Oskar Cox Jensen is currently one of the most insightful and prolific scholars of the ballad, and his latest book, The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian London, is a welcome addition to the field. By focusing on ballad-singers themselves, an understudied group, Jensen adds new dimensions to scholarly understanding of the place ballad-singers held in society. Jensen writes in an accessible way and attempts an innovative and experimental structure of chapters and interludes to further engages the reader. Jensen places emphasis on performance, rather than the textual context of ballads, and on the ballad-singer as an autonomous individual rather than a mouthpiece for the songs.

Jensen's overarching argument—that the ballad-singer was the voice of a disenfranchised working class until working people began to find other ways to make themselves heard—does much to explain the disappearance of ballad-singers from London streets in the late nineteenth century, and it makes the reader question the nostalgia with which the passing of the ballad-singer is typically viewed. Jensen is explicit about his view that nostalgia for ballad-singers is misplaced. After all, in addition to being rendered unnecessary due to political change, ballads gave way to a richer and more complex popular musical culture. Further, there were developments within popular music, such as a new taste for harmony (rather than a single melodic line) and greater access to keyboards (which became more affordable) that made ballad-singers obsolete. With changes in the print industry, songbooks replaced broadsides. Jensen is sometimes too zealous in trying to persuade the reader that all of these changes were for the better, as when he argues that the broadside was very exploitive of consumers because it gave them only one song for a penny, on a sheet that was flimsy and of poor quality, whereas a songbook offered better value for money or a better investment for the poor because they got more songs per penny, and songbooks were made of better materials, allowing them to last longer. Perhaps it is not necessary to pass moral judgment on the phenomenon of ballad-singers and its disappearance. Were ballad-singers manipulative and exploitive? If so, it is a problem that only became more acute in popular entertainment. As popular music became more complex, so did methods of advertising and commercial exploitation. The ways to trick the poor to surrender their hard-earned cash proliferated with the growth of capitalism.

In addition, Jensen's focus on progress or the positive can make the reader lose sight of what was lost due to historical change. Broadside ballads may have been simple, but they were accessible in a way later popular music was not. Anyone could sing the melody of a broadside or participate through the refrain and chorus. With harmony and the keyboard coming to dominate, popular music became increasingly professionalized, with consumers depending on professional musicians and singers to entertain them. As anyone who has tried can affirm, learning how to read and perform music is quite difficult, and this makes music less accessible. Jensen's invitation to readers to sing with the ballad recordings posted on the website associated with the book underscores the accessibility of this music to amateur performers, a quality that has much to recommend it and that has been lacking from much popular music since the time of the ballad (though perhaps TikTok can begin to rectify this, as seen with the recent sea shanty craze.)

In an attempt to mimic the structure of patter ballads, Jensen organized the book into four chapters and four “interludes,” as he calls them. However, most ballads from the period he studies did not have the prose recitation/interlude structure; they had verses punctuated by a repeating refrain or a chorus. It would have been helpful to direct the readers to a patter ballad, so they can better understand the structure. The chapters explore themes: representation, progress, performance, repertoire. The interludes analyze specific ballads, which act as illustrations of the chapter themes. This is a very interesting concept, very much worth attempting, but it works only in part. Not all of the interludes are structured around a single ballad, as the introduction promises. One interlude focuses on several songs, one focuses on a singer, another explores a cluster of songs on the same theme. It is not always clear how the interludes support the themes developed in the chapters. Furthermore, it would be helpful to have more justification for why a particular song or group of songs was chosen for each interlude. The connection between chapters and interludes could be clarified for the reader.

In chapter 2, “Progress,” Jensen argues that the ballad-singer came to be seen as an anachronism in Victorian London. Victorians, particularly the middle class and, increasingly, the respectable working class, bought into the values of capitalism, demanding a well-ordered city, with traffic (and thereby commerce), flowing smoothly along its streets. Ballad-singers impeded this flow by making noise and causing crowds to gather. The songs they sang were often bawdy and crude, undermining ideals of self-improvement and virtue. The people listening to the songs were standing idle instead of being industrious. However, in other sections of the book Jensen works to convince the reader that ballad-singers, far from being marginal, were figures of authority in the communities where they operated. In addition, they were agents who shaped history and brought about historical change through expressing the needs and identities of their communities. These two contentions, anachronism and authority, seem at odds with each other. In numerous ways (and as Jensen is aware), the nineteenth-century voices that denounced ballad-singers as a nuisance did not articulate a new idea but rather repeated traditional grievances of the elite against ballad singers. Changes to middle-class values are not sufficient to explain the decline of street singing. This aspect of Jensen's argument needs to be further refined and articulated.

Overall, this is a well-researched, well-written, creative, and original book that has much to offer students of ballad history. The website with recorded songs that accompany it is an added bonus that will bring pleasure to readers.