The Case against Peter Buchan- Sigrid Rieuwerts
[The following is an introductory article titled, Purement scientifique et archéologique: The Mediating Collector. After that is Rieuwerts article.
Not proofed carefully.]
Purement scientifique et archéologique:
The Mediating Collector
The work of ballad collectors is many faceted and, answering F. J. Child’s aspiration that he “should wish to sift that matter thoroughly” (Hustvedt 1970: 248), this section addresses their diverse legacies. There has always been an element of resurrectionism in ballad studies, with collectors using words reminiscent of anatomists exhuming corpses (“Leur but est purement scientifique etarchéologique”; see Lootens and Feys [1879] 1990: ii), reflecting, in a nutshell,the basic agendas of the time: excavation and the creation of the national and regional identities explored in the previous section.Not only did ballad traditions apparently require excavation, but innumerable collectors also charged themselves with restoring their former glory. One such was Peter Buchan, one of Scotland’s best and most notorious collectors. “Peter as usual…managed somehow (we wish we always knew how) to attain that completeness which is the despair of other ballad collectors,” wrote Gavin Greig,“
They may be ‘fashed’ with blanks; Peter never is” (1963, article 157). While collecting was ostensibly undertaken for scientific and literary interest, it was also socially and financially profitable and earned Buchan a substantial fortune. Greig admired Buchan’s tenacity and success as a collector while chiding his penchant for filling in the gaps himself, though, fortunately, he was quite good atit. As Kenneth S. Goldstein noted, in relation to anthropological and folklore fieldwork,The collector chooses types of problems that need solving,informed by training in culture theory and based in part on his aesthetic.... The existence of the collector’s aesthetic is a fact—afact that comes into frequent play in the collector’s communications with informants. In response, the informant’s selection of the song or ballads to be performed is tempered by his knowledge of the collectors’s taste. Simply put, collectors, intentionally or unintentionally, pass on such information to their informants who in turn sing ballads or songs they believe will please the collector. (1989: 367-68)
Subsequent editors must, of course, reach their own conclusions about theextent of the fieldworker’s influence. Sigrid Rieuwerts’s essay deals with exactly this issue in the context of F. J. Child’s troubled attitude toward Peter Buchan’s reliability; even that great editor was not able to come to any firm conclusions.Over and above various gradations of forgery, mediators of traditional song, as they are fashionably called, have been accused of cultural appropriation and worse. The collector as invader is an idea that has become more popular in the post colonial era. Valentina Bold’s essay offers a reflexive look at a fieldworker’s place in the centuries-old procession of collectors to and through the Borders and North East of Scotland, surely one of the most heavily mined areas of ballad tradition anywhere in the world.Finally, this section offers an academic and personal appreciation, from James Porter, David Engle, and Roger de V. Renwick, of the wide-ranging contribution of the late D. K. Wilgus to international ballad scholarship: his emphasis on the texts and related contextual information; his ideas of cataloging by narrative and thematic units, rather than whole ballads types; and his magnificent achievement of summarizing the complex, sometimes ill-tempered debates in a century of folk-song scholarship since the death of Francis James Child (see Wilgus 1959:chaps 1, 2).
References Goldstein, Kenneth S. 1989. “The Collector’s Personal Aesthetic as an Influence on theInformant’s Choice of Repertory.” In Ballades et Chansons Folkloriques, edited byConrad Laforte, 367–71. Actes de la 18th session de la Commission pour l’Étude dela Poésie de Tradition Orale (Kommission für Volksdichtung) de la Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore [SIEF]. Actes du Célat, no. 4. Québec:Célat, Université Laval, 1989.Greig, Gavin. 1963. “Folk-Song of the North-East: Articles Contributed to the Buchan Observer from December 1907 to June 1911.” In Folk-Song in Buchan and Folk-Song of the North-East, with a foreword by Kenneth S. Goldstein and Arthur Argo.Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates.Hustvedt, Sigurd B. 1970.
Ballad Books and Ballad Men. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1930. Reprint, New York: Johnson (page references are to reprint edition).Lootens, Adolphe-R., et J. M. E. Feys. [1879] 1990.
Chants Populaires flamands avecles airs notés et poésies populaires diverses recueillis à Bruges [Flemish Folksongswith Tunes and Other Folk Poems Collected in Bruges]. Reprint, Antwerpen: K. C.Peeters Instituut voor Volkskunde, with a postscript and indices by Stefaan Top (pagereferences are to reprint edition). Wilgus, D. K. 1959.
Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press
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The Case against Peter Buchan
by Sigrid Rieuwerts
It is a well-known fact that the North East of Scotland is particularly rich intraditional songs and ballads. In The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, almost one-third of Child’s A texts—those he considered the oldest and best examples of a specific ballad type—come from this area. One of Aberdeenshire’s chief and most voluminous collections of traditional ballads in the nineteenth century was undertaken by Peter Buchan (1790–1854). He not only edited important collections like Gleanings of Scarce Old Ballads (1825) and Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland (1828) but also left invaluable manuscript collections of songs, ballads, and tales. And yet, far from being held in great honor and esteem, Peter Buchan has been the most criticized ballad collector ever. In his lifetime, he was generally regarded as a forger, and Scottish scholars (among them William Walker, Gavin Greig, Alexander Keith, and David Buchan) have been trying to clear his name ever since. Instead of rehearsing old arguments, I will discuss the case against Peter Buchan by focusing on F. J. Child’s changing view of the Aberdeenshire ballad collector and editor.When Child published his first, eight-part ballad collection, English and Scottish Ballads, in 1857–59, he meant it to be the most comprehensive collection of these ancient narrative songs that had ever appeared. Thus, he explained in his preface, any traditional ballad was to be included in the collection, how-ever mutilated or void of aesthetic value. He felt, however, obliged to justify the inclusion of what he felt to be particularly bad examples, namely those from Peter Buchan’s ballad compilations, by adding the following footnote: “Some resolution has been exercised, and much disgust suppressed, in retaining certain pieces from Buchan’s collections, so strong is the suspicion that, after having been procured from very inferior sources, they were tampered with by the editor” (Child 1857–59, 1: ix). In the second, substantially revised edition of 1860, this footnote has been withdrawn, and Child—for the first time in his career as a ballad collector and editor (see Rieuwerts 1994: 8–10)—employs the distinction between the “poetry of the people” and the “poetry of art.” No longer is disgust expressed at Peter Buchan’s traditional ballads but rather, at the lowest form of art poetry, namely broadsides of the Roxburghe and Pepys type.
For his third and ultimate collection of traditional ballads, Child felt at a loss about Peter Buchan. He took Svend Grundtvig’s
Danmarks gamle Folkeviser as his model but surprisingly did not accept his friend’s advice on the Scottish collector/editor. In his first letter to Child, Grundtvig pointed out that Buchan’s “much abused but very valuable collections” might appear spurious but were nevertheless genuine. “I am able to prove, through a comparison with undoubtedly genuine Scandinavian ballads, the material authenticity of many of those pieces, which consequently may safely [be added] to the English ballad store” (Grundtvig to Child, 17 February 1872, quoted in Hustvedt 1970: 244). So close is the connection with traditional Scandinavian material that Grundtvig chose many of Buchan’s texts (in addition to those of Motherwell and Scott) for his translations into Danish. The collection appeared in 1842 under the title Engelske og Skotske Folkeviser med oplysende Anmœrkninger fordanskede af S. G.Kjöbenhavn. Grundtvig was very much aware of the fact that English scholars had slighted Peter Buchan. Years after the Percy Society had published Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads in 1845, he took issue with the editor, J. H. Dixon, for not giving Buchan the credit he deserved. After all, the Percy Society’s publication was based on two of Buchan’s manuscript volumes, containing ballad versions taken from oral tradition in the north of Scotland, yet not a word was said about Peter Buchan’s own ballad collections. Why was it, Grundtvig asked, that “it is not even mentioned, that this same Mr. Buchan has published three different collections of traditionary songs, and, in fact, is the man who has rescued, and for the first time published, more traditionary ballad versions than any other antiquary in Great Britain that we know of? (Grundtvig 1855: 21). Grundtvig pointed out that two-thirds of the texts published by the Percy Society had already appeared in print. As it was a printing society devoted to making unpublished material available to its members, this fact would have caused an outcry. At the time, Grundtvig placed his defence of Peter Buchan in Notes and Queries on 14 July 1855; however, the Percy Society had already been dissolved for three years.
What he could not have foreseen, and what would have infuriated Grundtvig even further, was the fact that Dixon’s Percy Society publication was to be reissued two years later by Robert Bell as part of his Annotated Edition of the English Poets. (Note the word “English.”) All references to Peter Buchan or Scotland were eliminated and the full title ran Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, Taken Down from Oral Recitation, and Transcribed from Private Manuscripts, Rare Broadsides, and Scarce Publications, Edited by Robert Bell.
This book, incidentally, sparked Child’s first ballad collection of 1857–59. Asked to model an American series of British poetry on Bell’s rather successful Annotated Edition of the English Poets, Child copied many parts of the British publication. The only place where he thought he could do better was the anonymous poets of the British Isles. He regarded Dixon’s and Bell’s collections as dreadful and, instead of reissuing a very similar, if not identical, collection, he printed his eight volumes of
English and Scottish Ballads. In trying to put his stamp on his edition, Child directed his criticism at Peter Buchan’s ballads, the very material Dixon and Bell had used without acknowledgment. He felt, as he wrote time and again, disgusted by the sheer vulgarity of Buchan’s versions, differing in quality and markedly longer than the ones Child regarded as the genuine ballads of the people. Child wrote to Grundtvig (26 March 1872) in response to his Danish friend’s endorsement of Buchan’s texts: “From the internal evidence, the extraordinary vulgarity, especially, of many of his ballads, I should think that he must have tampered very extensively with his originals, if even he did not invent out and out. I should wish to sift that matter thoroughly” (quoted in Hustvedt 1970: 248). Grundtvig did not want to let the matter rest and took issue with Child over Buchan’s presumed “vulgarity.” The extreme elegance and exquisite taste exhibited in many of Scott’s texts is to my eyes a strong direct proof of their want of genuineness, while on the other hand what you term the “vulgarity”of the Buchan texts is to me the best proof of their material authenticity;...very often what now to delicate eyes and ears may seem “vulgar,” is in fact of the old stamp.
(Grundtvig to Child, 2 June 1872, quoted in Hustvedt 1970: 249) Still, Child felt on sure ground, for he had one proof that old Peter Buchan was a cheat. Dr. John Hill Burton testifies that a part of the ballad called Chil Ether was drafted by a friend at his bedside when he was recovering from an illness and was sent to Buchan, with the intention of taking the measure of his honesty. Peter was so happy as to be able to supply all that was missing from the recollections of the peasantry.—I had reason to believe in Buchan’s dishonesty before, but I wanted explicit proof. (Child to Grundtvig, 1 July 1873, quoted in Hustvedt 1970: 257)
Child was right: “Chil Ether” was indeed a forgery. Only a note can be found in Buchan’s manuscripts that he printed the text from a different source. Joseph Robertson and John Hill Burton, later George Kinloch’s and Robert Chambers’s coworkers, passed on their ballad to the unsuspecting Peter Buchan. Further-more, they were abetted by Dean Christie, who claimed later that he had found the tune of that “popular” ballad. Grundtvig was undoubtedly familiar with these accusations, as they were reiterated in Notes and Queries by J. C. R. and T. G. S. (1855: 95, 135) in response to his praise of Buchan in that journal. He seems to have accepted Buchan’s failings, but he still holds out hope that the publication of Buchan’s manuscripts will clear his name: “What now ought to be done is this, that the whole ballad portion of Mr. Buchan’s MSS. should be published from the MSS., but with all the additions and variae lectiones of the published collections of Mr. Buchan thrown into the notes” (Grundtvig 1855: 22). Therefore, he is extremely interested in Child’s passing remark that Buchan’s papers are now in the British Museum and he will have copies made. What Child does not tell Grundtvig is that he was instrumental in arranging their deposit at a public library. Just before Buchan’s sudden death in London on the 19 September 1854, at the age of sixty-four, he had sold the rights to his manuscripts to the publishers Ingram and Co., who subsequently left them to their broker, the poet Charles Mackey, who used them for his Illustrated Book of Scottish Songs.
As is well known, Child was very eager to have all the genuine old ballads of the English language in their authentic versions, not touched up by editors. Having the use of the ballad collector’s and editor’s original manuscripts was therefore of paramount importance. And in tracing the various manuscripts Child employed one of the most industrious scholars of the time, the ever-helpful Frederick James Furnivall. At Child’s request and insistence, the latter had earlier secured Percy’s folio manuscript, often described as the foundation document of English ballad lore. Furnivall, again being Child’s agent, now persuaded Mackey to sell the two volumes of Buchan’s manuscripts to the British Library. Thus, they were deposited in 1873, and, in the summer of that same year, Child was able to consult them in London. Naturally Grundtvig was very anxious to learn what Child had found in the manuscripts and also added in his letter to Child, “The impression (or the proofs) you have got, as to the trustworthiness (or untrust worthiness) of the editors, for down what can now be collected in Old Deir, and such trash I get! Better work themines of Spain & Denmark” (Child to Lowell, Christmas 1877, quoted in DeWolfe Howe and Cottrell 1970: 31).
Two years later, he still had not given up on the idea of going to the North East of Scotland: “There must be ballads there:—how elsehave the people held out against poverty, cold & darkness?” (Child to Lowell, 21 December 1879, quoted in DeWolfe Howe and Cottrell 1970: 45). Not wanting to delay the publication of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads even further, he eventually began to print without having been able to judge the situation inthe North East of Scotland for himself. When the first installment of Child’s major work came out in 1882, he was immediately taken to task in a review for including “freakish” and “monstrous”verses, and the reviewer added, “. . . even some whole ballads from the collection of Peter Buchan, as well as from some less heinously offending collections. ”From that reviewer’s perspective, Buchan’s collection was one of the worst possible examples of ballad lore: It contains many genuine and precious fragments of old ballads; but these are so mixed up with bald doggerel, either written by the collector himself or palmed off on him by some one having as littlefeeling as himself for the true ballad style, that it is almost worse than useless. It will never be of any value until some person with the proper qualifications, goes over it thoroughly and separates the chaff and tares from the sound grain. (Davidson 1909: 468) In fifteen pages, the review went to extraordinary lengths in dismissing any claims Peter Buchan’s collection might have on representing the genuine ballads of the people in the North East of Scotland. Child should have been more careful in admitting the work of such a forger, he argued. Child’s A text of “Leesome Brand” (Child 5), for example, was described as a fabrication. The author of the review lent particular weight to his accusations by adding that he had grown up in Aberdeenshire, spoke the dialect, and even sang some of the ballads mentioned. Child, always eager to receive advice, did not take issue with any of these accusations in public, perhaps because the author of the review was Thomas Davidson, an American scholar of Scottish extraction who had become a friend a couple of years earlier. We learn more about Davidson from one of Child’s letters:
Is it not odd that, after having flooded Scotland with circulars addressed to schoolmasters & ministers, with scarcely a perceptible effect, I should find a man in this very town whose mother knows (as he says) 164 ballads? This man is a scholar, & knows whereof he is talking. His mother lives in Old Deer. I have tried to make him abandon all worldly business and go back to Aberdeenshire—where others, I think, besides his mother still retain ballads—and collect all that he can find. In default of willingness on his part to come up to this manifest duty, I have accepted his mediation with two persons three thousand miles nearer the source and I hope that good may be the result. The same gentleman thinks that he may be able to get some light concerning P. Buchan’s proceedings. (Child to Murdoch, 2 February 1876, Murdoch MSS. no. 21; see also Lyle 1976: 137-38)
Thomas Davidson clearly felt strongly about Buchan. Since Grundtvig had died just after the first installment of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Child became heavily dependent on Davidson in all matters relating to Aberdeenshire. His influence was substantial, for he gave Child not only invaluable information on his home county but also supplied him with contacts in Aberdeenshire and, last but not least, with ballads. Davidson firmly believed that Peter Buchan was a cheat. He felt particularly insulted by Buchan’s claim that his ballads were derived from oral tradition. With Grundtvig dismissing the case against Buchan, and Davidson strenuously trying to prove it, Child sat on the fence, feeling less well equipped to be a judge on these matters than his two friends. He could not dismiss the ballads outright, as Furnivall, Ebsworth, Chappell, and other English editors had done. He did, however, feel their disgust at the vulgarity of some of Buchan’s texts. He printed them, nevertheless, unlike Kittredge, who deliberately omitted them from his later one-volume edition. One of the oft-quoted pieces of evidence against Peter Buchan was his letter to the Earl of Buchan, published in Motherwell’s review of Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland. In this letter, Peter Buchan described how his ballad collection of 1828 came about. The Ballads and Songs were all taken down from the recitation of very old people, during a ten or twelve years siege that I stormed their straw-covered citadels, and by many good judges they have been considered the most original and best collection hitherto published, having been given in their primitive truth and order. The task was really laborious and expensive, as I kept a wight of Homer’s craft, an old Senachial veteran, constantly in pay, . . .still it has come short of rewarding me for the time, trouble, and expense I have been at in creating it out of a chaos of rude materials. (Buchan, quoted in Motherwell 1828: 648; emphasis mine)
The choice of the word “creating” was seen as an indictment against the authenticity of his published versions. At the time, however, the prevailing attitude was that incomplete or mutilated copies from tradition had to be improved by collation with versions obtained from different quarters. Filling in missing verses, or improving existing ones, was common practice among singers, and it was difficult for editors to refrain from doing the same. Since Peter Buchan worked in the broadside trade and boasted more than once of the great stock of ballads he had accumulated in print, it was reasonable to assume that some stanzas had been lifted from these sources. The source Buchan named, “a wight of Homer’s craft” he kept in constant pay, was seen as further proof. James Rankin, a blind beggar, had been a colorful contributor indeed, and not even Buchan trusted him completely. In his note to“The Scottish Exile” in the manuscript, Buchan says Rankin has “deceived him again” (see Walker 1887: 59, 166).
When Buchan was forced to sell his library in 1837, a great number of ballad manuscripts were listed, among them “about twelve or more volumes of Manuscript Scottish Ballads and Songs exactly as taken down from the singing and sighing of the old Dames and Carles amongst the mountains and glens in the North Countrie, Scottish Straggling Ballads, of the last century, from Oral Tradition, scarce MSS. and old printed copies, containing about 400 pages” (Catalogue 1837: 41–42). Only a couple of these are accounted for, and I am surprised that nobody has ever tried to trace the others. Why, for example, should the Glenbuchat manuscript not be one of the missing Buchan documents? In myview, this is a possibility and worth investigating.[1]
Summing up, it is really no wonder that Child and his contemporaries were confused about the different Buchan manuscripts. The one deemed original extends from 1816 to 1827. Buchan gathered in one huge folio volume (about1,112 pages) all the songs and ballads he intended for publication: 220 items intotal. It passed through many hands and was offered to Child several times, buthaving seen Buchan’s manuscripts in the British Library, he gave them little importance (C. K. Sharpe had testified that everything was faithfully recorded inthe copies after the first sixteen pages). When Child mentioned to William Macmath, on 29 June 1892, that he would still like to see David Scott of Peterborough’s Buchan manuscripts, despite their modernized and “stylized” spelling, Macmath was intrigued. He and Murdoch had had the chance to buy them. Apparently, on that missed occasion, Scottbought one Buchan volume at an auction in Edinburgh for twenty pounds; Murdoch had offered eighteen for it. According to both of Child’s main Scottishcorrespondents, it was not worth more than that. To Macmath, it seemed that allthe pieces were in the printed book, and furthermore, he said, there was thequestion whether the printed book, or the manuscript, came first. In any case, heconcluded, the manuscript was not a copy from tradition, and thus Child was ledto believe that there was no great loss in not having it. (For Child’s correspon-dence with his Scottish friends, see: Child MSS.)Unlike Motherwell’s own manuscripts, the Buchan manuscript is not a work-ing copy. It gives very little insight into the oral tradition from which he was gathering. Only a few of the contributors are named, and the circumstances of collection—the singer’s identity and the time and place—remain unrecorded. A field notebook, like the one Motherwell kept, does not seem to have survived, if indeed it ever existed. Furthermore, Buchan did not focus on songs and balladsfrom oral tradition as much as Motherwell did, instead collecting at random from broadsides, periodicals, and earlier songbooks. But since he wanted to give hiscollection a distinctly “northern” touch—balancing Sir Walter Scott’s Border collection—his attention inevitably turned to the yet uncollected stores of bal-lad lore in the North.William Walker eventually secured the Buchan manuscripts for Harvard Col-lege Library, but Child did not live to see them. I doubt, however, that the manu-scripts—valuable as they might have been to him—would have changed hismind. They would have answered many of his philological questions, and cer-tainly he would have seen for himself how much (or rather how little) Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland differed from the manuscript versions (seeChild to Walker, 19 November 1891, in Walker 1930: 6–7). This manuscript alone, however, cannot answer the crucial question as to whether Buchan’s recordings of traditional ballads are trustworthy. Child, in the end, gave Buchan the benefit of the doubt, but he was far from James Dingwell Walker’s estimation of Peter Buchan as “the saviour of the ballad minstrelsy of the north” (1887: 388). To the very end, what Child confided to Grundtvig at the beginning holds true: “When I come to Buchan, I am in difficulty. I must confess that my treatment of his ballads both seems and was capricious” (Child to Grundtvig, 8 May 1874, quoted in Hustvedt 1970: 264).
Notes
1.The Glenbuchat manuscript was being prepared for publication by the late David Buchan;the work is being extended and completed by James Moreira.
References
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The Ballad and the Folk. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Reprint, Phantassie, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1997.
Catalogue of the Private Library of Peter Buchan. 1837. Aberdeen: Chalmers.
Child, Francis James. Correpondence and Papers Relating to Ballads, with Many BalladVersions. 33 vols. Harvard College Library, 25241l.47* (cited in the text as ChildMSS).Child, Francis James, ed. 1857–59.
English and Scottish Ballads. 8 vols. Boston: Little,Brown and Company.
Child, Francis James, ed. 1882–98. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. 5 vols. Reprint, New York: Folklore Press, 1956–57; New York:Dover, 1965. Corrected edition prepared by Mark and Laura Heiman. Northfield,Minn.: Loomis House Press, 2002. Digital edition, with gazetteer, maps and audio CD.New York: ESPB Publishing, 2003.Davidson, Thomas. 1909. “Prof. Child’s Ballad Book.”
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5:466–78.DeWolfe Howe, M. A., and G. W. Cottrell, eds. 1970.
The Scholar-Friends: Letters of Francis James Child and James Russell Lowell
. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.Grundtvig, Svend. 1855. “Buchan’s Scottish Ballads: Percy’s Reliques.”
Notes and Queries12 (14 July): 21–22.
Hustvedt, Sigurd B. 1970. Ballad Books and Ballad Men. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1930. Reprint, New York: Johnson.Lyle, E. B. 1976. “Child’s Scottish Harvest.”
Harvard Library Bulletin 25: 125–54.Motherwell, William. 1828. “Ancient Ballads of the North of Scotland.”
The Paisley Magazine 13 (1 December): 639–66.Murdoch, James Barclay. n.d. Correspondence. Harvard College Library, MS Am 1319/ *53m–101 (cited in text as Murdoch MSS).R., J. C. 1855. “Buchan Ballads.”
Notes and Queries 12 (1855): 135.Rieuwerts, Sigrid. 1994. “‘The Genuine Ballads of the People’: F. J. Child and the balladcause.”
Journal of Folklore Research 31, nos. 1–3: 1–34.S., T. G. 1855. “Buchan Ballads.”
Notes and Queries 12 (1855): 95.Walker, William. 1887.
The Bards of Bon-Accord 1375–1860. Aberdeen: J. and J. P.Edmond and Spark.Walker, William.
Peter Buchan and Other Papers on Scottish and English Ballads and Songs. Aberdeen: Wyllie & Sons, 1915. [Walker, William]. 1930.
Letters on Scottish Ballads from Professor Francis J. Child to W. Walker Aberdeen: Bon-Accord Press