“These Halfpenny Sheets form almost the entire poetry of Seven Dials, and though they teach little or no history, they show, at least, what kind of poetry finds the most favourable reception and the readiest sale among our lowest classes. As far as we can ascertain, there are in London eight or ten publishers of the Fortey and Disley stamp—though not on so large a scale. Of ballad-singers and patterers of prose recitations (such as the ‘Political Catechism’), there may be about a hundred scattered over the metropolis, who haunt such localities as the New Cut, Tottenham-court-road, Whitechapel, and Clerkenwell Green; and according to the weather, the state of trade, and the character of their wares, earn a scanty or a jovial living by chanting such strains as we have now laid before our readers. ‘Songs if they’re over religious,’ says one minstrel, ‘don’t sell at all; though a tidy moral does werry well. But a good, awful murder’s the thing. I’ve knowed,’ says our authority, ‘a man sell a ream a day of them.—that’s twenty dozen you know;’ and this sale may go on for days, so that with forty or fifty men at work as minstrels, a popular ballad will soon attain a circulation of thirty or forty or fifty thousand. Now and then the publisher himself composes a song, and in this case is saved the cost of copyright, though his expenses are very trifling, even when he has to purchase it. If one of the patterers writes a ballad on a taking subject, he hastens at once to Seven Dials, where, if accepted, his reward is ‘a glass of rum, a slice of cake, and five dozen copies,’—which, if the accident or murder be a very awful one, are struck off for him while he waits. A murder always sells well, so does a fire, or a fearful railway accident. A good love story, embracing
‘infidi perjuria nautæ
Deceptamque dolo nympham’
often does fairly; but politics among the lowest class are a drug. Even the famous Ballad on Pam’s death didn’t do much except among the better sort of people; and though the roughs are fond of shouting Reform, they don’t care, it would seem, to spend money on it.”
We have submitted this wretched doggrel to our readers, that they may form some idea of the kind of Street Literature which is still popular with so many of the lower classes. It is humiliating, in the midst of all the schools and teaching of the present day, to find such rubbish continually poured forth, and eagerly read. Still there are some redeeming features in this weary waste. Taken as a whole, the moral tone of the ballads, if not lofty, is certainly not bad; and the number of single stanzas that could not be quoted in these pages on account of their gross or indecent language is very small; while that of entire Ballads, to be excluded on the same ground, is still smaller.
THE FEMALE HUSBAND,
WHO HAD BEEN MARRIED TO ANOTHER FEMALE FOR
TWENTY-ONE YEARS.
What wonders now I have to pen, sir,