Broadsides on the Trial of Queen Caroline: a Glimpse at Popular Song in 1820

Extract

The Trial of Queen Caroline for adultery in 1820 provoked comment in a deluge of songs, satires and caricatures. My aim here is to draw attention to some of the songs produced, and to locate them in relation to the nineteenth-century broadside tradition. This will require some general remarks on the broadside trade in London, which remained the chief centre for this type of literature, and where almost all the songs to be dealt with were printed. The years under discussion in the first part of the paper are, approximately, those between 1810 and 1860. (The precise dating of most broadsides remains difficult.) Inevitably, these limits are fairly arbitrary: the broadside trade, which stretches back to the sixteenth century, does not finally the out until the closing years of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the middle of the century seems to mark the point at which the broadside loses any claim to be considered the principal vehicle for the dissemination of popular songs – yielding on the one hand to the mass-produced songbook, and on the other to the emergent music-hall. And while one cannot discern at any single point in the history of broadside production a very sharp change in taste or style, by the second decade of the century a considerable body of material has appeared which is specifically nineteenth-century in character. Whatever earlier limit is chosen, the persistence of the old alongside the new, characteristic of so much in popular culture, means that any study of popular musical taste in the earlier nineteenth century will, to a large extent, be dealing with material originating in the previous century or even earlier.