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

摘要

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