Victorian Street Literature

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Since their collection by a community more educated than their creators, works of Victorian England’s street literature have been the subject of a long and complicated argument. This argument is a useful one, as it presents a challenge to the accepted, critical definition of “art” literature, and shows that the real art is tenacious enough to thrive outside of limited canonical definitions. The history of literature is more than a history of “Great Works” and the other literature is more useful than as something to make the cannon look better by comparison.

Street literature is cast from a mold very different from the official literary one. Its conventions are different, with an emphasis on immediacy and quantity more than on accuracy and tradition. This literature was “produced within a very few hours of the publication of any event of the slightest public interest” or drawing on “an unlimited store” of subjects “domestic, or humorous, live, the sea, etc., etc.” (Ashton 1). Since print was the first thing to be mass produced, it is no surprise to see literature with a mass produced aesthetic, well before pop art employed the aesthetic visually.

In the beginning, works of street literature were probably taken for granted. Leslie Shepard, author of “The History of Street Literature” defines them this way:

“Street Literature is concerned with the cheap ballad-sheets, pamphlets and other ephemera of the masses, which circulated from the dawn of printing right up to the end of the nineteenth century’s literature often more influential than books” (Shepard 19).

The definition of this literature which probably sheds the most light on the popular opinion of them is “catchpennies,” a name which defines the literature in terms of its get-rich-quick methods of composition and distribution. These works of literature were hastily produced and then “the hawkers would come bawling through the streets, clutching a sheaf of broadsides or news pamphlets, hot from the press”, not unlike certain contemporary forms of what passes for lyrical “art” (Shephard 21).

Suddenly, the catchpenny presses stopped printing, and the ballads went quiet. Within a very short period of time, they became a part of the nostalgic past. A book published in London in 1888, “Modern Street Ballads,” says of the street vendors that sung and sold their work that “they are gone” probably irrevocably “but a trace of the vendor still lingers amongst us.” and then proceeds to list the names of only a handful of streets where such wares were still available (Ashton ix). Many have commented on the quick disappearance of street literature in Victorian England, particularly the collectors of street ballads and country music. “Around 1840 there was a dividing line, a point where something snapped, and songs ceased to be composed in the old tradition” and this date roughly corresponds to the arrival of the railroad as a significant cultural force. (Bratton 7). J.S. Bratton, though, suggests that this was not so much a disappearance of the ballad, but that it simply became unrecognizable to the eye trained only to see the tradition of ballad rather than ballad itself. Instead, works of the period represent “the coming together of many social, practical and literary changes” creating a spectrum of popular ballad which was distinctly Victorian” (Bratton 8). A view like this represents progress. It does much more than to regard the literature as a mere curiosity or (worse) as just another part of the cacophony of early modern urban noise. The view is also productive because it defines the value of the literature in terms independent from the interminable debate over whether or how it relates to the cannon, and whether or how that relationship matters.

This debate is an important consideration though, perhaps in its own right but also because it has always been a concern of the collectors, editors and critics who have passed the literature down to us. Their opinions have colored the way they present the stuff.

Since these kinds of writings have been, at best, questionably of a literary caliber, there hasn”t been enough concern for arranging them in ways that make them easier to discuss critically. After all, if the most interesting feature of this literature seems to be the way it was created and distributed, wouldn”t it make sense to class the literature accordingly” Might this lead to critical attention paid to lyrics that don”t fit within the classic ballad tradition” At present these enjoy a much lesser place in the discussion of Victorian street literature (Bratton 4). The broadsides, etc. are usually referred to in a manner that approximates being classified in terms of its creation and distribution, but the printed mater is usually sorted chronologically.