Figures of the Imagination

Fiction and Song in Britain, 1790–1850

Roger Hansford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317135302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This new study of the intersection of romance novels with vocal music records a society on the cusp of modernisation, with a printing industry emerging to serve people's growing appetites for entertainment amidst their changing views of religion and the occult. No mere diversion, fiction was integral to musical culture and together both art forms reveal key intellectual currents that circulated in the early nineteenth-century British home and were shared by many consumers. Roger Hansford explores relationships between music produced in the early 1800s for domestic consumption and the fictional genre of romance, offering a new view of romanticism in British print culture. He surveys romance novels by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Edward Bulwer and Charles Kingsley in the period 1790–1850, interrogating the ways that music served to create mood and atmosphere, enlivened social scenes and contributed to plot developments. He explores the connections between musical scenes in romance fiction and the domestic song literature, treating both types of source and their intersection as examples of material culture. Hansford's intersectional reading revolves around a series of imaginative figures – including the minstrel, fairies, mermaids, ghosts, and witches, and Christians engaged both in virtue and vice – the identities of which remained consistent as influence passed between the art forms. While romance authors quoted song lyrics and included musical descriptions and characters, their novels recorded and modelled the performance of songs by the middle and upper classes, influencing the work of composers and the actions of performers who read romance fiction.

1 ‘Raise the Song and Strike the Harp’

Minstrelsy, Balladeering, and Romance Fiction, 1790–1830

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, before mass commercialisation had fully taken hold, the practice of artistic communication in Britain was pleasingly fluid as notions of authorship, ownership, and medium were negotiated and tentatively established.¹ Concerns governing the performance, publication and distribution of music at this time were explored in romance fiction texts such as the Waverley novels by Sir Walter Scott.² Central to these issues was the figure of the minstrel and minstrel songs. The minstrel could be humorous or serious, but was usually chivalrous, steeped in literature, and musically talented. Because of its talents and qualities, the minstrel’s identity represented artistic creation and performance. Just as the persona of ‘Sappho’ was important to vouchsafe the ancient origins of song for Victorians, according to Yopie Prins, I argue that the minstrel fulfilled the same function in Romantic culture.³ In contrast to Sappho, the minstrel could be of either gender but, like her, exerted a powerful force in national culture.⁴ Although traditionally seen as male, the minstrel exists in both male and female guises in songs and print culture of the period. Pioneering singers, poets, authors, and editors could align themselves with the minstrel figure. This helped them to claim their own place within the literary tradition by association with historical lyric production.⁵ Minstrels were looked up to because they could entertain audiences and record the events and feelings of a certain political or cultural group. Always the chosen vehicle for communication, ballads were inseparable from minstrels, their singers. This chapter explores how ballads of different kinds play a key role in Scott’s fictional texts, and in everyday life at the time.

Minstrels

Romantic poets had met the minstrels and found they were themselves.⁶

By the nineteenth century, minstrels were viewed as figures of mystery and romance. During their history, the term ‘minstrel’ was used interchangeably with various spellings of ‘jongleur’, ‘wait’, ‘troubadour’, ‘trouvère’, ‘minnesinger’, and ‘bufone’, the terms in different countries denoting a variety of roles from musician to poet or story-teller, to general entertainer, and even craftsman or employee of the court.⁷ According to Lawrence Gushee and Richard Rastall, it is unclear whether minstrels were specialists in one art or all-round entertainers, and they may have been singers or instrumentalists; issues of performance practice are not reliably recorded.⁸ Details concerning the education and payment of minstrels are sketchy, and they may have performed for street crowds or aristocrats at court.⁹ Gushee and Rastall identify the ‘heyday’ of minstrelsy as falling between 1250 and 1500, although they also describe minstrels as professional secular musicians, mainly instrumentalists, and entertainers of any kind from the twelfth century to the seventeenth.¹⁰ Generally, minstrels are understood to have been performing prior to the development of a literate musical culture, and there remains a pervasive romantic image of a ‘wandering poet-musician’, that of ‘the itinerant singer accompanying himself on a plucked string instrument before an audience of knights and their ladies’.¹¹ This perception chimes with the image created in romance fiction, the historical uncertainty allowing nineteenth-century authors to reinvent minstrels for their own ends, re-creating their practices and lifestyles.

In conjunction with the growth of literate culture around 1800, the figure of the minstrel became germane. A number of British publications from this time centre on the idea, showing the minstrel held cultural as well as historical importance. Joseph Ritson appended ‘Observations on the Ancient English Minstrels’ to his Ancient Songs from the Time of King Henry the Third to the Revolution of 1790; James Beattie’s The Minstrel; or, the Progress of Genius: A Poem was issued from London and Edinburgh in 1771 and reissued in America in 1821; James Hogg’s The Forest Minstrel: A Selection of Songs Adapted to the Most Favourite Scottish Airs, Few of them ever before Published came from Edinburgh in 1810; and William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, with an Historical Introduction and Notes, was published in Glasgow in 1827. Walter Scott’s publications on the minstrel were prolific, including a ballad collection entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Kelso and London, 1802), his poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (London and Edinburgh, 1805), and a selection of ‘Fugitive Poetry from the Best English Authors’ entitled English Minstrelsy, published in London and Edinburgh in 1810. What emerges from these titles alone is a sense that minstrelsy encompassed poetry, song, editing, authorship and performance; it constituted the very act of being creative and – more importantly – getting the act recorded in print. Rather than being a person who lived at a certain time, a minstrel was someone engaged in creativity. The historical associations of the minstrel lent authority to emergent publications and, as their titles show, also helped to negotiate the boundaries of nationality through the arts. What links this cultural understanding of minstrelsy with my focus is the prevalence of the topic as a theme in romance fiction. James Hogg and Walter Scott were romance authors as well as ballad editors, enabling me to make cross-media comparisons of minstrelsy as described by them and their followers.

Scott celebrated the minstrel figure whilst exploring the nature of editorship in his romance, Waverley (1814), which followed his earlier editing work. Yuri Cowan and Marysa Demoor’s article on Scott’s ballad anthologies describes how the author/editor created and practised minstrelsy, drawing parallels between Scott’s dual roles. The article explains how historic minstrels are thought to have created ballads, and suggests that editors similarly could frame ballads according to their own artistic purposes and the relevant cultural context.¹² Editors like Scott may have altered ballads for the neatness or completeness of their collections; new songs could have been placed against old ones without this being signposted.¹³ The parallels between ballad editor and romance author were not limited to the issues of creative input and image-creation, helping to align the song anthology with the fictional romance. Cowan and Demoor suggest that ballad collection was itself a form of historicisation, noting Scott’s point in Border Minstrelsy that ‘the ballads could be used to understand the everyday life of the past’.¹⁴ This raises the question of authenticity, and whether authors/editors were being ethnographic – referring to practices that were historically or geographically situated – or creative.¹⁵ Cowan and Demoor find that Scott’s work in both roles was pioneering: Scott portrayed a ‘professional minstrel class’ which gave ballads to the people, building an aura of authority as editor which prepared the way for him to re-nationalise the gothic as an author of fiction; with his idea of minstrelsy he ‘participated simultaneously in the Romantic discourse of creative genius and in the Victorian discourse of audience’.¹⁶ Here Cowan and Demoor capture the tension between orality and publication, which is key to the topic of minstrel as motif for the growing publishing business.¹⁷ How could romantic genius and inspiration be captured in fixed media? As I show, many of Cowan and Demoor’s points about songs and poems are echoed in the romance texts’ portrayal of minstrels and their work.

Ballads

… songs have a habit of wandering across boundaries.¹⁸

Many publications from around 1800 with titles referring to minstrels collected songs and ballads from the period and earlier.¹⁹ The ballads could be on a variety of topics. Romanticism framed the minstrel as the composer/performer of the ballad, the songs being the vehicle of their craft or the medium for their art. Ballads therefore form part of the cultural context in which romance novels should be read. Like the work of the minstrels, ballad collections are problematised by the same tension between ‘ethnographic fieldwork’ and ‘antiquarian revival’, and they relate to the debates surrounding folk musics and their imagined communities and boundaries of reception.²⁰ Editorship and fictional authorship could be aligned in this period, those in both roles dealing with similar themes, sometimes in similar ways. Between literature and music there is even the link of nomenclature, the ballad being related to songs termed ‘romance’ in French and Hispanic cultures.²¹ British ballads also share literary motifs with courtly Romances such as Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian cycle, and in poetic form they may resemble medieval lais as adapted into French poetry by Marie de France.²² This link to twelfth-century literature shows interesting potential for nineteenth-century claims to historical authenticity, whether or not these were genuine.

The term ‘ballad’ has been used to describe various types of songs, many of which form a context for romance fiction. James Porter et al. define the ballad as ‘a short popular song that may contain a narrative element’; it consists of stanzas that are narrative, dramatic and/or lyric in quality – sometimes including a refrain with its strophic musical setting – and it was cultivated in Europe from the late Middle Ages.²³ Ballads had dance connections related to the French Carole, but this was not sustained throughout the genre’s history. Porter et al. explain how the character of the ballad changed from being quite impersonal, with a plot that was ‘tragic, romantic, otherworldly, heroic or humorous, while in newer ballads and broadsides the tone becomes personal, partisan or polemical’.²⁴ The change in tone may be a symptom of the way oral ballads were gathered into collections that depended on the editor’s notions of community, and this followed the increasing theorisation of ballads by the end of the eighteenth century.²⁵ Many ballad collectors were influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder’s conception of songs emerging from the landscape of the untrained national ‘folk’, even though they were more likely to have originated from individual musicians working in urban settings. Ballads may seem to belong more to the folk than the classes of privilege with which minstrels are associated – for example the ‘bothy ballads’ are attributed to Scottish...