This study offers a radical reassessment of a crucial period of political and cultural history. By looking at some 400 songs, many of which are made available to hear, and at their writers, singers, and audiences, it questions both our relationship with song, and ordinary Britons' relationship with Napoleon, the war, and the idea of Britain itself.

For three centuries, ballad-singers thrived at the heart of life in London. One of history's great paradoxes, they were routinely disparaged and persecuted, living on the margins, yet playing a central part in the social, cultural, and political life of the nation. This history spans the Georgian heyday and Victorian decline of those who sang in the city streets in order to sell printed songs. Focusing on the people who plied this musical trade, Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates their craft and their repertoire, the challenges they faced and the great changes in which they were caught up. From orphans to veterans, prostitutes to preachers, ballad-singers sang of love and loss, the soil and the sea, mediating the events of the day to an audience of hundreds of thousands. Complemented by sixty-two recorded songs, this study demonstrates how ballad-singers are figures of central importance in the cultural, social, and political processes of continuity, contestation, and change across the nineteenth-century world.

For three centuries, ballad-singers thrived at the heart of life in London. One of history's great paradoxes, they were routinely disparaged and persecuted, living on the margins, yet playing a central part in the social, cultural, and political life of the nation. This history spans the Georgian heyday and Victorian decline of those who sang in the city streets in order to sell printed songs. Focusing on the people who plied this musical trade, Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates their craft and their repertoire, the challenges they faced and the great changes in which they were caught up. From orphans to veterans, prostitutes to preachers, ballad-singers sang of love and loss, the soil and the sea, mediating the events of the day to an audience of hundreds of thousands. Complemented by sixty-two recorded songs, this study demonstrates how ballad-singers are figures of central importance in the cultural, social, and political processes of continuity, contestation, and change across the nineteenth-century world.

Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was one of the most popular and influential creative forces in late Georgian Britain, producing a diversity of works that defy simple categorisation. He was an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian, theatre-manager, journalist, artist, music tutor, speculator, and author of novels, historical works, polemical pamphlets, and guides to musical education. This collection of essays illuminates the social and cultural conditions that made such a varied career possible, offering fresh insights into previously unexplored aspects of late Georgian culture, society, and politics. Tracing the transitions in the cultural economy from an eighteenth-century system of miscellany to a nineteenth-century regime of specialisation, Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture illustrates the variety of Dibdin's cultural output as characteristic of late eighteenth-century entertainment, while also addressing the challenge mounted by a growing preoccupation with specialisation in the early nineteenth century. The chapters, written by some of the leading experts in their individual disciplines, examine Dibdin's extraordinarily wide-ranging career, spanning cultural spaces from the theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, through Ranelagh Gardens, Sadler's Wells, and the Royal Circus, to singing on board ships and in elegant Regency parlours; from broadside ballads and graphic satires, to newspaper journalism, mezzotint etchings, painting, and decorative pottery. Together they demonstrate connections between forms of cultural production that have often been treated as distinct, and provide a model for a more integrated approach to the fabric of late Georgian cultural production.