Robin Ganev begins her book with a question, “What are popular ballads and what can they tell historians?” (11). There may be no singular answer to this question, but Songs of Protest, Songs of Love succeeds in providing ample evidence that ballads are rich resources, traditionally underutilized by cultural historians. The position of the popular ballad in scholarship has been marginal for centuries—always relevant but never easily fitting into academic categories of literature, folklore, history, visual art, and music. Ganev, however, makes a strong case for the broadside ballad as a window into the world of “ordinary people,” a world in which poetry was a common form of mass communication—“news, political elections, celebrations, education, moral and religious instruction, entertainment, and social criticism,” all written in metered verse accompanied by woodcut illustrations (11). This book approaches ballads, both in their popular and literary forms, as expressions of grassroots political and social ideologies, conveyed through popular media in ways that have startling resonance with twenty-first-century readers.
The first chapter deals with the multifarious nature of ballads and how they provide insights into the popular culture of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Britain. The broadside ballad is a study in contradictions—produced in cities yet depicting rural life; based in the printed word yet claiming to speak for the mostly illiterate peasant. Ganev examines these apparent contradictions and, using literacy statistics, sales figures, and other demographic data, reveals that ballads had a broad readership, and an even broader listenership, across class lines. By introducing the reader to the diversity of the ballads’ audience, she begins to show how broadside ballads represented currents in popular thought and opinion.
Chapter 2 discusses ballads as a medium for social criticism, focusing on the social and economic conditions of the countryside. Ganev goes into considerable depth parsing different definitions of the word “farmer” in the eighteenth century, but this is not an exercise in semantics; rather, it is an insightful elucidation of the changing complexities of agriculture and the multitiered economy of farming in Britain. She provides multiple examples from the ballads to illustrate how differences between landed and landless farmers became central to competing discourses over the most morally correct ways to utilize the land. In this ethical battlefield, the high ground belonged to “the agricultural labourers and tradesmen [who] dominated popular song” (68).
Chapter 3 may contain the most useful and practical analysis of ballads as applied to a specific socioeconomic issue. The policy of enclosure ended ancient traditions of hay gathering and arable farming on common lands. Ganev argues persuasively that ballads enrich our understanding of popular attitudes toward this controversy. Ballads not only made the case that “enclosure impoverished the peasantry and enriched the gentry,” they also decried “the poor’s loss of liberty, a home, a community and an aesthetic experience” (79). Chapter 4 deals with the ballads’ valorization of the communal laborer’s “life of work,” celebrated because of the laborer’s intimate relationship with the land. Ganev recognizes that this perceived connection between the nation’s land and its people also encouraged workers to view their labor with pride, keeping them happily toiling to feed, clothe, and supply a nation that was frequently at war. Ballads also idealized peasants’ bucolic lives filled with simple pleasures: health, family, freedom, natural beauty, revelry, and a hearty appetite for food and sex.
Chapter 5 examines the ballads’ depiction of rural sexuality, certainly the juiciest topic in the book, analyzing the gender roles and sexual norms that figure large in the ballads. For the urban ballad audience, the characters of the plowman and the milkmaid embodied popular stereotypes of the sexually vigorous peasantry, and the ballads’ playful double entendres are well illustrated by the examples that Ganev provides. Her discussion of pre-Victorian bawdiness in popular balladry, and its counterpart in literary pastoral poetry, gives the reader numerous insights into British sexual politics. Ganev is strongest when shedding light on the complexities of British morality, revealing the many competing voices in the mainstream.
The book’s final chapter considers the British writer, evangelical commentator, and philanthropist Hannah More (1745–1833) and how she used the popular broadside ballad form to spread her own ideas about the place of the rural poor in British society. More appropriated the people’s poetry and then used it to promote highly moralistic and even authoritarian ideals. Ganev highlights the intelligence of the peasantry, showing that they uniformly rejected More’s puritanical propaganda. Although Hannah More would make an excellent topic for Ganev’s next book, here More seems somewhat tangential to the many good points made within.
One notable weakness of the book is the author’s chronology. Most readers today are accustomed to nonlinear historical writing; nevertheless, a sense of historical context is still crucial for orienting the reader. In this book, the author frequently skips back and forth through time, citing from ballads written many decades apart, sometimes within the same paragraph, in order to prove her points. While this is not a cardinal sin, it can be confusing, especially when the reader must flip to each chapter’s endnotes to find out when each ballad was published. The book’s subtitle suggests that it is primarily concerned with the eighteenth century, but this is a very long eighteenth century, with the book’s content leaping from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.
This small headache aside, Songs of Protest, Songs of Love is a book that should find a place on the shelf of any ballad scholar or of scholars of British cultural history in general. Ganev has assembled an impressive collection of ballad texts that reflect the changing social conditions in Great Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. She successfully proves that historians have much to learn from the broadsides, while outlining significant areas of scholarship that could benefit from more attention to the study and analysis of ballads.
