Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period

One of the popular metropolitan pastimes of the nineteenth century was the singing of ribald songs. These songs, forced off the streets by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, were sung by professional actors and singers in theatres, music halls, gardens and other public venues. But they were also sung by amateurs in cider and coal-hole cellars, coffee-houses and gentlemen's clubs. Because almost no songbooks survive from the first half of the nineteenth century, this species of popular entertainment has, until recently, been almost completely overlooked in favour of the rural and street ballads which were collected by respectable gentlemen-scholars. The songbooks of the 1830s and 1840s contain no printed music. Collections like Nancy Dawson's Cabinet of Choice Songs or Fanny Hill's Bang-up Reciter were printed in tiny numbers, and on the sly, for ‘flash gentlemen' and ‘rummy coves' (so their titles tell us) who were already familiar with the tunes used and with the songs parodied. These booklets were printed in a small format so they could be hidden in a pocket, memorised, and then passed around or thrown away. Collectors have long sought ‘these priceless chapbooks', but only recently a collection of forty-nine songbooks, amounting to about one thousand individual song texts, has come to light. This reset collection therefore represents almost all of the known songbooks from the period. The reprinting of these songs represents a golden opportunity for scholars interested in popular music, London theatre and music halls, as well as the slang and flash-language of the period.