This exhibit uses Omeka, a content management system developed by George Mason's Center for History and New Media, to make Charles Hindley's 1871 compilation of British broadside ballads more widely available. Broadside ballads were single sheet publications that sold for a penny or less.  They were distributed by street hawkers and itinerant peddlers who often advertised their wares by reciting or singing their contents; many broadsides also included woodcut illustrations.  They were a hybrid form that mixed elements from oral, visual and print culture and brought traditional "folk" culture into the world of commercial, city-based, news and entertainment.  

Broadside ballads first appeared in England in the early 16th century.  Although not an elite form, they attracted a socially mixed audience.  By the 19th century, however, they were marketed almost exclusively to poor and working-class readers attracted by their low price.  Early 19th century innovations had made cheap printed matter more widely available.  The form this printed matter took, however, was shaped by politics as much as technology.  Just as the World Wide Web has lowered barriers to entry in recent decades and provoked anxieties about a flattening of authority, cheap publishing in the 19th century led to fears that poor readers would challenge political and cultural elites.  The mechanism of control in Great Britain had already shifted from licensing to taxation in 1712; by 1815, in the wake of the French Revolution, the stamp tax on newspapers was increased to 4d. and newspapers were priced out of the reach of poor and working-class readers.  As a result, the circulation of single sheet broadsides exploded.   

     
By 1871, however, when Reeves and Turner published Curiosities of Street Literature, penny dailies had replaced broadsides as a vehicle for news and entertainment among many poor and working-class readers.  Hindley's collection came out just ten years after the last of the so-called Taxes on Knowledge was eliminated (the stamp tax was abolished in 1855, that on advertisements in 1853, and that on paper in 1861).  Not coincidentally, 1855 was the year the Daily Telegraph, one of the first mass circulation daily tabloid papers in the UK, began publication.  As a result of these developments, broadsides were becoming a historical curiosity.  Instead of evoking the potentially threatening streets of the urban poor, they became a vehicle for nostalgia and suitable for collecting in a print equivalent of an older, often aristocratic, form that anticipates the modern museum--the Cabinet of Curiosities.  Hence the title of Hindley's book.  

The pricing sheet and insignia at the beginning of the collection is telling in this regard.  The volume we have reproduced on this site is listed on the insignia page as copy number 91 in the Large Post Edition of which "only 100 copies" were printed.  Underneath what looks like a finely decorated plate is an area designed for the owner to write down "Purchased by . . . on the day of."  The insignia itself is reminiscent of the imitation bone china manufactured by Wedgwood for middle-class consumption.  On the next page is the price list with the following line in capital letters at the top:  "Guaranteed only four hundred and fifty-six copies printed" with prices ranging from one pound one shilling to two pounds two shillings and "each copy of each edition numbered."  Broadsides were sold on the streets for a penny or less by peddlers; Hindley's collection is in a different world, both economically and bibliographically.   

In Hindley's Introduction, he acknowledges that the volume contains reproductions but emphasizes that "every care has been taken to print them verbatim et literatim" (word for word, letter for letter).  He goes on to say that where possible, "they all bear the printers name and address"  and "in many cases, the wood-cuts [used to print the originals] have either been borrowed or purchased for the purpose of presenting them in their original style."  The only exceptions to his printing instructions--"set up word for word from copy"--are what he calls "Errors of the Press" like turned letters or "WROng FoNT."  These were common "in former days" from a lack of skill on the printer's part, "a deficiency of capital, and the hurried manner in which they were prepared and worked off to meet the momentary demand."  Hindley goes on to list the present street literature printers "from whose 'establishments'" he obtained "upwards of two thousand street 'papers' and 'ballads,'" including Fortey and Disley, two successors to Catnach, who with Pitts was the largest purveyor of broadsides in the 19th century.  An attentive reader will notice these names as well as two others Hindley mentions--Taylor and Harkness--at the bottom of many broadsides in this edition.   

After supplementing sheets from these printers with items from private collections, the sheer number of broadsides Hindley had to chose from made selection and organization quite difficult:  "With such a vast amount of 'material' to hand," he "arranged" his collection according to the following classification schema:   "I. 'COCKS,' OR 'CATCHPENNIES.'  II. ROYALTY AND POLITICAL. III. BALLADS ON A SUBJECT. IV. DYING SPEECH AND CONFESSIONAL PAPERS."  He calls each of these a "DIVISION" and organizes the table of contents and the book in these terms.  In reproducing Curiosities of Street Literature, we have maintained Hindley's terminology as well as his classificatory system and put a link to each "division" on the left hand margin of the following pages.  Each division, moreover, has an illustration and introduction of its own.  These introductions provides additional information on that category.  In several cases he bases his account on interviews he conducted with those involved in the trade.