At the time of writing, though the copy before me is a hardback, the imminent paperback of Andrew Lamb’s life of Henry Russell retails at around £20 ($33 in the US). This matters: it puts the book, at least in theory, within the reach of those without a university library or that increasingly rare thing, a research expense allowance. It means it can appeal, not just to academics, but to that substantial body of researchers associated with institutions like EFDSS (the English Folk Dance and Song Society), who are more numerous, curious, and knowledgeable about historical song studies than many people in our humanities faculties. And this is a book, or at least a subject, for both constituencies, since Henry Russell was undeniably one of the most significant Anglophone songwriters of the nineteenth century. If, as Lamb laments, the titular ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ is all that remains of his legacy in the UK today, then his songs, career, commercial strategies, lawsuits, performance style, Anglo-Jewish identity, personal cosmopolitanism, impact upon both British and American patriotism, eclectic musical influences, and acknowledged influence upon the likes of Stephen Foster, make him not just a rewarding but an essential figure if we wish to understand Anglo-American culture in the Victorian age.

The problem is, how to go about it? Colleagues and I faced this issue some years ago, when we felt the need to give Russell’s predecessor, Charles Dibdin the Elder, proper scholarly consideration. No one wants a great man biography of a middling-class, middle-of-the-road white Georgian or Victorian cultural icon; nor should they (in the end, we plumped for an edited collection, using Dibdin as lens more than object, but enough of that here). Russell is not sexy, nor does he attract the attention of hardcore musicologists. His life, considered in terms of global mobility, would be a fascinating parallel to that of, say, Jenny Lind; his works should be considered among the canonical products of Victorian-era music, literature, and drama. For the historian, the argument is irrefutable: he was a cultural colossus, and merits attention as a phenomenon, setting aside all questions of taste. And yet, he goes largely unstudied.

This updated edition of Lamb’s biography, however, does not seem to be the book destined to catalyse the study of Russell, his peers or his imitators. On multiple grounds it satisfies the requirements of neither the academic nor the enthusiast: it has no bibliography, no index and, most egregiously of all, no notes of any kind. This last is an especial tragedy since Lamb, an illustrious and eminent authority whose research was conducted in an age before mass digitisation and OCR-facilitated full-text searching of archives, has achieved something monumental here in his laborious documentation of Russell’s life; his fact-checking of his subject’s slippery (albeit entertaining) memoir; and his accumulation of tour data, journalism, anecdotes, concert programmes, and legal proceedings. It is staggering and rather poignant to think how challenging this research must have been, and how much easier now; infuriating to think how much more useful to others all this effort would have been if the resulting book included citations. Kurt Gänzl, the editor of this second edition, must shoulder a deal of the responsibility here, judging by the tone of his own introduction (p. ix), which may raise both flags and eyebrows.

If you have not, at this point, written off the idea of tackling this book, the next lines may not help. Lamb is an old-school scholar, very little concerned with analysis, theme, critique, close reading; much more concerned with itemisation, chronology, setting out facts in order. He is astonishingly silent, as if unaware, concerning the antisemitism that pervades coverage of Russell’s early career (pp. 10, 85); nor does he flag or otherwise mitigate the offensively racist language used by Russell and others with reference to Black Americans (e.g. p. 125 as one of many instances). My point here is not that he should use trigger warnings (though they would help) or censor primary sources, but rather to register surprise at a total lack of interest, especially as US abolitionism was a major mid-career cause of Russell’s, and this combination of prejudice, performance of blackface minstrel songs, and abolitionism is surely something worth thinking about (pp. 229, 243).

This is far from the only regrettable silence. As a devoted biographer, Lamb is equally incurious about Russell’s personal life, its joys and tragedies; nor does he seem to like him very much, expressing continual exasperation at his subject’s attitude to the truth. On the other hand, as a study of a professional life, there is very little analysis of repertoire (the only music included is by way of illustration and consists of the title pages of various scores), whilst Lamb lacks the interest of, say, a Peter Holman in mechanics: how Russell transported his early pianofortes, for instance (p. 48).

As should by now be obvious, all of this makes A Life on the Ocean Wave a frustrating read; one has the sense of a missed opportunity, above all due to the tragedy of those absent notes. It speaks to a consistent and seemingly insoluble problem in the study of this sort of culture, whereby its historic significance demands the standards and critical rigour of contemporary scholarship, yet its accompanying aesthetic and politics seem to militate against sustained interest from the academy.

Yet for all that, taken on its own terms, this is a deeply engaging and ferociously thorough book; one that compelled me in spite of these contradictions, leaving me with a wealth of material for my own work – and I will not be alone in this. Russell’s life simply has too much to offer not to be wholly absorbing, however represented. His collaborations with writers like Eliza Cook and Charles Mackay, producing such megahits of the century as, respectively, ‘The Old Arm Chair’ and ‘There’s a Good Time Coming, Boys’, would make a fine study in themselves. The role (and commercial reward) of transatlantic touring relative to song publishing resonates now as then. As the narrative develops, it takes on a depth and momentum that at times makes one almost forget the book’s problems.

Above all, it is the extensive (uncited!) quotation of contemporary reviews and accounts that is this work’s great achievement and reward; for anyone interested in ‘popular culture’ (whatever that is) or the ‘middlebrow’ (ditto), these amount to required reading. For decades, Russell captured the mid-Victorian zeitgeist; long after his retirement, the recollection and re-staging of his works (e.g. pp. 346–52) mobilised widespread nostalgia. His own unreliable narration of his life, published in the 1890s, is shown to be a vastly entertaining read and deeply revealing of the spirit (if not the letter) of nineteenth-century mainstream Anglophone culture; you could do very much worse than read that memoir with this volume as a corrective guide.