A Book of Scattered Leaves (Volume I)

Poetry of Poverty in Broadside Ballads of Nineteenth-Century England

James Hepburn

2000
283 pages
$44.50
ISBN 0-8387-5397-3
LC 99-043700

In nineteenth-century England, poverty was widespread and hideous, but major poets had little to say about it. Boradside poets said more, some of them writing with intimate knowledge. James Hepburn assembles for the first time 120 representative broadside ballads on fourteen aspects of poverty. Also, for the first time, he presents a detailed study of broadside ballad authorship and audience. He is able to date most of the ballads, and he arranges them chronologically in each of the fourteen sections, providing substantial factual, literary, social, and printing backgrounds on many. In Volume One, 54 ballads in six sections show decades of poverty; injustices of law; enemies of the poor; workhouse conditions; household economics; and the doubtful future.

About the author:

James Hepburn took his degrees at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. Among his academic books are The Author's Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent (1968), Critic Into Anti-Critic (1984), and Letters of Arnold Bennett (4 vols. 1966-86). He recently published Arnold Bennett and Amberley and he is preparing an edition of the social-political verse of John Morgan, chief broadside poet of nineteenth-century England.