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Street Music in London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘Evidence’ from Charles Dickens, Charles Babbage and Lucy Broadwood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2017

Paul Watt
Paul Watt*
Affiliation:
Monash University Email: paul.watt@monash.edu
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Abstract

What evidence is there that street music was widespread, problematic and immoral in nineteenth-century London? This article re-examines a substantial literature that has been used to build a case or argument of the pervasive notion that street music was a curse in nineteenth-century London. Looking at a variety of sources afresh the article argues that historical evidence has often been misunderstood, misread or misconstrued in establishing historical narratives about street music in nineteenth-century London.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , April 2018 , pp. 9 - 22
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 See, for example, correspondence from ‘B’ to Michael T. Bass, November 5 [no date], in Bass, Michael T., Street Music in the Metropolis: Correspondence and Observations on the Existing Law and Proposed Amendments (London: John Murray, 1864): 58–59Google Scholar. On page 58 ‘B’ writes, in italics and quoting a magistrate in relation to a hearing of a street musician in breach of the law, ‘London is the only European capital in which street music is allowed’.

2 Correspondence from Charles Doxat to Michael T. Bass, June 4, 1864, in Bass, Street Music in the Metropolis, 23.

3 Boutin, Aimée, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015)Google Scholar: chapter 4.

4 In the case of Dickens see, for example, Dickens, Charles, ‘The Streets – Morning’ and ‘The Streets – Night’ in Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-Day People, introduced by Thea Holme (London: Oxford University Press, 1957): 47–58Google Scholar and Lightwood, J.T., Charles Dickens and Music (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1912)Google Scholar. In reference to Babbage see Babbage, Charles, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longmans Green, 1864; repr. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968)Google Scholar. Citations in this article are from the 1968 edition). Mayhew’s major ethnographic work was The London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work, 4 volumes (London: Griffin Bohn, 1861). A recent critical study of Mayhew is Groth, Helen, ‘The Soundscapes of Henry Mayhew: Urban Ethnography and Technologies of Transcription’, Cultural Studies Review 18/3 (2012): 109–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Lightwood, J.T., Charles Dickens and Music (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1912)Google Scholar.

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7 Lightwood, Charles Dickens and Music, 5.

8 Unsigned, ‘Reviews’, Musical Times vol. 54 no. 840 (1913): 102.

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13 Cudworth, ‘Dickens and Music’, 589.

14 Cudworth, ‘Dickens and Music’, 588.

15 Cudworth, ‘Dickens and Music’, 589.

16 Sketches by Boz, viiii. See also Grillo, Virgil, Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz: End in the Beginning (Boulder CO: The Colorado Associated Press, 1974): 7Google Scholar\.

17 Dickens, Charles, ‘The Streets – Morning’, in Sketches by Boz, 47Google Scholar.

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20 Charles Dickens, ‘The Streets – Morning’, 50, 51.

21 Charles Dickens, ‘The Streets – Morning’, 51.

22 Charles Dickens, ‘The Streets – Night’, 53.

23 Charles Dickens, ‘The Streets – Night’, 55, 56.

24 Correspondence from G.T. Chambers to Michael T. Bass, July 10, 1864, in Bass, Street Music, 35.

25 John F. Stanford, letter to Michael T. Bass, [no date], May 1864, in Bass, Street Music, 50.

26 Correspondence from Victor Baune to Michael T. Bass, 4 May 1864, in Bass, Street Music, 8. The practice of bribing street musicians was the topic of an article ‘The Great Street Music Nuisance’, Examiner, 21 May 1862, reproduced in Bass, Street Music, 68–70.

27 Babbage, Passages, 337. For critical studies of Babbage see Winter, James, London’s Teeming Streets: 1830–1914 (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar, chapter 5: ‘Enjoying’, 65–79 and Brenda Assael, ‘Music in the Air: Noise, Performers and the Contest over the Streets of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Metropolis’, in The Streets of London from the Great Fire to the Great Stink, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram, 2003): 183–207.

28 Babbage, Passages, 345.

29 Charles Babbage, correspondence to Michael T. Bass, 13 July 1863 in Bass, Street Music, 20–22.

30 Charles Babbage, correspondence to Michael T. Bass, 13 July 1863 in Bass, Street Music, 20.

31 Charles Babbage, correspondence to Michael T. Bass, 13 July 1863 in Bass, Street Music, 19.

32 Babbage, Passages, 352.

33 Babbage, Passages, 353. The suggestion that Babbage had a difficult personality is supported by comments made about him by Lady Ada Lovelace who wrote of him that he was ‘one of the most impracticable, selfish, intemperate, persons one can have to do with’. Cited in Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, 72. Winter (page 72) explains that Lovelace ‘went on to become his [Babbage’s] protégée and later on his “High Priestess”’. Winter cited this extract from Dorothy Stein, Ada: A Life and Legacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985): 115–18.

34 Babbage, Passages, 353.

35 Babbage, Passages, 353.

36 Babbage, Passages from the Life, pp. 338–9. These three tables are reproduced here as Tables 1–3.

37 Correspondence from Alfred Wigan to Michael T. Bass, 7 June 1864 in Bass, Street Music, 17. See further correspondence from ‘Chelone’, pages 76–8 and an article (no title) in The Times of 19 May 1864, in Bass, Street Music, 105–8.

38 Hindley, Charles, A History of the Cries of London: Ancient and Modern (London: Reeves and Turner, 1881)Google Scholar. Previous studies are plentiful and include The New Cries of London (London: Harvey and Darton, 1823); Percy Cruikshank, The Modern Cries of London (London: Read and Co., c. 1865) and Andrew W. Tuer, London Cries (London: Field & Tuer, c. 1880).

39 For more on the development of historical method in the nineteenth century see Gooch, G.P., History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1965)Google Scholar; Iggers, George G., The German Conception of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Kenyon, John, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983)Google Scholar; John Clive, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (London: Collins Harvill, 1989); Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende, eds, British and German Historiography, 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions and Transfers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 123–57; and Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011).

40 Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, vii.

41 Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, xxxiii.

42 Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, xxxiii.

43 Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, 7, 20–21, 102.

44 Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, 110–11.

45 Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, 44.

46 Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, 22.

47 Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, 100.

48 Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, 101

49 Broadwood, Lucy, ‘Some Notes on London Street Cries’, Journal of the Folk Song Society 6/22 (June 1919), 43–47Google Scholar. For a biography of Broadwood see de Val, Dorothy, In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011)Google Scholar. For an account of Broadwood’s work as an ethnographer see Jones, Lewis, ‘Lucy Etheldred Broadwood: Her Scholarship and Ours’, in Folk Song: Tradition, Revival, and Re-creation, ed. Ian Russell and David Atkinson (Aberdeen: Elphinstone Institute, 2004): 241–252Google Scholar.

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52 Broadwood and Gilchrist, ‘Miscellaneous Street Cries’, 71.

53 Cra’ster, Barbara M., Broadwood, Lucy E. and Glichrist, A.G., ‘Boulogne Street Cries’, Journal of the Folk Song Society 6/22 (June 1919): 78–79Google Scholar.

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57 Williams, Broadwood and Gilchrist, ‘London Street Cries’, 58.

58 Transcriptions of cries were also undertaken in Paris. See Aimée Boutin, City of Noise, chapter 4. Surely future research will find ethnographers at work in other cities.

59 Boutin, City of Noise, 3.

60 Boutin, City of Noise, 3.

61 Hendy, Noise, xv. The privileging of aural over visual sensations is explored in detail by George Simmel in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997): 109–35.