Canadian Journal for Traditional Music/Revue de musique folklorique canadienne
Abstract
Although The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1 882-1 898) was the
most systematic and scholarly collection of vernacular ballads published in the Victorian
era, Francis Child nonetheless omitted from his canon a large number of extant narrative
songs, including many found on black-letter broadsides and others that he had printed in
his earlier collection, English and Scottish Ballads (1 857-64). This article explores Child's
changing approach to ballad editing, discusses his ambivalence towards broadsides,
and examines his selective use of texts discovered by English collectors during the Late
Victorian folksong revival, with a view to explaining what kinds of material he discarded
and why he did so
