Jewels Left in the Dung-hills: Broadside and other Vernacular Ballads Rejected by Francis Child

Abstract

Although The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1 882-1 898) was the most systematic and scholarly collection of vernacular ballads published in the Victorian era, Francis Child nonetheless omitted from his canon a large number of extant narrative songs, including many found on black-letter broadsides and others that he had printed in his earlier collection, English and Scottish Ballads (1 857-64). This article explores Child's changing approach to ballad editing, discusses his ambivalence towards broadsides, and examines his selective use of texts discovered by English collectors during the Late Victorian folksong revival, with a view to explaining what kinds of material he discarded and why he did so.