‘Songster’, meaning a book of songs, is not an elegant word. One thinks of hipsters, holsters, trucksters and dumpsters, mostly associated more with North America than with Europe; and indeed what may possibly constitute the only really rigorous scholarship on songsters has come from the USA. It is clear from browsing the British Library catalogue that in the 18th century a title such as The Merry Songster referred to the person singing the songs, as though he or she were avian, like the subjects of Thomas Hardy's poem ‘Proud songsters’. Yet as with ‘computer’ and ‘typewriter’, which originally indicated the person doing the computing or typewriting, ‘songster’ in time became a common enough term referring to the artefact itself, though there remained plenty of other things to call it, as titles referred to in the present publication indicate: The Harrison Medal Minstrel, Machine-Room Chants, Secular Song and Hymn Book, and many more, not forgetting Never Mind the Bollocks That Was The Sex Pistols.

Nor is the songster a topic easy to handle, and it has to be said that, overall, Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century feels unsatisfactory, for all its individually valuable items of research and exposition. Frankly, this was not a topic that was going to be conquered by putting together a widely ranging sheaf of conference papers and other essays.

‘Song book’ is a frighteningly broad designation, by comparison with which one feels that ‘songster’ ought to indicate something much more limited and specific within this general catchment; but one of the problems with the present book is that it both does and does not endorse such specificity. The editors breezily assert on page 1 that songsters were ‘pocket-sized anthologies of popular songs’ and that they ‘overwhelmingly contained only song texts – words, not music’, and this certainly describes one norm and a plausible function, of being the vade mecum of an informal singer, which they go on to extrapolate. Yet the book proceeds with substantial chapters on, for instance, Moore's Irish Melodies (a study by Sarah McCleave), discussing their musical texts just as much as, if not more than, their poetic ones, and this series was in an utterly different physical format: large, lavish and surely elite, which would also apply to the Scottish folksong arrangements, taking in Allan Ramsay, George Thomson, Joseph Haydn and others, that are the subject of Andrew Greenwood's chapter, its running head the somewhat disingenuous ‘Rethinking the songster’, which similarly goes into considerable musical detail, in this case for the song ‘Lochaber’. Also, Kate Bowan's chapter, ‘Friendship, Cosmopolitan Connections and late Victorian Socialist Songbook Culture’, is far less about songsters than about the leading figures of the visionary labour movement, their interpersonal and international links, and some of the verses they wrote that appeared in left-wing song books.

One thirsts for persistent interrogation of the artefact as a phenomenon of material culture. Can a songster be defined any more closely than as a pocket anthology of lyrical poems between two covers sold for mass consumption? Can it even be isolated as that, when, for example, hymn books have frequently been sold simultaneously in pocket words-only format, as larger-format volumes with words and melody, and as organists’ or choir copies complete with the tunes’ harmonies? Religious hymn books are not included in Cheap Print and Popular Song, nor are Sankey and Moody's white gospel songsters considered, the latter a huge area of Victorian cultural history that has been all but ignored by scholars. Another problem of species definition is performance practice. Myriad points of interest arise in the course of the book, and for these one is naturally grateful, but they need consolidating, and the question is never asked whether a songster's contents were actually intended to be sung. There is no doubt that in a vast number of cases they were, but even a cursory glance at late Georgian songsters begins to raise all sorts of problems. Huntsman's Songster, for example, includes the verbal texts of recitatives, arias and a chorus from the opera Der Freischütz, and this particular songster, like many others, offers no indications of the tunes to which the other poems might or should be sung. Some volumes, for example The Jovial Songster and Kirkwood's Ballad Songster, include riffs in comic prose between their comic poems: are they mementoes of a stand-up act or handbooks for its reproduction, and if so, would the poems be sung or also spoken by the comedian? Paradoxically in a book whose default assumption is sung performance, McCleave's chapter argues (pp. 56, 59) that, beyond the first stanza, Moore probably did not intend his poems to be sung. I find no evidence for this eccentric view, and the prosody always fits perfectly. Elsewhere, as anyone who has experience of contrafacta knows, for example in trying to fit a broadside text to a specified tune, the prosody will frequently present itself as recalcitrant, and far more consideration of this problem, and the value of its solution, would have been welcome, for example in showing how effective a satire can be when mischievous words are shoehorned into a venerable tune. More music examples in Derek Scott's fascinating chapter on ‘The US presidential campaign songster, 1840‒1900’, for instance, would have enhanced this element of historical recuperation. Here, by the way, there can have been no question of a song not being sung when ‘a crowd could use songs to drown out a speaker, as the Democrats found in their 1840 campaign’ (p. 75). Who said music was not political?

Care and consistency in anticipating readers’ critical concerns are frustratingly absent in many places. Why, for example, does Paul Pickering on several occasions omit the third line of exemplified contrafacta of the seven-line ‘God save the King’ in his chapter on its political uses? Indeed, in his citation of the original (p.112), he omits the sixth line in error. On pages 123‒4 it is precisely how they managed to shorten ‘God save the working man’ to four syllables that one wishes to know about – or is the author trying to tell us that they didn't, when he states that the message is ‘awkwardly set to the familiar tune’? Yet again a line is dropped, without ellipsis, on page 133. Paul Watt's chapter on ‘The Prefaces to Songsters: The Law, Aesthetics, Performers and their Reputations’ cannot do justice to these huge areas and tantalises with its inductive approach to them through a slim bunch of case studies. Conversely, the most enriching chapters tend to be those whose authors, through long experience and disciplinary concentration, have the fullest bibliographic command and can assert a historical landscape, foremost among them Norm Cohen's on ‘American Secular Songsters in the Nineteenth Century’ and Michael Pickering's on ‘The Blackface Songster in Britain’.

There are also serious lapses in proof-reading and copy-editing that reflect badly on Cambridge University Press as well as, it has to be said, on the book's three editors. A dismaying number of them occur in Paul Pickering's and Kate Bowan's chapters – verbs not agreeing with nouns, ‘that’ or ‘which’ that should read ‘who’, ‘albeit’ meaning ‘be it’, missing parenthetical marks, and illogical ‘[sic]’s and clumsy phrasing over which one stumbles unnecessarily. A bad error occurs when Paul Watt reproduces the rules for singers from The Convivial Songster (1782): number 6 should undoubtedly be ‘Not to sing through the nose’ rather than ‘through the note’. H. Wiley Hitchcock's division of American musics was into ‘cultivated’ and ‘vernacular’, not ‘cultured’ and ‘vernacular’ (p. 1, footnote). The stave height and font size of the music examples varies unacceptably (will publishers ever get this right?).

Despite its problems, there is an abundance of positive thought and information in the book. Every chapter is of interest and leaves one wanting more, and attention can be drawn to those on Australian topics in particular: Mark Pinner's on ‘Charles Robert Thatcher's Songsters’, a useful window onto gold-rush culture; and Graeme Smith's on ‘Australian Songsters and the Australian Folk Song Movement’. Anthea Skinner's slightly gauche but engaging case study of ‘The girl I left behind me’ brings in the military: reassuring evidence that the editors have taken pains to cover most of the secular fields of mass consumption. Furthermore, and however light their touch elsewhere, one is grateful for their decision to offer at the end of each chapter a list of songsters referred to in the text, along with a bibliography, although throughout the book it would have been helpful to know which songsters included music (a simple code could indicate this). However, this edited collection is not yet the cultural history of the songster its subtitle proclaims. That will require a lone scholar's long period of devotion culminating in a monograph. I am thinking, for comparison, of Steve Roud's magisterial Folk Song in England (Faber 2017), although even here he had to farm out two chapters. With the ontology of song the stakes are high indeed.