Preliminary Programme

This talk addresses the problematics of cataloguing illustrations in popular “low” literature,
specifically broadside ballads. Broadside ballads are shifting mobile assemblages that not only
are produced collaboratively (by authors, printers, publishers, sellers, and audiences) but also are assembled and reassembled by their makers at the level of their constituent parts (tune, woodcut illustrations, text). The problematics of developing a digital archive of such protean artifacts are as rudimentary as defining what, exactly, is being catalogued in the archive: when it comes to the English Broadside Ballad Archive or EBBA (http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu), we have to ask: are we cataloguing printed texts, original artifacts, electronic files, or woodcuts? In this talk, I explain EBBA’s definition of objects and the terms for those objects, focusing on the scholarly decision to understand the ballads’ woodcut illustrations as “impressions.” I then discuss how one goes about cataloguing these impressions, detailing the avenues we have traveled and the dead ends we have encountered in large part because we are dealing with “low” not “high” art. Our struggles to catalogue the lowly woodcut impression on ballads includes using keywords, narrative descriptions, tree-systems, and fixed categories. Finally, I offer new initial steps toward a consistent and productive form of digital cataloguing of early modern “low” illustrations that is ironically not entirely based on systematic, computerized programs. These archiving steps—even as they depend upon new technologies to organize, analyze, and display information—also rely heavily on scholarly expertise. Only an intimate familiarity with the ballad’s lowly impressions across the thousands of ballads in the archive can produce one of EBBA’s most valuable archival features: the matching of related or variant illustrations among ballads, a feature I will demonstrate both within EBBA and across archives. (Show less)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, popular stories, like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, or Amadis de Gaulle, were disseminated via different media. The Dutch history of Jan Klaasz and Saartje Jansz for example, originally published as a comedy in 1682, was retold in two different songs, an almanac, and several catch penny prints. These literary prints – single sheets containing eight to sixteen woodblocks with a short text underneath each picture – were the new, and highly popular media of the eighteenth century: millions of prints, with a print run of 1000 to 10.000 copies each, circulated in the streets of many Dutch cities. The eighteenth century is therefore considered as the 'Golden Age' of the catch penny prints.
Publishers adapted the older literary stories to a new period and a new target audience. By adapting the narrative to the specific medium, they tried to distribute their media products to a large as possible reading public. Thus, songs and penny prints in particular created a possibility to disseminate literature to different kinds of readers.
In this paper, I want to reveal what kind of adaptations were made, and what aspects of a narrative were influenced most by the use of mew media. I will first describe the adaptation of the Dutch history of Jan Klaasz and Saartje Jansz to the songs, the prints, and the almanac. Secondly, I will make a comparison with the adaptations of the story of Jan de Wasser (the henpecked husband). This highly popular story, originally a farce, was also retold in songs and in numerous penny prints. Compared to the narrative of Jan Klaasz and Saartje Jansz, the narrative of the henpecked husband underwent more changes. The less comprehensible narrative of the henpecked husband created more possibilities for the publisher to modify both the depictions and the descriptions. This is clearly visible in the many differences between the catch penny prints of Jan de Wasser: printers easily altered the order of the woodblocks, or changed the lines underneath the pictures. The comparison between the adaptations of the two stories gives a better insight into the relation between narrative and medium: how did media influence the narrative and what aspects of the narrative could be altered by the publishers? (Show less)

When did today’s global transmedia mass culture start? Travelling between theatre and print, consumed in diverse forms by the middle and lower classes, the popular cultures of France, England, and the United States are considerably integrated in the mid-nineteenth century. This presentation explores the emergence of globalized mass transmedia culture. The use of these three terms mainly associated with current-day media culture hopefully provocatively draws attention to parallels with today’s popular culture. At the end of the 1830s, stories began circulating at staggering speed between media, classes, and countries thanks in part to a new media, the cheap novel. Indeed, the first novels to be financially accessible to the working classes were French romans-feuilletons (1836), British penny bloods (1837), and American pamphlet novels (1839). (Show less)

This paper offers some commentary on the literary background of ballads dealing with affairs of state that were published in England between 1639 and 1689 – a period that comprised the horrors of civil war, the experimental disruptions of interregnum regimes; the deep religious and political divisions of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, leading to the emergence of ‘party’ politics, and finally, the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ and a new civil war in Ireland, that, like its tunes, was to last centuries. No member of the national body politic, man or woman, however lowly or young, remained untouched by these events. Nor did they suffer in silence. Blithely ignoring the old maxim ‘meddle not with state affairs’, more than a thousand distinct broadside ballad titles, helped them describe or comment upon the social, political and religious divisions of this intensely traumatic period.
About half of all broadside ballads were love songs, but political ballads too were immensely popular. Of the 1,055 ‘political’ titles published between 1639 and 1689 – about a third of the total ballad broadside production of the period - half were printed in the traditional ‘black-letter’ format that was calculated to be of interest to the broadest possible range of readers, socially and geographically, perhaps a quarter of the known black-letter ballad production (including numerous military love songs). The remaining 500 or so titles, were printed in a variety of ‘white-’ or ‘roman-’ letter’ formats and ranged in style and content from the highest sophistication and satire, to scatological attacks on errant politicians. Yet, while these product types were demonstrably different in their approach and intended audiences, all political ballads (and many non-political ones) contain some elements of Christian Humanist learning, owing debts to the Horatian Odes, to Aristotelian and Ciceronian political analysis, to Old and New Testaments and other religious authorities as well as contemporary commentators, historians, playwrights and musicians.
While the many contemporaneous editions of ‘Poems on Affairs of State’, published in large anthologies in ever larger editions from the 1660s onwards, have attracted some attention from political and literary historians, these single-sheet ballad publications, which rarely found themselves anothologised, have been largely ignored. Yet, these ‘fugitive sheets’, which had to fight hard for sales in the streets against less demanding love songs or more sensational tales of crime and daring do, could operate beyond the bounds of literacy or financial security, and offer an ideal vehicle through which to analyse cultural exchanges at the very lowest social level. Drawing upon research carried out for my Political Broadside Ballads of 17th century England: A Critical Bibliography (Pickering and Chatto, 2011), this paper examines the dissemination and mutual comprehension of political ideas across the social spectrum of England’s urban populations, by comparing and contrasting the most common literary, classical and mythical models that black- and white-letter balladeers drew upon to entertain and educate their listeners. (Show less)

My current research is part of a larger project entitled: Popularization and media strategies: 1700-1900. This project analyses the processes of selection and adaption in Dutch popular literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It aims to answer questions about the strategies and motives behind such processes of selection and adaptation on the level of the production and distribution. Of particular interest are catchpenny prints and songs. These popular print media can be considered as historical mass media, not only because of their massive production rates but also because of their wide dissemination in the Dutch Republic. Besides that, they incorporate three main concepts of popular culture: text, image and music.
Many songs, stories and images would have been forgotten without these popular print media. By further exploring the characteristics of the selection and adaptation in popular printing, we gain more insight into processes of cultural exchange and the circulation of stories or songs from generation upon generation, until now.

Recent studies acknowledge the fact that the distinction between the popular and the more elite culture has traditionally been presented too rigid. More researchers now assume a widespread interaction across cultural boundaries. The starting point of my paper will therefore be that the processes of selection and adaptation in popular printing eventually led to a growing cultural convergence instead of a growing divergence. By examining the production and distribution of Dutch catch penny prints I will show that not only stories taken from the elite culture were adapted to popular print media, but that folk narratives could inspire the literary production of the elite culture as well. In this paper I will focus on the story of Gulliver´s Travels, which is an illustrative example of the mechanism of cultural exchange. This story was originally written as political satire and circulated in the edition of a more expensive novel. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, however, specific adaptations also became available for the lower classes it in the form of cheap catchpenny prints.
In structuring the processes of selection and adaptation the focus of this case study will be on the dynamic relation between producers, distributors and the different popular print media. I will especially concentrate on intermediality as a publishing strategy. (Show less)