store by the accuracy of the text and to be found guilty of
reprinting from a defective copy could not have boosted the young editor's
confidence. Nevertheless, two years later, in 1852, Child accepted the general
editorship of the reprints of British Poets in 130 volumes. Although the
reprints were advertised as "a complete collection . . . from Chaucer to
Wordsworth," they were neither complete nor did they include a volume on
Chaucer. The missing Chaucer volume is all the more remarkable since
Child made his name as a Chaucer expert only a few year later in 1862 with
his influential article, humbly entitled "Observations on the Language of
Chaucer." Child must have felt that he could do no real justice to Chaucer.
Here we see an interesting parallel to his later ballad collection The English
and Scottish Popular Ballads: without a preceding publication of the Percy
Folio Manuscript, no proper ballad collection is possible, nor a Chaucer
edition without more Chaucer texts in print.
ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH BALLADS
Child's 130-volume edition of British Poets was based on an earlier collection
(The AldineEdition of the British Poets [1830-53]) and thus consisted mainly of
reprints he saw through the press with alterations and additions. This
involved Child sometimes correcting the text, sometimes collecting and
editing the poetry from existing work, and sometimes even leaving volumes
for others to edit (for example, his friendsJames Russell Lowell and Charles
Eliot Norton). However, Child himself "selected and edited" the narrative
poetry of unknown British poets and published them as English and Scottish
Ballads in eight volumes (1857-59). In his preface to the first volume of
1857, the editor proclaims:
The compilation now offered to the public will be found more comprehensive
in its plan than any of its kind which has hitherto appeared. It includes nearly
all thati s knownt o be left to us of the ancienbt alladso f Englanda nd Scotland,
with a liberals election of those which are of later date. Of traditionalb allads
preserved in a variety of forms, all the important versions are given, and no
genuine relic of olden minstrelsyh, oweverm utilatedo r debasedi n its descent
to our times, has on that account been excluded, if it was thought to be of
value to the student of popular fiction. (Child 1857-59, l:ix)
6
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
English and ScottishB alladsw as intended to give the "genuine relics of olden
minstrelsy," a plan reminiscent of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,
which offered "select remains of our ancient English bards and minstrels"
(Percy 1765, 1:7). Child also follows Percy in his arrangement of ballads into
"Books" and their further subdivision "chiefly according to the order of
time" (Percy 1765, 1:8): "In the several books, the ballads are grouped with
some attention to chronological order, the probable antiquity of the story,
and not the actual age of the form or language, regulating the succession,"
Child explains in his preface (1857-59, l:x). Furthermore, in his choice of
material, Child is heavily influenced by Reliques, even taking many of his
texts directly from Percy's collection.
Romances, ballads of non-popular origin or transmission, broadsides,
and lyrical pieces are to be found juxtaposed to the genuine traditional
ballad in both collections, and the only difference between them consists in
Child's exclusion of ballad imitations. Although he raises some questions as
to their value, he nevertheless excludes the ballad imitations on practical
rather than aesthetic grounds: 'The addition of another volume to a compilation
already so bulky, seemed highly objectionable. Besides, whatever may
be the merit of the productions in question, they are never less likely to
obtain credit for it, than when they are brought into comparison with their
professed models" (1857-59, 5:iv).
Given so much agreement in scope and arrangement, there can be no
doubt that Child's English and Scottish Ballads was modelled after Percy's
Reliqueso fAncientEnglishP oetryI. t should be borne in mind that Child was no
ballad expert at that time. The role he saw for himself was that of a faithful
editor whose duty it was to select and edit a comprehensive collection of
early English poetry for his series that could serve to illustrate "the gradual
improvements of the English language and poetry from the earliest ages
down to the present" (Percy 1765, 1:8). And was there any better way to
accomplish this than to make a widely respected ballad edition like Percy's
his model? Thus, there was no need for Child to concern himself with
questions regarding the nature of the popular ballads, their origin and
transmission. He could fully concentrate on his role as editor. Indeed, he
wants it to be known that he has not only taken great pains in selecting the
most authentic copies, but has also "carefully adhered to the originals as
they stand in the printed collection" (1857-59, l:xi). He would have liked to
edit his texts from the manuscripts themselves, but with none available he
has to resign himself to printed collections. In addition, since many of the
texts in English and ScottishB allads stem from the Reliques,C hild is especially
interested in the Percy Folio Manuscript in order "to be able to cancel or
register the numerous alterations which Bishop Percy made in the ballads
taken from his famous manuscript, but that invaluable document has fallen
into hands which refuse an inspection of it even to the most eminent of
English scholars" (1857-59, l:xi).
This particular reference to the Percy Folio Manuscript and its whereabouts
has undergone remarkable changes in subsequent editions of English
and ScottishB allads. In the rewritten preface of May 1860, Child complains,
"We have not even the Percy Manuscript at our command, and must be
content to take the ballads as they are printed in the Reliques, with all the
editor's changes. This manuscript is understood to be in the hands of a
dealer who is keeping it from the public, in order to enhance its value"
(1860, 1:xi). And again in August 1866, the information regarding the
location of the manuscript is updated. It is "still in the hands of the
grandchildren of Bishop Percy, but unfortunately they are not disposed to
give it to the world" (1866,1 :xi). Eventually, in a Postscript to the text, we are
informed, 'The Percy Manuscript is soon to be printed by the Early English
Text Society" (1866, l:xi). The rewritten prefaces clearly exemplify the
importance the Percy Manuscript was taking on for Child: not having the
manuscript at one's command has at first been only a regrettable inconvenience,
but it then became an absolute prerequisite for further ballad
collections. And yet, Child's Englisha nd ScottishB alladswas the most comprehensive
ballad collection of its time: there should not have been a need for
a further collection in any case. So why was Child so desperate to have the
Percy Manuscript made available?
THE SECOND EDITION OF ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH BALLADS
A comparison of the various editions of English and Scottish Ballads, and
especially of the prefaces of 1857 and 1860, surprisingly shows that these
changes were prompted by Svend Grundtvig's Danmarksg amleF olkevisera,
ballad collection that would have been available in 1857, for it had been
published in parts from 1852 onwards. Child, however, was at that time only
marginally interested in the subject of ballad poetry, and he does not seem
to have taken any notice of the Danish ballad collection until after he
finished English and Scottish Ballads in 1859. "I wish I could leave you Svend
Grundtvig for your leisure moments. I will try to get through with the two
first vols in the course of the vacation," Child writes to Lowell, in a letter
thought to date fromJanuary 1860. He adds, "I mean now sooner or later to
make a clean sweep of the whole field, of Northern ballads at least" (in
Howe and Contrell 1970:12).
Child was indeed to make a "clean sweep" of the whole field with his later
collection, entitled TheE nglish and ScottishP opularB allads (1882-98). "Ever
since I attempted an edition of the English and Scotch ballads," he writes in
his first letter to Svend Grundtvig on March 26, 1872, "I have had the
intention of making some day a different and less hasty work. I had at the
time neither leisure nor materials, and as you, better than anybody, could
perceive, but a very insufficient knowledge of the subject. The collection was
made as a sort of job-forming part of one of those senseless huge collections
of British Poets" (in Hustvedt 1970:246).
8
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
Insufficient knowledge and lack of material were singled out as the two
main reasons for the dissatisfaction Child felt about his own work. He
praised Danmarksg amleF olkevisera s "a work which has no equal in its line,
and which may in every way serve as a model for collections of National
Ballads" (1860,1 :xi). But although Grundtvig's ballad collection served him
as a starting point and model for a different and less hasty work, Child soon
realized that the role of the editor of Danish ballads was remarkably different
from that of the editor of English ballads: "Such a work as Grundtvig's
can only be imitated by an English editor, never equalled, for the material is
not at hand" (1860, l:xi). Not having a firm grasp of the subject nor having
the material at hand were the two major obstacles to a new and definitive
ballad collection. And indeed, it was to take Child more than twenty years to
secure manuscripts and material from oral tradition and to gain sufficient
knowledge of the subject to feel confident enough to commence editing
and printing the standard work on English ballads, The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads.
PERCY'S AND GRUNDTVIG'S COLLECTIONS AS ROLE-MODELS
An early glimpse of what his later standard work on ballads was supposed to
look like can be caught by examining Child's reworking of the English and
Scottish Ballads in 1860 and 1866. In the knowledge of Grundtvig's ballad
collection, Child attempted to give the second edition of English and Scottish
Ballads a new direction, but the scope for introducing changes without
altering the character of the book altogether was necessarily very limited.
Although only a few changes could be made to the material itself (Child
drops some short romances and adds one or two ballads), the material was
now presented in a different light by enlarging some of the prefaces
considerably or even apologizing for some original notes and commentaries.
'The Introductory Notices prefixed to the several ballads may seem dry and
somewhat meagre," he confesses, and apologizes also for the very imperfect
references to ballads in other languages: 'These prefaces are intended to
give an account of all the printed forms of each ballad, and references to the
books in which they were first published. In many cases also, the corresponding
ballads in other languages, especially Danish, Swedish, and German, are
briefly pointed out. But these last notices are very imperfect" (1860, 1:x).
The differing prefaces provide ample illustrations for Child's change of
heart and mind. While he offers his first compilation of English and Scottish
Ballads in 1857 to the student of popular fiction as being "more comprehensive
in its plan than any of its kind which has hitherto appeared" (1857, 1:
ix), in the rewritten preface of the second edition of English and Scottish
Ballads in 1860, Child merely states that "these volumes have been compiled
from the numerous collections of Ballads printed since the beginning of the
last century" (1860,1 :vii). The shift of emphasis is even more apparent when
it comes to the role of oral tradition. In 1857, following in Percy's footsteps,
9
Sigrid Rieuwerts
Child firmly places the ballad in the past and speaks of it as a "genuine relic
of olden minstrelsy, (however mutilated or debased in its descent to our
times)." In 1860, under the influence of Grundtvig's collection, Child not
only offers "the ancient ballads of England and Scotland," but also "nearly all
those ballads which, in either country, have been gathered from oral tradition,-
whether ancient or not" (1860, 1:vii).
In the light of Danmarksg amle FolkeviserC, hild makes these changes to
English and Scottish Ballads in May 1860 "in order to give the collection a
homogeneous character" (1860, l:xii). This homogeneity, of course, could
only be achieved by applying a clear ballad concept-something which was
conspicuously lacking from the first edition. In the second edition, the
important distinction between the true popular ballad and artificial literature
which was later to form the basis of The English and Scottish Popular
Ballads is made for the first time:
Widely different from the true popular ballads, the spontaneous products of
nature, are the workso f the professionalb allad-makerw, hich make up the
bulko f Garlandsa nd BroadsidesT. hese, thoughs ometimesn ot withoutg race,
more frequently not lacking in humor, belong to artificial literature,-of
course to an humble department. (1860, l:vii)
And although this distinction comes close to being retracted by a footnote,
which states, 'This distinction is not absolute, for several of the ancient
ballads have a sort of literary character, and many broadsides were printed
from oral tradition" (1860, l:vii), from this point on it is nevertheless the
guiding light in Child's search for material.
The reshaping of English and Scottish Ballads in 1860 is a significant step
towards TheEnglisha nd ScottishP opularBalladso f 1882-98, which to a certain
degree can be called Child's third attempt to produce the standard work of
ballad poetry. While the first edition of Englisha nd ScottishB allads (1857-59)
was modelled on Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and the second
edition of 1860 was inspired by Grundtvig's Danmarksg amleF olkeviserb, oth
forces can still be seen at work in his crowning ballad collection.
The second edition does exhibit "very vital changes" (cf. Hustvedt
1970:212) and should not simply be classed as a reprint of English and Scottish
Ballads, because only this edition contains a clear ballad concept and lends
support to the need for a thorough investigation into the available material
from oral tradition and manuscript sources.
CHILD'SD EVELOPINGC ONCEPTO F THE POPULARB ALLAD
INSUFFICIENT MATERIAL
It was pointed out earlier that according to Child, Grundtvig's Danish ballad
collection could in no way be equalled by an English editor for lack of
support by the people: "All Denmark seems to have combined to help on his
10
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
labors; schoolmasters and clergymen, in those retired nooks where tradition
longest lingers, have been very active in taking down ballads from the
mouth of the people, and a large number of old manuscripts have been
placed at his disposal" (Child 1860, 1:xi).
In contrast to the Danish situation, Child could not fall back on a large
number of old manuscripts nor rely on the assistance of schoolmasters and
clergymen. Almost all the texts in English and ScottishB alladsh ad to be given
from printed collections, but since Child valued a particular ballad primarily
for its antiquity and poetic quality, the source of the material did not
really matter. However, if his new collection TheEnglish and Scottish "Popular"
Ballads (emphasis mine) was to include only "ballads from the mouth of the
people," then he needed to concentrate on material from oral tradition and
manuscripts. By shifting his emphasis from the poetic to the "popular"
quality of the ballad, the Percy Folio Manuscript assumed an even greater
importance. Its non-availability became a great burden to him and he
passionately believed that the "greatest service that can now be done to
English Ballad-literature is to publish this precious document" (1860, l:xi).
The announcement he could make at the end of his 1866 edition of
English and Scottish Ballads-that the Percy Manuscript was about to be
published-must have given him enormous pleasure, since he had tried for
many years to secure the valuable manuscript. The founder of the Early
English Text Society, FrederickJames Furnivall, who as an Englishman felt it
"a disgrace that an American should take more interest in an English MS.
than oneself, and the more a disgrace that in this case the genuineness or
falsity of the text of a score of our best ballads was involved" (Furnivall and
Hales 1867-68, l:x), made several attempts to secure the precious manuscript.
Despite Furnivall's failure, Child "pegged away" and eventually, after
he added fifty pounds to Furnivall's offer of a hundred pounds to Bishop
Percy's grandchildren, the right was obtained to hold the manuscript for six
months (later extended to thirteen months) to make and print one copy of
it. Thus, "the cause of the printing of Percy's MS.," as Furnivall testifies in his
preface, was
the insistence, time after time, by Professor Child, that it was the duty of
English antiquarian men of letters to print this foundation document of
English balladry, the basis of that structure which Percy raised, so fair to the
eyes of all English speaking men throughout the world. Above a hundred years
had gone since first the Reliques met men's view, a Percy Society had been
born and died, but still the PercyM anuscriplta yh id in EctonH all,a nd no one
was allowed to know how the owner who made his fame by it had dealt with it,
whetherh is treatmentw asf oul or fair. (Furnivalal nd Hales 1867-68, l:ix)4
The Percy Society mentioned by Furnivall was specifically established in
1840 for the "Publication of Ancient Ballads, Poetry, and Popular Literature."
Among the fifteen members of the council of that society, we find
11
Sigrid Rieuwerts
many names associated with songs and ballads, including William Chappel,
John Payne Collier, Thomas Crofton Croker,J. O. Halliwell, Edward Rimbault,
and Thomas Wright. AlsoJames Maidment, the local secretary for Edinburgh,
and his fellow citizen David Laing distinguished themselves as members. No
membership list is attached to the First Annual Report of the Percy Society,
but we are told that the number of members, limited by the laws of the Percy
Society to 500, was "rapidly filling." Though no record has yet come to light,
it would be surprising, given Child's interest in poetry and ancient ballads, if
he had not also been a member of the Percy Society. In any case, it is
apparent from his "Bishop Percy's Manuscript" review and from his list of
ballad collections in English and ScottishB allads that he was familiar with the
society's printing proposals and its actual publications (The Percy Society
1841:13-16).
CHILD'S FIRST ARTICLE IN THE NATION
In his first Percy Manuscript review, Child criticizes the Percy Society for its
poor management and its "excessive antiquarianism" (1867:167). In particular,
"a little more good sense, including a stricter plan and a dash of financial
shrewdness" were wanting. Among its publications are found, he said, "some
reprints of Garlands, and two poorvolumes of ballads, but with these a large
amount of miscellaneous trash which it makes one yawn to think of' (167,
emphasis mine). The Percy Society would not have failed to gain sufficient
support and to ensure for itself a lasting good name, Child argues, if it had
proposed to print "all the Romances of Chivalry and the National Ballads,
properly so called" or indeed had attempted to give to the world in full the
Percy manuscript, which is "the one thing which a society bearing the name of
Percy might have expected to undertake before any other" (167). But the dissolution
of the Percy Society was determined in March 1852 (see "Percy
Society" 1852:238), and it was left to the Early English Text Society, or more accurately
to its founder, FrederickJames Furnivall, to step aside from its regular
course and to edit and issue the Percy Manuscript as a special publication.
Not unexpectedly, Child is full of praise for the Early English Text Society
in his first review. He lifts the Society high above other printing clubs
established in England and commends it warmly to "the patronage of
Americans." In fact, Child devotes more space to the discussion of the Percy
Society and the Early English Text Society than to the book he was supposed
to review and to which he himself had contributed so much. When it is
mentioned, for example, that "each piece is prefaced by an excellent
introduction, all, except one or two, by Mr. Hales," Child could have
acknowledged the "one or two" prefaces he himself wrote (167; see also
Furnivall and Hales 1867-68, l:xxv). Therefore, when Child-an insiderstates,
"We do not know when an important literary task has been undertaken
with more spirit or executed with more fidelity," he clearly means
12
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
every word of it. While Child says little about the actual publication of Bishop
Percy'sF olio Manuscriptb y Furnivall and Hales, he deals with the manuscript
itself in more detail, mainly by answering three questions: what we were to
expect of the manuscript, what it really looked like, and what its publication
meant for our understanding of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
Regarding the first question, the manuscript was expected to contain
"more than thirty of the best and most ancient of the English ballads; in fact,
about one-fifth of all that now remains of a precious species of literature in
which Great Britain, with (or without) the single exception of Denmark,
holds a pre-eminence" (167). Since at least some of the ballads were known
to have been "improved" by Percy prior to their publication, and since some
of the best of these are exclusive to the Percy Manuscript, there was no way
of knowing what to expect in terms of individual texts. Regarding the
famous manuscript itself, no nicely written and illuminated manuscript was
to be expected, but, as Child put it, "a dirty, scrubby, ill-written, mutilated
old book" (167). Only those, however, who worked with the actual manuscript
could have known that "it is a folio of 521 pages, imperfect by reason
of the loss of the first and last pages and of one half of fifty-four pages at the
beginning" (167).
As to its contents: "nearly two hundred pieces of all sorts, mostly ballads
and romances, with fortunately only the smallest admixture of moral and
didactic dulness" (167). Some of the pieces, however, are grouped together
"for good reasons" and published separately in "an appendix" entitled Loose
and Humorous Songs. These pieces are, as Child says, "the opposite of moral
and didactic, not the harmless coproliteso f a remote age, but rank and
noxious specimens of comparatively modern dirt" (167). Loose and Humorous
Songs is the only volume for which Child's assistance is not acknowledged.
He even warns his friend Lowell about these unacceptable, dirty
pieces from the Folio Manuscript: 'There is an appendix of 'Loose Songs,"'
he writes, "of which the editors have made a very ostentatious concealment,
which if it ever comes in your way I advise you to put up the chimney (where
it will be in its element) or into the fire-where the authors no doubt are!!
They are just as dirty as they can be, and I am glad that I am not particularly
responsible for their coming out" (in Howe and Cottrell 1970:18).5
In the same letter ofJune 23, 1867, to Lowell, Child privately shows his
disappointmerit about the first volume of the Percy Manuscript: "Poor stuff
most of it and in the main not new-but it's all genuine, bad or good, and
answers my purpose" (in Howe and Cottrell 1970:18). Overall, the aesthetic
value of the Percy manuscript material was disappointing. And yet, with the
genuineness of the ballads being Child's main concern, the publication of
the Percy Folio Manuscript answered his purpose: he had the satisfaction of
working with the authentic texts from the manuscript and was now able to
go beyond the printed versions in Percy's Reliques.
13
14 Sigrid Rieuwerts
With the publication of the folio manuscript, Percy's editorial practice of
refurbishing and restoring texts was fully exposed for the first time. However
disappointed Child might have been, he does notjoin in the chorus of
those who think "scorn of polish and elegance, and declare the bishop a
greater botch than the scribe" (167). Although he equally does not approve
of Percy's puffing out, pomatuming, stuffing and powdering of texts,6 he
shows remarkable sympathy for the bishop:
Nothing shall induce us to speak with disrespect of Bishop Percy. Any one
can see from his prefaces that he loved a ballad-not wisely, but well. He was
no prig and no pedant, and through all his apologies it is plainly perceptible
that in his heart he much preferredt he "artlessp roductionso f the old rhapsodists"
t o the compositionso f some "whoh ad all the advantageso f learning."
We also incline to think that he knew the people of his time, and that that
"polished age" would not have tolerated the uncouth ballads of the manuscript
had they not been first trimmed and doctored by the bishop. (167)

CHILD'S SECOND ARTICLE IN THE NATION
How Percy trimmed and doctored his folio manuscript material is explained
more fully in Child's second review, written after the publication of the
manuscript was completed in three volumes in 1868. In it, Child accuses
Percy of destroying "the affecting simplicity and artless beauties of the
originals," the very reason ballads are admired, by correcting and completing
for a polished age "a story which was already complete." Child's verdict
in his first review that the taste shown in the choice of pieces was excellent is
reiterated in his second with an important modification: "Percy did, it is
true, give us the best ballads; but he gave only one, we believe, as it stands in
the manuscript, and that only in an appendix" (1868:192). Only one "genuine"
ballad in Percy's Reliques-a startling revelation. Considering also that
less than a quarter of its contents was actually printed by Percy, the enthusiasm
over the manuscript and its publication must surely have dwindled.
Nevertheless, to Child and those who set "a true estimation on popular
poetry" (1868:192), it was a relief to the mind to have this "invaluable and
strictly unique collection of poetry" rescued from "the chances of destruction
and the niggardliness of its owners" and to have placed it "within the
reach and under the guardianship of thousands" (1867:167).
Thinking about countless other ballads that "perished like the generations
of the leaves," Child made himself melancholic, and yet, he knows it is
an irreversible process. Ballad times are gone, or, as Child put it more
graphically, "A supercivilized man of the eighteenth or nineteenth century
can no more think, or unthink, himself into the mental condition of a
ballad-maker than he can put off his flesh and sit in his bones" (1867:167).
Child clearly believed that the time for ballad-making is long gone. And
unless we want to return to a primitive and uncivilized state of society, "all we
can do now, is to put beyond danger what we happen to retain, and to seek
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
out and save what is just ready to perish" (Child 1868:192-93). Therefore,
having secured the Percy Folio Manuscript was regarded as only the first
step. The next step has to be to try to rescue what was about to be lost.
And indeed, Child was not alone in his endeavors. In his "Foreword,"
written at the completion of the publication of the Percy Folio Manuscript
on March 12, 1868, Furnivall offered to continue with the publication of
ballads:
As we have made a fair start at Ballads with this Percy book, it seems a pity to
stop till we have reprinted the whole of the rest of the collections. We are
bound to go throughw ith them. I have therefore made arrangementsf or a
BalladS ocietyw, hichw ill begin to publishn ext year,a nd works teadilyt hrough
the whole of our Ballad collections. One can notbe content with selections and
scraps.( Furnivalal nd Hales 1867-68, 1:xxv-xxvi)
More specifically, Furnivall proposes to print
the whole of Pepys's Collection in the library of Magdalene College, Cambridge,
the Roxburghe and Bagford Collections in the British Museum, the
Ashmole,R awlinsona, nd Douce in the Bodleian,M r.E wing'sC ollection( if he
will allow it), and such MS. Ballads as can be found,-as they stand, without
selection or castration.( Furnivalal nd Hales 1867-68, l:xxv)
PUBLICATIONS OF THE BALLAD SOCIETY
The Ballad Society was thus the direct outcome of Furnivall's work on the
Percy Folio Manuscript. In fact, we learn from a letter to Grundtvig that
Child himself had suggested "the forming of a Ballad Society for the
collecting and printing of all such remains of popular ballads as could be
found in the memory of the people or in manuscripts" (in Hustvedt
1970:262). Although the proposed society attracted about 200 members
before publication commenced, it did not arouse only unbounded enthusiasm.
To have "all our Ballads" in print is clearly too much for the editor of
Notesa nd Queries:" Greata s is Mr. Furnivall's energy, we doubt if it will suffice
to carry this scheme into effect. What moderate library will be ably [sic] to
devote room for the volumes which these ballads alone will occupy?" ("Ballad
Society" 1868:428). Sensing that some subscribers might be frightened
away by the prospect of being swamped with an enormous number of ballad
volumes, Furnivall restates the purpose of the Ballad Society in his reply to
Notes and Queries: "We do not mean to print all the English ballads, new as
well as old, but only the comparatively old ones in the known collections"
("Ballad Society" 1868:480). Altogether he envisages thirty volumes, with,
he hoped, three volumes to be issued annually, requiring not more than ten
years to complete the Ballad Society's work.
Furnivall, however, turned out to be overly optimistic. Right from the
beginning, the Ballad Society was beset with problems and not even Child
could lend his wholehearted support. In the First Report of the Ballad Society,
15
Sigrid Rieuwerts
Furnivall gives an account of Child's reaction to the proposed scheme of the
society: "Professor Child of Harvard, for whom the print of the Percy Folio had
been undertaken, for whom the Chaucer Society had been established, at once
said that printed Ballads first, and Manuscript ones afterwards, would not do
for him; he wanted his horse before his cart, not after it" (1869:3).
Child voices his criticism of the proposed proceedings of the Ballad
Society not only privately to Furnivall, but also publicly in his second review
of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript. The Harvard scholar makes it very clear
that although he is generally pleased with the scheme of the Ballad Society,
he is "not favorably struck by the order of proceedings": why should they
publish the great collections of broadsides or flying leaves first, and the
manuscript ballads only "when Mr. Furnivall, or whoever their editor may
be, has had time to collect them," he asks (1868:193). Child leaves no doubt
that he despises ballads of the Roxburghe and Pepys quality. To him the
broadside collections are just dark heaps that needed to be turned in case
there is a true jewel, a genuine ballad of the people, hidden among them.
He therefore tries to convince Furnivall, who was after all the founder and
director of the Ballad Society, to change its scheme and attend to the
manuscript ballads first, because these, he argues, are not only "more in
danger of destruction," but their value is also "immeasurably greater"
(1868:193). By having the ballads from manuscripts published first-and
indeed, he feared it might never come to that if all the broadside collections
had to be published first-Child hopes to discover "a few fine ballads" and
obtain "the genuine texts of corrupted and highly 'edited' ones already
known" (1868:193).
Again, the emphasis is on the genuineness of the ballads and their poetic
quality. The texts themselves, their language and style, was Child's overriding
concern. But not so for Furnivall: he judged ballads, even those from
manuscripts, to be "poor in verse." To him, they were only "valuable as
illustrations of the social state and life of their time" (Furnivall and Morfill
1868-72, l:v). As long as the texts were genuine and not highly edited, the
ballads answered Furnivall's purpose, and it did not really matter whether
they were taken from a manuscript or a broadside collection. To him, there
was no particular need to go beyond the printed collections, and indeed, he
doubted that there were still "old Ballads of high imagination, deep pathos
or sweet fancy" in manuscript form that had not already been printed over
and over again (Furnivall and Morfill 1868-72, l:v). Child, on the other
hand, thought it probable that much might still be gathered of the genuine
popular ballads by ransacking public libraries and hunting up private
manuscripts as well as tracing the singers themselves, along with the nurses
who taught them: "From these sources, public libraries, parish scrap-books,
and the memory of living persons, it is probable that much might be
gathered" (1868:193).
16
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
Thus, even before the Ballad Society had issued a single volume, it
became clear that Child's and Furnivall's views on the ballad, and especially
their reasons for offering them to the public, were very different. If the
genuine ballads were indeed "showing the first efforts of ancient genius, and
exhibiting the customs and opinions of remote ages" (Percy 1765, 1:1-2;
emphasis mine), then Child was primarily interested in the former and Furnivall
in the latter. But for whatever reasons, they were united in their attempts
to recover the forgotten literary traditions of the English-speaking world.
BALLADS FROM MANUSCRIPTS
Furnivall only '"veryr eluctantly" gave way to Child's request and set about
"to get together a small volume of manuscript ballads" (Furnivall 1869:3). It
was not intended to be the first year's issue of the newly formed society, but
as it happened, neither the Roxburghe nor the Civil War collections could
be produced in time. Furnivall felt it would be disastrous to postpone the
commencement of the Ballad Society's publications, and therefore, he
hastily put together Ballads from Manuscripts, or as the subtitle more aptly
describes the first part of the collection: "Ballads of the Condition of
England in Henry VIII.'s and Edward VI.'s Reigns." Furnivall only succeeded
in producing the first of the two volumes envisaged. The cause of
this failure, he said,
famous ballad scholar himself. As a result, Child has been perceived as
having no ballad concept at all: "One hundred years of criticism," observed
Michael Bell recently, "have made FrancisJames Child a hollow man without
theory and without place in the great chain of ideas that forms the modern
discipline of Folk Studies" (1988:298).
Such a dismissali s all the more surprisings ince to folklorists, TheEnglisha nd
ScottishP opularB allads has long been the standard collection and reference
book in ballad studies. ThelmaJames's famous dictum of 1933 that a "Childballad"-
as the English and Scottish popular ballad is often referred to-
"means little more than one collected and approved by Professor Child"
(1933:59) has been repeated time and again and regrettably, it is still widely
accepted today that we have no record of Child's "criteria of selection" (see
McCarthy 1990:2).
Given the fact that subsequent scholars have found defining the genre
difficult, if not impossible, it is neither "our good fortune" (Andersen 1991:39)
nor a matter for regret that Child has left us no clear-cut and easy-to-apply
definition of the English and Scottish ballads. Albert Friedman, for example,
has argued that it is impossible to define the traditional ballad by anything but
example (1961:6-7).' It seems that many scholars have not gone far enough
into the materials to realize that Child had specific selection criteria and knew
exactly what he wanted to publish: the genuine ballads of the people. Thus,
one might say Child ultimately defined the popular ballad not so much in
word as in deed, not so much by theorizing as by editing. And although the
collector and editor of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads would probably
be the first to acknowledge that he may not always have abided by his
own distinctions and principles, he offered the popular ballads to the
extent of his knowledge of sources. Our discussions of the inclusion of one
ballad and the omission of another fall short if they fail to take into account
both Child's ballad concept and the availability of the material.
James's highly critical article of 1933, which has since then been basic to
most discussions of the ballad, therefore needs to be challenged: the content
changes she rightly notes between Child's earlier and later ballad
collections, and indeed even between the different editions of one and the
same collection, are not indicative of a missing ballad concept, but of a
changing one. In the following essay, Child's changing perception of the
ballad as a genre will be described in some detail.
THE CHANGINGB ALLADC ONCEPT
Child edited ballads for more than forty years, and it can hardly come as a
surprise that his ideas about ballads changed over that period of time. And
yet, many ballad scholars today would not even say that Child had a ballad
concept, let alone a changing perception of the genre. It has been argued
that all of the information about his concept of the genre are "scattered,
2
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
often contradictory, observations" (Andersen 1991: 39) mainly to be found
in his correspondence, his students' lecture notes, and his headnotes to
individual ballads. To make matters worse, only a fraction of the materials is
available in printed form: Harvard College Library still houses huge stores
of unprinted ballad material relating to Child, such as the Child Manuscripts
in thirty-three folio volumes. There is definitely no scarcity of material
on Child's ballad concept, but only an urgent need to make his correspondence
and notes available.
And yet, even the little in print of Child's thinking on the subject of
English and Scottish popular ballads, namely his article "Ballad Poetry," is
known only secondhand to most American folklorists (Bell 1988:286): the
original article appeared in a now forgotten encyclopedia and is not readily
available. Indeed, if "Ballad Poetry" had not been the source for W. M.
Hart's study on "Professor Child and the Ballad," it probably would not have
been known at all. Bell argues that Child's article deserves much greater
attention because "the essay on Ballad Poetry contains a theory of popular
culture important in its own right and central to the development of
American folklore scholarship in the twentieth century" (1988:298). In his
admirable discussion of the article, Bell not only stresses that Child had a
formal ballad theory, but also that his essay "Ballad Poetry" is "an accurate,
reasonable, if abbreviated, resum6 of his views on the ballad" (1988:285).
Still, Bell fails to realize-as have many before him-that this is only one of
a chain of articles the editor of TheE nglish and ScottishP opularB alladsw rote
on ballad poetry. Child's hitherto unknown contributions to ballad theorytwo
articles reprinted here for the first time in order to ensure that not
another generation of ballad scholars will be accused of knowing Child's
ballad concept only secondhand-are not only important in their own right
but also mark a crucial stage in Child's thinking on the popular ballads.
Both are concerned with the publication of BishopP ercy'sF olio Manuscript
(1867-68). When we take a closer look at Child's ballad concept and the
particular steps leading to TheEnglisha nd ScottishP opularBallads,i t is evident
that the publication of the Percy Folio Manuscript was the most important
step of all. Child's changing ballad concept will be at the center of our
attention and we will be particularly concerned with establishing how and
why this American professor came to edit the folk ballads of the Englishspeaking
world in the first place, while considering what motivated him and
why he did it in the way he did.
was "the newness and difficulty of the subject to me"
(Furnivall 1869:4).
By printing the ballads from manuscripts first, as Child had suggested, the
Ballad Society not only failed to attract new subscribers, but almost certainly
lost some. Furnivall's Ballads from Manuscripts was far from favorably received.
As one greatly disappointed reviewer complained in Notes and Queries,
"Our national ballads may be counted by hundreds, we might say thousands;
and in the two Parts now issued, containing some three hundred and fifty
pages, we have some dozen ballads (?)" ("Notes on Books" 1869:255). Moreover,
he entreats the Ballad Society to steer clear of the two rocks ahead of
them to avoid suffering shipwreck:
In the first place, they must be careful to print ballads and ballads only: not
poemsl,i ke the Imageo f Ypocres(iew hich numbers 2,576 lines, fills eighty-six
pages, and has already been printed... ) ... In the second, not to overload the
balladsw ith such a masso f illustrationa nd dissertationa s is here hung on to
the ballad "Nowe a dayes"-the ballad occupies eight pages, the comment
nearly a hundred. ("Notes on Books" 1869:255)
Furnivall rejected this well-intentioned and well-justified criticism out of
hand, making it known that he believed he understood his own business
better than any of his critics. He was especially adamant when it came to his
illustrations and introductions: "It is not for the jingle that historical Ballads
are to be sought, but for the light they throw on the sufferings, the sympa-
17
Sigrid Rieuwerts
thies, the hopes, the fears, the life, of Englishmen in former days; and these
must be illustrated from contemporary documents" (Furnivall and Morfill
1868-72, 1:ix-x).
Subsequent parts of Balladsf rom Manuscriptsh, owever, containing ballads
chiefly from the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, were no longer selected and
edited by Furnivall, but by W. R. Morfill. Although the new editor heeded
the advice of the reviewer and filled his pages with more texts than notes and
commentaries, Ballads from Manuscripts was nevertheless a disaster for the
Ballad Society. Apart from failing to ensure a favorable public response and
to attract subscribers, it discredited the study of ballad poetry. The items in
Ballads from Manuscriptswere in the main neither ballads nor material taken
from manuscripts, and were therefore nothing like the genuine ballads of
the people Child had in mind when he proposed the publication, or indeed
the Ballad Society.
The truth is that Child himself had wished to be editor of the manuscript
ballads, and the collection he offered to the Ballad Society was nothing less
than what was later to be The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. It was, as
Child recalled in his letter to Grundtvig, "the fear of dying with nothing
done" which prompted him to action (in Hustvedt 1970:246). His proposal
to undertake "a proper edition of the English and Scotch ballads," however,
was turned down by his enthusiastic friend. Furnivall argued that Child's
project could not even be contemplated for lack of material; and besides,
the Ballad Society had already committed itself to print the Roxburghe and
Pepys collections and that that work would take twenty years to complete.
Child did not accept Furnivall's rejection, and after much persuasion,
"Furnivall half consented to introduce the genuine national ballad into his
scheme" (Child, in Hustvedt 1970:247). Ever since working on his second
edition of English and Scottish Ballads, Child had wanted to make a proper
ballad collection, and in a way it seemed appropriate to make it part of the
Ballad Society's publications. Given the society's poor financial situation
and its long-term commitment, it is, however, difficult to imagine that Child,
by using the society instead of a publisher, could really have escaped all
control "both as to the extent of the work and the rate of publication"
(Child, in Hustvedt 1970:246). Since Child's collection was meant to be the
standard work on ballads, he was in no doubt that it would occupy him for a
number of years.
FINAL PREPARATIONS FOR THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS
On February 17, 1872, barely four years after the Ballad Society was set up,
Svend Grundtvig wrote to Child for the first time, thanking him for "the very
flattering mention" he had been given in English and Scottish Ballads and
offering his help and cooperation for a new and revised edition (in Hustvedt
1970:243). Grundtvig saw in Child, "a fellow-scholar, who knew beforehand
18
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
the literature in question, and knew how to distinguish the very different
kinds of poetical productions, older and later, popular and artificial, which
by English editors, ever since the time of Bishop Percy, have been mixed up
indiscriminately under the general head of 'Old Ballads"' (in Hustvedt
1970:243). Child was, of course, delighted with Grundtvig's letter. He knew
only too well that without Danmarks gamle Folkeviserh, e would not have
distinguished older popular from later artificial poetical productions. The
prospective editor of the genuine English ballads was very pleased indeed to
accept Grundtvig's assistance, especially since Furnivall only half-consented
to Child's proposal and even this "only lately." "Your letter at once puts
matters into a different position," Child replied to Grundtvig on March 26,
1872, and added, "I feel sure that I could do the work somewhat as it ought
to be done.... In the second place, I should at once drop the Ballad Society
and seek for a publisher" (in Hustvedt 1970:247).
As we have noted before, Child saw lack of material and insufficient
knowledge of ballad lore as the two main obstacles he faced in preparing
the standard ballad collection. With the publication of the Percy Folio Manuscript,
at least "the foundation document of English balladry" (Furnivall
and Hales 1867-68, 1: ix) was at his disposal. And with Grundtvig offering his
advice and criticism, the second obstacle was also removed. Confident that the
work could now be done properly, Child launched an appeal for "Old Ballads"
in Notesa nd Querieos n January 4, 1873. It is interesting to read on what kind of
material TheP opularBalladso ftheEnglishR aceb yP rofessorEJC. hild,a s Grundtvig
called the collection (in Hustvedt 1970:252), were to be based:
I am engaged in preparing an edition of the English and Scottish Ballads,
which is intended to embracea ll the truly" popular"b alladsi n our language,
in all their forms. I purpose [sic] to get in every case as near as possible to
genuine texts,c ollatingm anuscriptsa, nd earlyp rintedb ooksa nd broadsides,
and discardinge ditorialc hangesn ot criticallyjustifiableT. o do this to the full
extent, it is essentialt hat I should have the use of the originalt ranscriptso f
ballads derived from recitation in recent times. (1873:12)
Child voiced his interest in even the smallest fragment of a ballad whether
printed or unprinted, including ballads from oral tradition:
Something also must still be left in the memory of men, or better, of women,
who have been the chief preserverso f ballad-poetryM. ayI entreat the aid of
gentlewomen in Scotland, or elsewhere, who remember ballads that they have
heard repeated by their grandmothers or nurses? May I ask clergymen and
schoolmastersl,i vingi n sequesteredp laces,t o exert themselvest o collectw hat
is left among the people? (1873:12)
Any material was to be sent to Furnivall. Among those who responded was
William Macmath, who was later to become Child's chief correspondent on
ballads (see Reppert 1956:512, pass.).
19
Sigrid Rieuwerts
Only a few months later, in the summer of 1873, Child suddenly found
himself sent to England for health reasons. The eight weeks he spent in
England and Scotland enabled him to meet some of his correspondents and
to trace various ballad manuscripts, among them those of Herd, Buchan,
Motherwell, andJamieson. "I... did all I could to forward my ballad-work,"
he remarked to Grundtvig (in Hustvedt 1970:258), and with the feeling of
having accomplished something, he set about his ballad work with new vigor
on his return to Harvard.
"BALLAD POETRY"
One of the results of his tour abroad was an article published in Johnson's
Cyclopaediian 1874. In this article, called "BalladP oetry," he elaborated on
the distinction, adopted from Grundtvig for his second edition of English
and ScottishB allads,b etween the popular ballads, as spontaneous products of
nature, and the broadsides, as an artificial literature. The true popular
ballad, or "the genuine ballad of the people," as he preferred to say, was to
Child what "effusions of nature" were to Percy or Volkspoestieo Herder. The
English language, he complained, has "no unequivocal name" for it and
Child sometimes even used the German term Volksballade(s ee Child in
Hustvedt 1970:262).
Child viewed the popular ballad as "a distinct and very important species
of poetry" (1874, 1:464; see also Rieuwerts, forthcoming). The conditions
for its creation and survival no longer exist, he argued, and consequently
the popular ballad is no longer a living genre. "Its historical and natural
place is anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art, to which it has
formed a step, and by which it has been regularly displaced, and, in some
cases, all but extinguished" (Child 1874, 1:464). Child particularly emphasized
the artlessness of the true popular ballads, "the absence of subjectivity
and of self-consciousness" (Child 1874, 1:464). Consequently, broadsides,
described as "products of a low kind of art," along with ballads from the
mouths of "professional singers" or the hands of "modern editors" have no
place in the ballad collection of the people (Child 1874, 1:466).
Since Child saw the popular ballad as "founded on what is permanent and
universal in the heart of man," he considered it to be truly international in
character (Child 1874, 1:464). Clearly, Child viewed his role as "editor of
English ballads" within the wider context of collecting and preserving the
genuine poetry of all peoples (Child, in Dal 1978:189). When he speaks of
English ballads, he does not, as Harker erroneously assumes (1985:105),
refer to the ballads of the English nation, thereby excluding, for example,
the Irish and Scottish; rather, he uses that expression to denote all the
popular ballads in the English language. And it is interesting to observe that
Child's article focuses mainly on ballad poetry not in the English language.
20
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
"I have been accumulating in our College Library ballad-books in all languages,"
Child told Grundtvig in 1872 (in Hustvedt 1970:246). As a member
(and for almost thirty years secretary) of the Library Council of Harvard
University, he was well positioned to do so.
In seeking this distinct type of poetry, Child hoped to recover the earliest
literary records of man. All traces of the popular ballad, however small, were
welcome, and in this respect, questions of definition did not even arise. For
Grundtvig, Child's adviser on scope and arrangement, the matter is quite
simple: 'The chief point is that the edition contains every bit of genuine
ballad lore, and consequently all that may be genuine, and I might say, also all
that has been so" (in Hustvedt 1970:260). It is better to include a ballad no
more than ten percent genuine than to lose a ballad one hundred percent.
Following his Danish friend's advice, Child included ballads of popular
origin, "attested by foreign parallels in folk-literature," and also ballads of
popular transmission, attested by several genuine versions, i.e., versions "not
prosaic, over-refined, cynical, sophisticated, sentimental, unnatural, trite, or
moral" (Hart 1906:806,866).
In sum, the year 1874 was an important landmark for the subsequent
publication of TheE nglish and ScottishP opularB allads. Not only could Child
report that, with one exception, "I shall have all the materials which I am to
look for" (in Hustvedt 1970:265), but he had also formed a definite idea of
the ballads he meant to insert. While for English and ScottishB allads he had
felt "obliged to include everything that the English had been accustomed to
call Ballad" (in Hustvedt 1970:262), in the new edition he was finally
determined to include only the genuine popular ballads.
PUBLICATION OF THE "GENUINE POPULAR BALLADS"
Although the preliminary work seemed to have been completed by 1874,
the first part of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads did not come out
before December 1882. On receiving the first volume of Child's collection,
Grundtvig admitted to "some feeling of paternal pride, and perhaps a bit of
national vanity, seeing the plan and the principles of editing and illustrating
popular ballads, fostered by me 35 years ago, now universally acknowledged
and even carried into execution on the other side of the ocean" (in
Hustvedt 1970:296-97). And Child gratefully repaid his debt by saying that
he had "closely followed" the plan of Grundtvig's Old Popular Ballads of
Denmark and had furthermore "enjoyed the advantage of Professor
Grundtvig's criticism and advice" (1882-98, l:ix). It is important to realize,
however, that Child also owed a great deal to another man, and consequently
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads was not dedicated to Svend
Grundtvig, but to FrederickJ. Furnivall, which he, according to a common
friend, in "all ways so truly deserved" (Lowell, in Howe and Cottrell 1970:52):
21
Sigrid Rieuwerts
MyD ear FurnivallW: ithoutt he PercyM S. no one would pretend to make a
collection of the EnglishB allads,a nd but for you that manuscriptw ould still,
I think,b e beyondr eacho f man,y et exposed to destructivec hances.T hrough
youre xertionsa nd personals acrificesd, irectly,t he famousa nd preciousf olio
has been printed; and, indirectly, in consequence of the same, it has been
transferredto a place where it is safe,a nd open to inspection.T his is only one
of a hundred reasons which I have for asking you to accept the dedication of
this book from
Yourg ratefulf riend and fellow-studentF, .J . Child.
CambridgeM, ass.,D ecember,1 882. (Child 1882-98, 1:[5])
Furnivall and Grundtvig were both instrumental in bringing about the publication
of TheE nglish and ScottishP opularB allads, the one by publishing the
foundation document of English balladry, and in a way, also by his failure to
discern and edit the popular ballads, and the other by setting the standard
and advising on scope and arrangement.
By the time the second part of Child's ballad collection appeared inJune
1884, Grundtvig had already died. The deep personal grief Child felt at the
loss of his friend and mentor was matched by his own determination to see
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads completed. For this reason, he took
the precaution of arranging his material into some sort of order to ensure
continued publication of the work should the necessity arise, and he also
nominated George Lyman Kittredge as his successor. Relieved and encouraged
that the publication of Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser continued after
Grundtvig's death on July 14, 1883, Child wrote to Axel Olrik:
That Grundtvig'sm agnificenta nd absolutelyi ncomparablew orks hould not
be finishedh as seemed to me almosta tragicc ircumstanceb, oth for the glory
of Denmark and for the world of letters.... Now you will complete it: his chief
wish will be gratified, his reputation will be secured, for ever, and yours also.
(in Dal 1978:189)
In this revealing letter Child speaks of the unfinished ballad collection as
a tragic circumstance. Only a finished work would be for the glory of
Denmark and the world of letters, and would spread Grundtvig's fame.
There can be no doubt that Child himself would have wanted to finish The
English and Scottish Popular Ballads for the glory of the English-speaking
world and for the world of letters as well as for his own fame, since these
three considerations had initially motivated him. With The English and
ScottishP opularB allads, Child sought to present all the truly popular ballads
in all their forms in the English language, thereby documenting an early
stage of literature as well as accomplishing something for which he would be
remembered. And Child certainly completed what he set out to do by giving
all the known ballads to the extent of his knowledge of sources. The notes to
the individual ballads, the indices and glossaries, and even the general
preface were to him only of secondary importance.
22
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
Although much has been made of the fact that Child did not live to write
the general preface to TheE nglish and ScottishP opularB allads, I would argue
that his work is nevertheless complete. For even if Child had lived to see the
publication of the last part of the collection through the press himself, he
almost certainly would not have included the long awaited general preface.
It is well known that Child found it very difficult to start on the preface,
postponing it time and again. In the last two years of his life, Child was in no
"favourable condition" for writing a carefully elaborated introduction. He
had in mind "a general preface on the characteristics and history of popular
ballads," for which he was disposed-quite literally-to "review all the ballad
poetry of the world" (in Walker 1930:18). This is a very important point
often missed by those who attempt to reconstruct Child's unwritten introduction.
Like "Ballad Poetry," the general preface to The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads on the characteristics and history of popular ballads was
never meant to be confined to ballads in the English-speaking world, let
alone to selection criteria. There are more reasons why I regard The English
and ScottishP opularB allads as complete without the general essay on ballad
poetry. In his 1856 introduction to English and Scottish Ballads, he had
announced an "Essay on the History of Ballad Poetry" for the last volume
(Child 1857-59, l:xii). This essay, however, never saw the light of day, not
even in a second enlarged and revised edition, yet nobody to my knowledge
has complained about its incompleteness. This explanatory note, written in
September 1858, appeared in the "Advertisement to Volume V":
It was the Editor's wish and intention to insert in the concluding volume an
essay on the History of Ballad Poetry. Owing to a press of occupations, and
other circumstancesp, artlyu nforeseen,t his purposec ould not be carriedo ut,
in a mannera t all satisfactoryw, ithoutc ausinga n unwarrantablde elayi n the
completion of the work, and the execution of the original design has been
therefore postponed for the present. What has been written by Percy, Ritson,
Scott,M otherwellD, auney,C happell,a nd others, might affordv aluablea ssistance
in such an inquiry, but a wide and thorough examination of the topic is
yet to be made. (Child 1857-59, 5:iv)
Furthermore, Child has been allotted only 250 pages for the concluding
part. As he stresses in a letter to William Walker: "It would be undesirable to
make Part X much bigger than the others, and Part X must absolutely be
the last" (in Walker 1930:26). Even if Child had lived to write his longawaited
essay, he would not have had space for it in his monumental collection:
the posthumously published part already contains 260 pages without the
essay! In short, given the tight printing schedule ("I must begin to print in
October," he writes on August 6, 1896 [in Walker 1930:36]), and his persistent
ill-health, chances are that Child would have slighted the preface in any case.
For Child, ballad collecting and editing became a never ending process,
almost a way of life. It speaks volumes that in 1877, years before any part of
23
Sigrid Rieuwerts
The English and Scottish Popular Balladswas printed, he thought of "making a
second and final edition" (in Hustvedt 1970:274). The one thing that kept
him going to the very end was the burning desire that he, FrancisJames Child,
would give to the world in completeness and correctness all that was left, or all
that could be found, of the genuine ballads of the English-speaking people.
Darwin College
The University of Kent at Canterbury

NOTES
I would like to thankP rofessorM aryE llen Brown,f or withouth ers uggestiona nd encouragementt
his articlew ouldn ot have beens tartedn or withouth ers upporta nd patienceb eenfi nished.
1. See also Shields 1991, p. 40: "The body of song which Child called the 'true
popular ballads' (ESPB I, p. vii) and never really defined except by editing is not easy
to define by other means."
2. Daniel Haskell explains that 'The New York Nation, established in 1865, was
for many years, ... one of the leadingjournals of opinion and literary criticism in the
United States.... [T]he articles and reviews were generally unsigned, although
many of the leading writers and moulders of opinion in this country and abroad were
among its contributors" (1951, l:iii).
3. It is also interesting to note that Child used exactly the same words, namely
that he wanted "to do something" for Chaucer when he wrote his "Observations on
the Language of Chaucer" (1862:445).
4. Furnivall and Hales actually dedicated BishopP ercy'sF olio Manuscript:B allads
and Romances to "Professor Francis James Child of Harvard University, Massachusetts,
U.S. at whose instigation, and to relieve English antiquarians from whose
reproaches (too well deserved,) THIS WORK was first undertaken" (1867-68, l:xi).
5. Child's view that the "dirty"m atter should not have been printed is echoed in
an exchange of letters between a certain Fitzhopkins and Dixon, the editor of the
two poor ballad collections for the Percy Society, in Notes and Queries ("Fastidiousness"
1868).
6. Furnivall used these expressions in describing the "fashionable requirements"
Percy supplied in order to have his ballads accepted by the polite society: "He puffed
out the 39 lines of the Child of Ell to 200; he pomatumed the Heir of Lin till it shone
again; he stuffed bits of wool into Sir Cawline, SirAldingar; he powdered everything"
(Furnivall and Hales 1867-68, l:xvii).
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The Aldine Edition of the British Poets
1830-53. 58 vols. London: William Pickering.
Andersen, Flemming G.
1991 'Technique, Text, and Context: Formulaic Narrative Mode and the Question
of Genre." In TheB allad and OralL iteraturee, d.Joseph Harris, 18-
39. Harvard English Studies No. 17. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
"Ballad Society"
1868 Notesa nd Queries.S eries 4, vol. 1:428,480.
24
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
Bell, MichaelJ.
1988 "'No Borders to the Ballad Maker's Art': Francis James Child and the
Politics of the People." WesternF olklore4 7:285-307.
Child, FrancisJames
1862 "Observations on the Language of Chaucer." Memoirs of the American
AcademyN. ew Series8 :445-502.
[1874] 1902 "BalladP oetry."I n UniversaCl yclopaediaan d Atlas,e d. RossiterJohnson.
Rev. and enl. by Charles K. Adams, 1:464-68. 12 vols. New York:
Appleton.
[Child, FrancisJames]
1867 "Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript." The Nation 5:166-67.
1868 "Ballad Books." The Nation 7:192-93.
1873 "Old Ballads. Prof. Child's Appeal." Notesa nd QueriesS, eries 4, Vol. 11:12.
Child, FrancisJames, ed.
1848 Four Old Plays. ThreeI nterludes:T hersyteJs,a ckJugler,a nd Heywood'sP ardoner
and Frere;a nd Jocasta, a tragedyb y Gascoignea nd KinwelmarshW. ith an
introduction and notes. Cambridge: Nichols.
1853-66 British Poets. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
1855 TheP oetical Workso f Edmund Spenser:T he text carefullyr eviseda nd illustrated
with notes,o riginala nd selectedB. oston: Little, Brown and Company.
1857-59 English and ScottishB allads. 8 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
1860 English and Scottish Ballads. 2nd series. 8 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and
Company.
1866 English and Scottish Ballads. 2nd series. 2nd edition. 8 vols. Boston: Little,
Brown and Company.
1882-98 TheEnglisha nd ScottishP opularBallads.5 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin
and Co.
Collier,J. Payne
1850 "English and American Reprints of Old Books." Notesa nd QueriesS, eries 1,
Vol. 1:209-10.
Dal, Erik
1978 "FrancisJames Child and Denmark after the Death of Svend Grundtvig
1883." Norveg:F olkelivsgranskin2g1 :183-96.
"Fastidiousness"
1868 Notesa nd Queries,S eries 4, Vol. 2:381, 475, 522.
Friedman, Albert B.
1961 The Ballad Revival: Studiesi n the Influenceo f Popular on SophisticatedP oetry.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Furnivall, FrederickJ.
1867a "Bishop Percy's Folio MS." The Nation 4:176-77.
1867b "Bishop Percy's Folio, and the Early English Text Society." The Nation
5:279.
1869 FirstR eporto f the Ballad SocietyJ, anuary 1869. London: Taylor.
Furnivall, FrederickJ., andJohn W. Hales, eds.
1867 BishopP ercy's FolioM anuscript:L oosea nd HumorousS ongs.L ondon: Trfbner.
1867-68 Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances. 3 vols. London:
Trfibner.
25
Sigrid Rieuwerts
Furnivall, FrederickJ., and W. R. Morfill, eds.
1868-72 Ballads from Manuscripts. 2 vols. Hereford: Austin.
Grundtvig, Svend, ed.
1853-90 DanmarksgamleFolkevise5r .v ols. Copenhagen: Forlagt af Samfundet til
den Danske Litteaturs Fremme.
Harker, Dave
1985 Fakesong:T heM anufactureo f British" Folksong1"7 00 to theP resentD ay. Milton
Keynes: Open University Press.
Hart, Walter Morris
1906 "Professor Child and the Ballad." Publications of the Modern Language
Association 21:755-807.
Haskell, Daniel C., comp.
1951 TheN ation: Volumes1 -105, New York,1 865-1917: Indexo f Titlesa nd Contributors.
2 vols. New York: New York Public Library.
Howe, M. A. DeWolfe, and G. W. Cottrell
1970 The Scholar-FriendsL: etterso f FrancisJ ames Child and James Russell Lowell.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.
Hustvedt, Sigurd B.
1970 [1930] Ballad Books and Ballad Men. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1930; New York: Johnson Reprint.
James, Thelma
1933 "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of FrancisJ. Child." Journal of
AmericanF olklore4 6:51-68.
McCarthy, William Bernard
1990 TheB allad Matrix:P ersonalityM, ilieu, and the Oral Tradition.B loomington:
Indiana University Press.
"Notes on Books, etc: Ballads from MSS"
1869 Notesa nd Queries,S eries 4, Vol. 3:255.
The Percy Society for the Publication of Ancient Ballads, Songs, Plays, Minor Pieces
of Poetry, and Popular Literature
1841 Annual Report - Report of the Auditors - Council, 1841-42 - Laws of
the Percy Society - Members' Names. London: Richards.
1852 Notesa nd Queries,S eries 1, Vol. 5:238.
Percy, Thomas
1891 [1765] Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs,
and OtherP ieceso f OurE arlierP oets Togetherw ith SomeF ew of LaterD ate.
Ed. Henry B. Wheatley. 3 vols. London: Swan Sonnenschein.
Poole, William Frederick, and William I. Fletcher
1882 An Index to PeriodicalL iteratureB. oston: Osgood.
Reppert, James D.
1956 "William Macmath and F. J. Child." Publications of the Modern Language
Association 71:510-20.
1974 "F.J. Child and the Ballad." In The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer
and MedievalL iteraturee, d. LarryD . Benson, 197-212. Harvard English
Studies No. 5. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Rieuwerts, Sigrid
n.d. "From Percy to Child: The Popular Ballad as 'A Distinct and Very Important
Species of Poetry.'"I n Balladsa nd BoundariesP: roceedingos f the2 3rd
26
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
InternationalC onferencoe f the Kommissionfu r VolksdichtungL, os Angeles,
June 21-24, 1993, ed. James Porter. Los Angeles: University of California
Press. Forthcoming.
Shields, Hugh
1991 "Popular Modes of Narration and the Popular Ballad. In The Ballad and
Oral Literaturee, d. Joseph Harris, 40-59. Harvard English Studies No.
17. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
[Walker, William]
1930 Letterso n ScottishB alladsf rom ProfessorFrancisJ.C hild to W. W[alker].A berdeen:
Bon-Accord Press.
Wilgus, D. K.
1959 Anglo-AmericanF olksong Scholarships ince 1898. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.
APPENDIX
Two Articles by Francis J. Child
BISHOP PERCY'S FOLIO MANUSCRIPT.*
[published anonymously in The Nation 5 (Aug. 29, 1867:167)]
Of the many subscription printing-dubs which have been set on foot in England during
the last twenty-fiveo r thirtyy ears,o nly the ShakespeareS ociety, the Percy Society, and the
Early English Text Society have offered any great attraction to the mass of the literary
world. The two first of these died some years ago, both, we presume, of excessive antiquarianism,
though the ShakespeareS ocietyw as much less guilty in that way than the Percy.T he
scheme of both was too indefinite. No subscriber could know what he would get in the
course of time, or how long he would have to be a member to complete his set-which is
well known to be a great point with your regular book-buyer. From both we had some good
things: from the Shakespearet, he Chester and CoventryM ysteries,a nd not a few desirable
old plays; from the Percy, a new text of the Canterbury Tales, some reprints of Garlands,
and two poor volumes of ballads, but with these a large amount of miscellaneous trash which
it makes one yawn to think of. Conducted with a little more good sense, including a stricter
plan and a dash of financial shrewdness, these clubs might have lived longer and have gained
a lasting good name. Thus, had the Shakespeare Society proposed to print all the English
Drama anterior to Shakespeare, and the Percy all the Romances of Chivalry and the
National Ballads, properly so called, their scheme, if executed with moderate prudence,
could hardly have failed of sufficient support. The Early English Text Society, let us hope,
will not repeat their mistakes. It has already in three years done quite as much for English
poetry as the Percy Society accomplished in twelve.
*
"BishopP ercy'Fs olioM anuscripBt.a lladsa ndR omancesE. ditedb yJohnW . Hales,M .A., Fellow
andl ateA ssistanTt utoro f Christ'sC ollege,C ambridgea,n dF rederickJF. urnivalMl, .A., of Trinity
Hall,C ambridgee,t c."V ol.I . LondonN: . Triibner& Co. 1867.
27
Sigrid Rieuwerts
If there was one thing which a society bearing the name of Percy might have expected to
undertakeb efore any other, it was to give to the wionr ld full that famous manuscriptf rom
which the "Reliqueso f Ancient English Poetry"w as largelyc ompiled.T hat manuscriptw as
known to contain, besides some romances and tales, more than thirty of the best and most
ancient of the English ballads; in fact, about one-fifth of all that now remains of a precious
species of literature in which Great Britain, with (or without) the single exception of
Denmark, holds a pre-eminence. Among these ballads are Sir Aldingar, Little Musgrave,
the Heir of Lin, Robin of Portingale, the Boy and the Mantle, the Marriage of Gawain,
Glasgerion, Guy of Gisborn, Child Waters, Child Maurice, Sir Cauline, and King Estmere,
and some of the best of these are found nowhere out of the Percy Manuscript. It was also
known that nearlya ll of these noble balladsh ad been more or less retoucheda nd repairedb y
the editor to suit the "improveds tate of literature"in his time. These considerationss hould
have made the publication of the manuscript an object of the first importance with a society
devoted to ancient ballads and popular poetry. Yet we have not heard that the council of the
Percy Club ever proposed this to themselves, and certainly they never proposed it to their
constituents. It is true that the business was not so simple as it might seem. The society
could not have got hold of the manuscript by asking for it once, twice, or thrice. That dirty,
scrubby, ill-written, mutilated old book has been guarded by the heirs of the bishop as
jealously as if it contained all the secrets of alchemy. For a good many years they have refused
to allow a line or a word of it to be copied, and they have been brought to terms at last only
by pertinacious" worriting"a nd the administrationo f a sop of£150. But it is likely that the
means which have proved successful now would have been efficacious twenty years ago.
It is to the Early English Text Society, or more accurately to Mr. Furnivall, one of the
committee of management, that the victory over the exclusiveness and avarice of the
proprietors of the manuscript is chiefly due, and it must be regarded as a most auspicious
sign of what may be expected in the future from this vigorous society that, while distributing
with unequalled liberality the treasures of public libraries, it should have the spirit to step
aside from its regular course to rescue from the chances of destruction and the niggardliness
of its owners this invaluable and strictly unique collection of poetry, and to place it within
the reach and under the guardianship of thousands. But it must be understood that this
much-desired book, though edited and issued by members of the English Text Society,
does not form a parto f the society'so rdinaryp ublications.T he sole reasonf or this is the cost
of the copyright,w hich would have eaten largelyi nto the subscriptionsa, nd so haver educed
the amount of the yearly issues, perhaps to the permanent damage of the society, which, to
succeed, must give, as it has done, very large returns for the annual guinea. For this reason
the Percy Manuscript was made a special publication, and, to meet the extra expense, in
addition to copies in the society's usual demi-octavo form, large-paper copies, some of
extreme magnificence, are to be issued at the price often, five and two guineas, according to
the style. The ten-guinea copies are to be in quarto and the five-guinea copies in extra royal
octavo, both on Whatman's best ribbed paper, made expressly for the book, and only fifty of
each will be printed, so that book-fanciers will have the attraction of rareness added to that
of beauty and, while indulging their innocent passion, will facilitate the society's praiseworthy
endeavors to make books of prime importance accessible to readers of very moderate
means. The ordinary edition, which is the only one we have seen or want, is furnished to
members of the society for a guinea, and we fancy that the American who is accustomed to
pay two or three dollars for a barely decent octavo will be well content when he sees the four
fair volumes which his guinea has brought him.
A few words will suffice for the description of the Percy Manuscript. It is a folio of 521
pages, imperfect by reason of the loss of the first and last pages and of one half of fifty-four
28
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
pages at the beginning. It contains nearly two hundred pieces of all sorts, mostly ballads and
romances, with fortunately only the smallest admixture of moral and didactic dulness, but
one or two bits in all, if we have rightlyo bserved.A numbero f pieces arei nterspersedw hich
are the opposite of moral and didactic, not the harmlessc oproliteosf a remote age, but rank
and noxious specimenso f comparativelym odern dirt, such as would suit the age of Charles
II., in whose time the collection seems to have been made. These, for good reasons, are to be
put in an appendix by themselves, making the last of four volumes, all of which are to be out
before September.
The texts of the firstv olume have been editedb y Mr. Fumivall,w ho has reproducedt hem
with all but superstitiousc are, and has had the proofs and revisesr ead three times with the
original. Each piece is prefaced by an excellent introduction, all, except one or two, by Mr.
Hales, and a generali ntroductiong, lossary,a nd indexesa ret o follow.W e do not know when
an importantli teraryt askh as been undertakenw ith mores pirito r executedw ith moref idelity.
The preface to the Reliques had prepared us to find the contents of the manuscript in a
bad condition, and we must say that our expectations have been exceeded. Those who do
not set much value on the wild flowers of poetry will probably wonder at the enthusiasm
with which a book of shreds and patches, as they may call it, is heralded. The man that
regards torsos and legs and arms as rubbish, and prefers the Bavarian Walhalla to the
Vatican Museum because none of its lymphatic heroes have suffered a smash or a smooch,
will think our careful editors fools for their pains, and wish that the scullion who lit his fires
with one-half of the first fifty pages had disposed of the rest of the manuscript in the same
usefulw ay. Another, who keenlya ppreciatesb allads,w ill be thankfult hat so much has been
preserved, and will speak more civilly of the stupid copyist, and even of the vandal scullion,
than of Percy with his improved and restored texts. When he sees the fragment of the Child
of Elle, thirty-nine lines in all, out of which the two hundred lines of Percy's ballad are
made, or compares the original with the emended and completed Sir Cauline, he will think
scorn of polish and elegance, and decare the bishop a greater botch than the scribe. But
while we avow that we are behind no one in our disesteem of Percy's editorial labors (that is,
his furbishing and restoring, for the taste shown in the choice of pieces was excellent), and
while we are perfectly alive to the fact that a supercivilized man of the eighteenth or
nineteenth century can no more think, or unthink, himself into the mental condition of a
ballad-maker than he can put off his flesh and sit in his bones, nothing shall induce us to
speak with disrespect of Bishop Percy. Any one can see from his prefaces that he loved a
ballad-not wisely, but well. He was no prig and no pedant, and through all his apologies it
is plainlyp erceptiblet hat in his heart he much preferredt he "artlessp roductionso f the old
rhapsodists"to the compositionso f some "whoh ad all the advantageso f learning."W e also
incline to think that he knew the people of his time, and that that "polished age" would not
have tolerated the uncouth ballads of the manuscript had they not been first trimmed and
doctored by the bishop.
Before dosing, we desire to commend the Early English Text Society, as we have taken
occasion to do before, to the patronage of Americans, and at the same time to hint to the
society how desirable it will be to proceed with system-to complete, for instance, first, the
Arthur literature according to the original plan, and then to give the other English
romances. There are many good things in the list prepared for publication, but nothing
which more deserves welcome than the announced edition of Piers Plowman, our best poet
beforeS hakespearee, xceptingC haucer,a nd note xceptingS penser.A nd why should not the
society do something, and do a great deal, for Chaucer, of whom we have still but one text,
and who is, critically speaking, unreadable, and will be, until his language has been
thoroughlys tudied in severalprintedv ersions?
29
Sigrid Rieuwerts
BALLAD BOOKS.*
[published anonymously in The Nation 7 (Sept. 3, 1868:192-93)]
The first volume of the poems of the Percy Manuscript received a hearty greeting in the
Nation. We have now the whole book, in three fine octavos of 600 pages, with a supplement,
which, for sufficient reasons, is kept somewhat in the background. We have every line,
word, andl ettero f the manuscriptt hat remains,i ncludinga ll of Percy'sn otes and scribblings.
Though the abominablec arelessnesso f the writing might almost have excusedi ndifference
to trifles, the very tails and dots of letters have been painfully considered, and where there is
only one stroke to an n or a variation in the form of c we are sure to be informed. Mr.
Furnivallw, ho answersf or the text, has been as scrupulousi n executinga s he was intrepidi n
undertaking. There are prefaces to every piece, and several articles of a more general
characterT. hese prefaces,m ostlyb y Mr. Hales, arec arefullym ade up and agreeablyw ritten,
and on special points the best authorities in England have lent their help. The pains taken
with the book is more remarkablein that the editorsw ere obliged to do theirw ork in a short
time. If an opportunity should occur for a deliberate revision, some improvements might be
made. The illustrations,w hether glossarial,l iterary,o r historical,m ight be better digested.
But this is a slight matter. The prefaces, it may be observed, though they generally contain
what is desirable in the way of solid information, are as little as possible in the conventional
tone of antiquariansa, nd the most "advanceda"n d "progressiveo"f philanthropistsm ight be
convinced by reading two or three of them that a passion for man and a passion for
manuscripts are perfectly compatible.
A full expression of the relief of mind which the publication of these poems has brought
us would look to many like wasteful and ridiculous excess. Such, however, would not be the
judgment of those who set a true estimation on popular poetry. It would not have been the
judgment of Macaulay,f or instance, who has spoken so appreciatinglyo f this species of
literaturei n the remarksp refixedt o his "Layso f Ancient Rome."" Eightyyearsa go,"h e says,
"England possessed only one tattered copy of'Child Waters' and 'Sir Cauline,' and Spain
only one tattered copy of the noble poem of the 'Cid.' The snuffofa candle or a mischievous
dog might in a moment have deprived the world for ever of any of those fine compositions."
This tatteredc opy of"Child Waters"a nd of "SirC auline"w as, of course,t he copy contained
in our manuscriptw, hich manuscript,e ven at the epoch referredt o, had sufferedl argel osses
from "being used by the maids to light the fire," and would all have gone to the dogs or to the
flames had not Percy begged it of his friend Humphrey Pitt. With it would have perished,
besides the pieces mentioned by Macaulay, and a hundred and fifty others not used for the
"Reliques,"s uch noble ballads as "Glasgerion,"" Aldingar,"" Robino f Portingale,"" Child
Maurice," "The Child of Ell," "The Marriage of Gawain," "The Boy and the Mantle," "Guy
of Gisborn," "The Rising in the North," and "King Estmere"-most of which we possess in
no other form-with excellent copies of "Sir Andrew Barton," "The Heir of Lin," "King
John and the Bishop," and a good many more than we wish to write out. From the utter loss
of these ballads we were saved, as Macaulay intimates, by Percy's intervention. Benedictus!
But let us now see what we have gained by the intervention of Mr. Furnivall and Mr. Hales.
Percy printed less than a quarter of the articles in his manuscript. We have now all the
rest, and among them not a few admirable poems. Percy did, it is true, give us the best
* ScottishB alladsa nd SongsH. istoricalandT raditionaryE. dited byJamesM aidment.2 vols. Edinburgh:
WilliamP aterson1, 868.
30
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
ballads; but he gave only one, we believe, as it stands in the manuscript, and that only in an
appendix-to the intent "that such austere antiquaries as complain that the ancient copies
have not been always rigidly adhered to may see how unfit for publication many of the pieces
would have been if all the blunders, corruptions, and nonsense of illiterate reciters and
transcribersh ad been superstitiouslyr etained,w ithout some attempt to correcta nd amend
them." Now, we admit all the blunders, corruptions, and nonsense which Percy charges on
his manuscript, and trust we have as little reverence as any bishop that ever was consecrated
for nonsense, corruption,a nd so forth. Editors are doubtlessi nexcusablew ho do not attend
properly to the emendation of texts. But what was Percy's course? Let us take for an instance
"Sir Cauline," one of the ballads so prized by Macaulay. Under the pretence of correcting
and completing a story which was already complete, Percy has extended this ballad from 201
to 392 lines, and has perverted a good, honest tale of successful love into a sort of tragical
pastoral of the most revolting sentimentality.
This is the end of the genuine "Sir Cauline":
"Then he did marry this king's daughter,
With gold and silver bright,
And fifteen sonnes this ladye beere
To Sir Cawline the Knight."
And this of the spurious:
"Then fayntinge in a deadlye swoune,
And with a deep-fette sighe,
That burst her gentle heart in twayne,
Fayre Christabelle did die."
Other ballads have fared almost as ill. A magnificent fragment, 39 lines only, of "The Child
of Ell," Percy made into a mawkish story of 200-this time realizing Sir Fretful Plagiary's
apprehension of the manager, "taking out some of the best things in my tragedy and putting
them into his own comedy,"t ransforminga savagea nd gloomy tale of immemoriala ntiquity
into the mildest description of eighteenth-century melodrama, in which a knight who has
carried off a baron's daughter addresses the enraged father in these civil terms:
"Nowe hold thy hand, thou bold baron,
I pray thee, hold thy hand,
Nor ruthless rend two gentle hearts
Fast knit in true love's band;"
and in which we have this kind of conversion:
(ORIGINAL.)
"He leaned ore his saddle-bow
To kisse this lady good:
The teares that went them two betweene
Were blend water and blood."
(PERCY.)
"And thrice he claspde her to his breste,
And kist her tenderlie;
The teares that fell from her fair eyes
Ranne like the fountayne free."
31
Sigrid Rieuwerts
"Whichb eing so well apparelledi n the dust and cobweb of that uncivila ge,"P hilip Sidney
says of "Chevy Chase," "what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar!"
The marvellous effects of gorgeous eloquence can be seen in any of the ballads revised and
completed by Percy to fit them for polished times. Yet Percy continually speaks of the
affecting simplicity and artless beauties of the originals. The wonder is that he should not
see that his imitations were in a style precisely the contrary.
"Sir Aldingar," "The Heir of Lin," "Guy of Gisborn"-what not, indeed?-have suffered
more or less, and "King Estmere," that purely delightful thing, no one will ever know how
much; for to save the trouble of copying for the press, Percy tore out the two leaves
containing it, and they are gone for ever. So what with the ravages of the housemaids and of
Percy, and some slight damages from the binder and from the atmosphere, the treasures
once containedi n this book ares ensiblyd iminished,a s theirb eautyh ad alreadyb een marred
by the accidents of the process of transmission, and especially by the carelessness of the
transcriberO. ne could make himself very melancholya bout this matter;a nd being in that
humor, what words could express our regret for the loss of countless other ballads, which
have perished like the generations of the leaves, and largely in consequence of the introduction
of the art which boasts the conservation of all arts? Since ballad times cannot return
except with the return of a state of society which no rational being wishes to see repeated, all
we can do is to put beyond danger what we happen to retain, and to seek out and save what
is just ready to perish. The Percy Manuscript was the first thing to be taken in hand, and
that is secure. Macaulay's dog or candle; Newton's dog and candle; Humphrey Pitt's
serving-maids;t he devastationo f the BritishM useum by some AbyssinianT heodor;m alice
domestic, foreign levy-nothing can touch it further.
Without the Percy Manuscript no proper collection of the national ballads of England
was possible, since only spurious copies of many of the finest ballads in the language were to
be had. Having got it, why should not Englishmen set to work, though very late, to make a
complete collection? Why should we not have an English work which should at least aspire
to equalS vendG rundtvig's" OldB alladso f Denmark"?A t the moment we askt he question,
the gallant Furnivall, who has perfectly imbibed the spirit of the knights among whom he
has lived so much, and delights above all things in arduous adventures, is establishing a
Ballad Society. This society proposes to print all the known collections of English ballads,
the Pepys, unless printed by Magdalene College, the Roxburghe, the Bagford, and so on;
also, manuscript ballads. First, we are to have the great collections of broadsides or flying
leaves, and the manuscript ballads "when Mr. Furnivall, or whoever their editor may be, has
had time to collect them." Now, while we have not a word to say against the matter of this
scheme, we are not favorably struck by the order of proceedings. We all know what the
Roxburghe and Pepys collections are made up of. Mr. Collier has printed a volume of
Roxburghe ballads, favorable specimens, there is reason to believe. We had, last year, a
volume of Black Letter ballads and broadsides, which the editor declares to be the most
extraordinarya nd valuablec ollection of early English ballads now known to exist, with a
very few exceptions, and those familiarp ieces. This most extraordinarya nd valuable of
existing collections is about as dull and useless reading as in a considerable acquaintance
with worthless literature we have ever met with. The Ballad Society, if the London
Athenaum is right, expects to publish about thirty such volumes as Collier's and this last. If
the project is carried out, we expect to have the fortitude to subscribe for and to examine
these thirtyv olumes. In our qualityo f lover of popularl iterature,w e could turn over a dark
heap, even of these dimensions, for the hope of a jewel here and there. But why should not
32
F. J. CHILD AND THE BALLAD CAUSE
the Ballad Society put its best foot forward, and print the manuscript ballads first? The
prestigew hich might be got by discoveringa few fine ballads,o r by publishingt he genuine
texts of corrupted and highly "edited" ones already known, would give the society a
momentum that would carry it through a long level of broadsides. Whereas, the propelling
of a sufficientn umbero f subscribersth rought wenty-fiveo r thirtyv olumeso f the Roxburghe
and Pepys quality seems to us, even with a good start, to be difficult, and, without a good
start, out of the question. Give us then, first, all that is left, or all that can be found, of the
genuine ballads of the people. Ransack the public libraries. Several of the best ballads we
have came from the UniversityL ibrarya t Cambridge.H unt up privatem anuscriptsW. here
is the manuscript of Mrs. Brown of Falkland, to whichJamieson and Scott owe so much? At
Aberdeen, very likely. Where is Herd's Manuscript, where the Glenriddell Manuscript, lent
Scott by Mr. Jollie of Carlisle?A nd next, where are the Mrs. Farquharst, he Mrs. Browns,
the Mrs. Arnots, the Miss Rutherfords themselves, and the nurses who taught them
ballads? Small hope, we acknowledge, of finding such nurses any more, or such fosterchildren,
and yet it cannot be that the diffusion of useful knowledge, the intrusion of
railroads, and the general progress of society, have quite driven all the old songs out of
country-women'sh eads-for it will be noted that it is mainlyt hroughw omen everywhere-
"The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones"-
that ballads have been preserved. From these sources, public libraries, parish scrap-books,
and the memory of living persons, it is probable that much might be gathered. The
manuscripts we have referred to have, indeed, been used already, but their contents have
undergone editorial manipulation, and although it is certain that anything handed down by
oral tradition is corrupted and mutilated on the way, and that critical ingenuity has often restored
a lost meaning, we insist on having the actual tradition placed before our eyes. We
utterlyr efuse" collated"ed itions,m adeu p froma varietyo f copies,s uch as we find in nearlya ll
the ballad-books from Percy down to our day, including Walter Scott's minstrelsy. No
principle less strict than that of the editors of the Percy Manuscript (saving what we think an
exaggeratedd eferencef or an ignoranta nd slovenlyw riter'sc apitall etters)i s stricte nough.
When the proposed society shall have printed all the ballads preserved in manuscript or
floating in the memories of the people, we shall be ready for the broadsides. These last
should follow and not take precedence, not only because the other class is more in danger of
destruction,b ut becausei ts value is immeasurablyg reater.
It has not been easy for Americans to get at these volumes as they were coming out, but
henceforth Messrs. Wiley will no doubt keep a full supply of copies. It should be remembered
that Mr. Furnivallh as had to beart he pecuniaryr esponsibilityo f publication,b esides
doing the largerp arto f the literaryw ork. A loss to him would be a shame to the public.T he
profits, if there should be any, will go to the Early English Text Society.
Mr. Maidment's book does not require many words. We have had from him three small
parcels of popular poetry before, the oldest dating more than forty years back, and in the
three there may be three or four texts which appear for the first time. The present
compilation has no new ballads, and no new copies derived from tradition, but the preface
contains much historical and genealogical lore, some of which appears to be original. It is
exasperatingt o see LadyW ardlaw's" Hardyknute"an ywhere,a nd not prepossessingt o find
it in the forefront of "Historical and Traditionary Ballads," actually taking the pas of "Sir
Patrick Spens"a nd "The Battle of Otterbourne."W ill anybodyt ell us why Chatterton's
33
34 Sigrid Rieuwerts
more than tolerable ballad of the "Bristowe Tragedie" is never seen in historical and
traditionalb allads,w hile the brummagem" Hardyknutec"o nfrontsu s at everyt urn?B y way
of testing Mr. Maidment on a point where the Scotch editors are particularlyw eak, we
turned to the "Douglas Tragedy." He thinks it far from improbable that this story, which is
the same as Percy's "Childe of Elle," may be founded on incidents in the history of the
family whose name it bears-in this following Walter Scott. But he forgets for a moment
the thirty or forty varietieso f the story in the Scandinavianla nguage( that he is acquainted
with the Scandinavianb alladsm ayb e inferredf rom his assertingt hat "SirP atrickS pens"f ar
excels "theb alladp oetry of this or any otherc ountry")a, nd does not attend to the warnings
of Jamieson against trusting the circumstantiale vidence of populart ales. Mr. Maidment
deserves the praise of rigid honesty in dealing with his texts