Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History of the Songster

This book is a cultural history of the nineteenth-century songster: pocket-sized anthologies of song texts, usually without musical notation. It examines the musical, social, commercial and aesthetic functions songsters served and the processes by which they were produced and disseminated, the repertory they included, and the singers, printers and entrepreneurs that both inspired their manufacture and facilitated their consumption. Taking an international perspective, chapters focus on songsters from Ireland, North America, Australia and Britain and the varied public and private contexts in which they were used and exploited in oral and print cultures.

Paul Watt is a senior lecturer in musicology at Monash University, Victoria. His previous books include Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period (edited with Patrick Spedding, 2011) and Joseph Holbrooke: Composer, Critic, and Musical Patriot (edited with Anne-Marie Forbes, 2015). His articles have been published in the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Music and Letters and Musicology Australia. With funding from the Australian Research Council, he is writing a critical biography of Ernest Newman and a history of the reform and regulation of music criticism in late nineteenth-century England.

Derek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds. His books include From the Erotic to the Demonic (2003), Sounds of the Metropolis (2008), and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010). Since March 2014, with the aid of a major award from the European Research Council, he has been researching the reception of twentieth-century German operetta in London and New York.

Patrick Spedding is a lecturer in literary studies and Associate Director of the Centre for the Book at Monash University, Victoria. His current research is divided between the publication and reception of Eliza Haywood's works and the authorship and publication of eighteenth-century erotica, the subject of his Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. His articles have been published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies in Philology, Book History and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.