Napoleon and British Song, 1797-1822

Oskar Cox Jensen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137555380
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

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.

1

‘A Hacknied Tune’? Song Culture in Napoleonic Britain

Until his death in 1808, John Freeth owned a tavern in Birmingham.¹ As his obituary notes, Freeth – a celebrated radical and debater – did more than serve drinks. Here was a man:

Who, when good news is brought to town,

Immediately to work sits down,

And business fairly to go through,

Writes songs, finds tunes, and sings them too.²

His biographer informs us that Freeth rarely committed his most extemporary effusions to paper, yet he is known to have published numerous collections of his songs, two of which concern the Napoleonic Wars.³ It would be folly to attempt to read one of Freeth’s songs without considering his agency – as consumer of news, as songwriter, as publisher, as singer – and without a thought to the contexts in which the song existed – the tavern, the songbook’s material page, the city of Birmingham at the turn of the nineteenth century. There is nothing ineffable or intangible about song thus conceived: it is a sort of musicking carried out by people in physical and temporal space. In this opening chapter, I wish to situate Napoleonic song culture in terms of those people, the better to understand the songs that follow as part of the practice of everyday life.⁴

As Freeth’s example demonstrates, a single individual could perform multiple roles in that practice. Yet in the context of any given song, even Freeth performed those roles consecutively rather than concurrently. Conceptually, those roles may be given as: writer; printer (almost all the songs in this book were printed at some stage in their history); singer; listener. These four roles suggest a journey from creation to consumption, though the reality was rather messier. If a listener liked a song, they would become singer in turn, and every act of singing is necessarily recreative: a song was always to some extent rewritten with each rendition, just as many were rewritten (accidentally or otherwise) with each printing. Even simply to listen is to participate in the creation of meaning. There is, therefore, fluidity, even instability, inherent in these four categories. Yet they serve to order our thinking about the practical operation of song culture in British society, during the Napoleonic Wars.

Writers

At the risk of gross simplification, it could be said that writers of Napoleonic song fell into two categories. These were distinguished, not by their relationship to politics or to Napoleon, but by their relationship to songwriting as a medium. One set were single-issue writers: those interested in the subject, rather than the medium, for whom the goal was politically or morally to influence others and thus to participate to some degree in affairs of state. The other set could more truly be called songwriters: their compositions generally ranged across a broader range of subjects, the process being a more accustomed habit of mind, and thus when they turned to topical matters, their writing was informed by both a wider and a deeper appreciation of the medium. In thinking through this intentional and technical difference, it may be helpful to see it as a vernacular permutation of Clement Greenberg’s proposition, perhaps too often bandied about: ‘that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium’.⁵ The former group, who in many cases lacked this competence, might be called amateurs in the modern sense, the latter amateurs in its original sense, save that some in both groups also wrote for profit. Indeed all songwriting constituted to some degree a bid for status within a community, however sincere the creative act. It is with regard to the first group (the single-issue ‘amateurs’) that these bids are of greatest interest, as this form of civic-minded songwriting was a phenomenon peculiar to the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Philp brings this to our attention in his discussion of the contributors to Reeves’ Association in the early 1790s: a group of would-be activists seeking to condition the mentality of the masses. He argues convincingly that many of those who contributed songs and other material were seeking a degree of social respectability.⁶ Though these writers might hail from lowly backgrounds, they were bidding for participative inclusion in a dutiful, loyalist public sphere, in its original sense of a privileged, restricted, literate community. Letters accompanying submissions to Reeves are full of self-justifying discourse in which the distinction between the ‘vulgar’ language necessary in addressing a plebeian audience, and that which the authors might ordinarily employ, is painstakingly made clear. By representing themselves as condescending patricians, low-status writers negotiated the careful social codes examined in Bourdieu’s Distinction, with the ensuing irony that in penning songs designed to keep the poor in their place, they were themselves challenging the established social order.⁷ John Morfitt of Birmingham took up his pen in 1803 because he could ‘no longer be silent’ in the face of ‘this tremendous crisis’, his words acknowledging both the need to make apology for his productions, and the break with custom in someone like him voicing a political opinion in print.⁸

This display was in part necessitated by a general prejudice against the writers of popular songs, at least as manifested in the London press. The European Magazine declared that: ‘There are few writers more frequent or more presumptuous in their intrusions on the public than, we know not what to call them, versifiers, rhymists, metre-ballad mongers, [anything] you will but poets.’⁹ The Scourge went further. ‘It scarcely need be mentioned, that these songs are generally composed by those who have been initiated in all the slang, filthiness, and corruption, which that seat of vice, St. Giles, can produce.’¹⁰ One retired bookseller defined ‘the composer of common ballads’ as belonging to ‘the lowest grade’ of Grub Street writers.¹¹ Thus Reeves’ contributing songwriters, in their exculpatory letters, were distinguishing themselves from both the masses and the stereotypical ‘chaunter cull’ (songwriter).¹² This attitude persisted throughout the Wars. By treating loyalist songwriting as a patriotic duty akin to parish charity, even the humblest could claim a share of Britannia’s glory. John Tye, author of another Birmingham song collection, laboured the point in claiming that his Loyal Songster, Dedicated to the Birmingham Loyal Associated Corps of Infantry possessed ‘no other recommendation than novelty and loyalty’.¹³

This phenomenon is of interest, not only in itself, but in its effect in producing a large proportion of topical song during the Wars: songs born, not from a popular cultural tradition of songwriting, but from an extrinsic political motivation. The most obvious consequence of this was the ‘us and them’ mentality manifest in the majority of avowedly loyalist songwriting, in which even the most vernacular lyricists could not help but pontificate, reflecting the attitude of Patty More, a bluestocking reformer and sister to the famous Hannah More: ‘They [the poor] have so little common sense, and so little sensibility, that we are obliged to beat into their heads continually the good we are doing them; and endeavouring to press upon them, with all our might, the advantages they derive from us.’¹⁴

The more habitual sort of songwriter perceived less of a chasm between self and audience. Being accustomed to or involved in song more broadly, there was no need to maintain a barrier of distinction. Some were, of course, ‘in the business’, though fewer than one might think. The best examples of professional songwriters engaging with Napoleon and the Wars are the prolific Dibdin family: Charles the Elder and his two illegitimate sons, Charles and Thomas. Poets such as Thomas Moore, though writing in the first instance for a more elevated audience, or regional figures like Robert Anderson of Carlisle, fall into a similar bracket. Some, like the Scottish weaver and songwriter Walter Watson, were occasionally supported by local subscriptions in recognition of their works.¹⁵ Most, however, derived little or no income from songwriting, typically getting by as weavers, schoolmasters, clerks, soldiers, or shopkeepers (we must of course also allow for the likelihood of anonymous female songwriters in both groups). In delineating this broad category, I do not mean to suggest that these writers were disinterested when their songs did address topical affairs. The most obvious example is the ‘weaver boy’ and radical leader Samuel Bamford, who readily admits his motivation in composing his ‘Lancashire Hymn’. ‘I often said to my companions; “observe our neighbours, the Church-folks, – the Methodists, – and the Ranters, – what charms they add to their religious assemblages by the introduction of vocal music. Why has such an important lesson remained unobserved by us? Why should not we add music, and heart-inspiring song to our meetings?” ’¹⁶ In the introduction to his earliest set of songs, Bamford refers to himself as ‘one of old Burke’s pigs’, and hopes of his ‘little book’ that ‘the sentiments of Liberty which it contains may arouse a corresponding feeling in the bosoms of his Countrymen’.¹⁷ He differed from the single-issue loyalists described above only in that his political output was informed and accompanied by an accomplished wider repertoire, symptomatic of his deeper engagement in song culture and, in consequence, his greater competence as a songwriter. William Thom, a weaver from Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, asserts the importance of this engagement to the act of composition: ‘It was not enough that we merely chaunted, and listened; but some more ambitious, or idle if you will, they in time would try a self-conceived song.’¹⁸ He lists his own influences – Byron, Moore, Hogg, Burns, and above all Tannahill – and locates the creative process of songwriting within an existing tradition: ‘some waxed bold … groping amidst the material around and stringing it up, ventured on a home-made lilt.’¹⁹ Songwriters of this stamp frequently left memoirs, in which they stress the importance of long practice, and represent themselves as part of an established tradition.²⁰

However one attempts to impose conceptual order, songwriting in this period was above all else heterogeneous: relevant writers range across the social and cultural spectrum, and their motivations were frequently mixed. Semi-professional Welsh singer-songwriters, for instance, could simultaneously profess piety and the wish to be paid, in formulas ranging from this humble verse by George Stephens –

Three small half-farthings is my tribute

Before the whole world in public;

If they are accepted (this is the truth)

It will be more in my mind than a piece of land.²¹

– to Ioan Dafydd’s more assertive stamp of intellectual copyright:

I must now conclude,

Lest I should tire anyone by singing,

By asking those of all ages

To give a single penny swiftly

For the little piece of paper,

And to respect it while reading it …

Let no one sell this song without the author’s permission.²²

Even pious loyalists had to eat, just as one presumes that soldiers’ eyewitness songs of Waterloo, proud and self-aggrandising as they could be, were not offered gratis to the London printers who published them.²³ And just as loyalty could have its financial reward, so professional songwriting could serve a nobler end. Such, at least, was the claim of Charles Dibdin the Elder, in his 1803 autobiography:

It was not enough … merely to write love-songs, pastorals, invocations to Bacchus, to sing the pleasures of the chase, or be a sonnet monger … It was necessary to go beyond what had been already done, and in particular to give my labours a decided character … and therefore as a prominent feature in my labours, I sung those heroes who are the natural bulwark of their country … I thought therefore the subject honourable, and commendable.²⁴

Dibdin is known to have written patriotic songs under Pitt’s duress, and to have complained bitterly at his ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• Note on the Songs
• Introduction
• 1. ‘A Hacknied Tune’? Song Culture in Napoleonic Britain
• 2. ‘Threats of the Carmagnols’: Contesting the Nation, 1797–1805
• 3. ‘That the War Might Cease’: Awaiting and Making News, 1806–1813
• 4. ‘Now Boney’s Awa’’: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Legend Established, 1814–1822
• 5. ‘Canny Newcassel’: A Case Study, 1797–1822
• Coda
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index