In The Politics of Songs Kate Horgan proposes to “emancipate” the study of British songs from a purportedly dominant “narrative of the redemptive role of the ballad in English culture” forwarded by “romantic critics” who gave primacy to apolitical narrative ballads, and she strives to “loosen the grip of the dead hands of a Romanticization” (171). Accurately, she observes that “political songs were an important and ubiquitous part of political, literary, and print culture in the eighteenth century” (168). Disappointingly, however, her book remains a thin collection of unrelated case studies that fails at thorough-going analysis of song-making and politics beyond declaring the “multivalent power of song” (117) or finding songs and their contexts “complexly resonant.” As these cited passages suggest, the writing is frequently infelicitous, further obscuring overall argument.

In chapter 1 Horgan examines a sixteenth-century ballad, “The Princely Song of Richard Cordelion,” that makes an array of eighteenth-century appearances—from antiquarian collections to broadside street ballads to newspapers. Identifying associations with “macro historiographical concerns of Whiggish history” in one printing or “micro political concerns of 1786” in another, Horgan declares in these different printings “the multivalent and multi-textual ways in which songs functioned politically” (60), without cogently identifying the exact “functioning” of the text in each case. In chapter 2 she focuses on the sixteenth-century psalm translations of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins to show in a survey of commentary and publication that these very popular psalms were often viewed disparagingly by elite observers, and thus “were national song” (92). The apparent point of the chapter, not ill taken but incompletely argued, seems to be that song scholars should pay more attention to Sternhold and Hopkins. In chapter 3 Horgan “uncovers” the application of classical Roman ideas about singing invective songs “to maintain the civil life of the polity” (25) in Whig circles and clubs in the radical 1780s and 1790s. As is already well established, classical emblems and models for songs pervaded eighteenth-century political parties and drinking clubs (the boisterous drinking tune “Anacreon in Heaven,” for instance set the US national anthem). In chapter 4 Horgan considers politics in Sheffield in the 1790s with reference to complicated sedition trials, particularly that of one James Montgomery found guilty of printing and publishing a seditious song. Examining Sheffield songs and trials in painstaking detail, Horgan concludes with the truism that political songs were “important and ubiquitous” in the eighteenth century (168). Perhaps too near to its dissertation origins, these chapters might have served better as single articles, each finding its separate focus with greater use of existing research.

The Politics of Song does offer insight. Welcome is discussion of the importance of Sternhold and Hopkins and religious singing in people's lives, a context underattended by a literary, musical, and cultural scholarship too secularly framed and biased. Usefully, the case studies examine local instances: individual songs, topical details, ephemeral publications, local political incidents, particularized contexts. With greater knowledge of song culture in general and precise analysis, these could illuminate how songs function. Finally, despite its oversimplified representation, The Politics of Songs voices apt impatience with a body of scholarship that, beginning with the nostalgic retrospection that characterized the eighteenth-century Ballad Revival, has overemphasized a sampling of nonpolitical ballads and preoccupations with aesthetics, antiquity, and orality.

Anatomizing the cultural terrain of political song making requires accurate consideration of song culture as multiple collective and conventionalized traditions of creation, performance, and circulation. Without this knowledge an investigator can treat songs only as idiosyncratic or resort to redundant, often self-evident generalities rather than real analysis.

English literary criticism and history began with attention to songs, leaving an enormous body of scholarship and collected materials. Setting her project in opposition to a narrow array of scholars—for example, the long-ago Victorians John Hales and Frederick Furnivall—Horgan overlooks a wide range of politically directed songs and extensive commentary requisite to her topic. Missing, for example, is any reference to the multivolume scholarly edition Poems on Affairs of State, chockfull as it is with editorial discussion of political songs of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Similarly overlooked are the many editions of Pills to Purge State Melancholy and the deluge of political balladeering with regard to Whigs and Tories in the reign of Queen Anne, the satirizing salvoes over the Hanoverian Succession and the War of the Spanish Succession, the plethora of songs in response to the 1720 South Sea Bubble of 1720, the satirical and sentimental songs in connection with the Jacobite Uprisings of “The Fifteen” and “The Forty-Five,” the political song-satire of John Gay, and more. A competent study of British political song will acknowledge these topics, songs, and considerable scholarship on them as a basis.

Horgan seems curiously unaware of the pervasiveness of singing and printed songs in most eighteenth-century contexts. People sang everywhere—in public and in private, across class divisions, in wide-ranging settings. An examination of specifically political contexts needs to clarify, functionally and semantically, what defines “political songs” in the context of other categories: oral versus printed ballads and songs, catches, glees, masonic hymns, work songs, stage songs, and the like. The dialogic character of political songs—their attack and counterattack, satirical and ironic squibbing and counter-squibbing—accentuates this need to recognize conventionalized types and traditions. Electronic databases, with their vast quantities of readily accessible but starkly decontextualized and uninterpreted texts, pose problems as well as advantages for the singer or scholar hoping to form a coherent sense of song culture, which requires assessing intertextualities within collective sensibility. The Politics of Songs in Eighteenth-Century Britain offers only limited insight into the functions and meanings of the political songs in its view.