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Summary

Developing the thesis elaborated in the latter part of Chapter 4, I contend that the demise of the ballad-singer was primarily due to a shift in mainstream taste and musical potential, as the masses developed both the appetite for, and access to, a wide range of more sophisticated music. By 1864, when this book ends, the ballad-singer was almost entirely absent from the debate around the Street Music Act championed by Michael Thomas Bass MP, indicating the irrelevance of the ballad-singer to the contemporary street scene. This argument, predicated upon technological change, literacy, economics, and class consciousness, is essentially optimistic, running counter to the rhetoric of decline and nostalgia found in nineteenth-century elite writing on the subject. I contend that the primarily musical transformation by which melodic song became subordinated within a new and totalising conception of music, was itself symptomatic of the great historical forces of reform, education, improvement, and enfranchisement that were at work in Victorian London.

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