The Popular Marketing of "Old Ballads": The Ballad Revival and Eighteenth-Century Antiquarianism Reconsidered

Abstract

As IT IS CURRENTLY UNDERSTOOD, the ballad revival emerged in eighteenth-century England as an activity of the scholarly and literary elite. Writers such as Percy, Ritson, Prior, Goldsmith, and Scott admired, collected, and commented upon old ballads to fulfill an antiquarian agenda. For them, these ballads were remnants of an earlier stage in the nation's literature and history, and exemplified the untainted, untutored genius of the English people. Approached as the exclusive activity of polite circles, antiquarianism-the ballad revival in particular-is not believed to have affected the common people themselves, whose songs and stories continued to circulate in oral tradition, filled the stalls of broadside printers, and provided literary antiquarians with the subjects for their study. Albert Friedman, for example, pointedly excludes the possibility that the ballad revival was felt at the popular level:

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