Paula McDowell’s The Invention of the Oral is a scholarly book about eighteenth-century English culture, with two chapters of special interest to folklorists and ballad scholars. The book argues that the eighteenth century was when people began to notice what was preserved in writing and what had come down in oral tradition. Significant interest was awakened in the oral transmission of culture, ranging from religious events such as miracles and extra-scribal apostolic doctrines to poetry, song, and history. As literacy spread and with it printed materials, the wherewithal to read, the power of the spoken word was also rediscovered--in sermons, the theatre, and in the traditional knowledge of proverbs and ballads.
There is an extraordinary account here of “Orator” Henley, an Anglican minister who disaffiliated from the Church of England and gave public lectures on many subjects in addition to his Sunday sermons. A “restorer of ancient eloquence,” he made his independent living from these academical lectures and preaching, and was widely satirized in his own day. Another chapter demonstrates that oral traditions were often associated with old women, and particular laboring-class women, who preserved local superstitions and entertained children with tales of witches and goblins. McDowell reminds us of the remarkable fact that in compiling the London Bills of Mortality, it was women searchers who were expected to examine bodies and determine the cause of death (98), from which subsequent so-called scientific and objective accounts of epidemics and plagues then tried to disassociate themselves, because old women’s testimony was considered innately untrustworthy.
Chapters 7 and 8 will be of special interest to readers of JFRR. Chapter 7, “’The Art of Printing was Fatal’: The Idea of Oral Tradition in Ballad Discourse,” begins with Thomas Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was drawn from a textual source but was represented by Percy as the “select Remains” of ancient English minstrels and bards. McDowell asserts that Percy’s Reliques first constructed the oral tradition as something worth saving and in danger of being swamped by print, and claims that it was during this period that ballads from the “oral tradition” were re-evaluated and prized for the first time. Ballads that had been sung and passed along by voice were for the first time distinguished from the commercially printed broadside ballads that sold in great numbers from the late sixteenth century onwards. McDowell seems oddly skeptical about the distinction between traditional ballads and broadside ballads, long a standard assumption in the field, and refers to it as a prejudicial binary that arose in the eighteenth century (and ought, by implication, to be abandoned). But any singer will tell you that most broadside ballads are largely unsingable and could only ever have been passed along in print.
The chapter covers most of the main sources in the history of song collection in this period, examining the extremely important A Collection of Old Ballads (1723-25) in detail and doing credit to Robert Motherwell’s seminal contribution as a field collector and a student of oral tradition. John Pinkerton’s forgery of “ancient” ballads is well known, but few are aware of his intelligent definition of the generic qualities of oral poetry in his “Dissertation On the Oral Tradition of Poetry” (1781), which McDowell calls to our attention. This was the period when Homer was recognized as an oral poet--first by Thomas Blackwell, whose Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) describes Homer as a poor, strolling bard, and later by Robert Wood, who contended that Homer was illiterate, thus invoking the prestige of classical precedent for contemporary balladeers and ballad-making. McDowell notes that broadside ballads were omitted from “genteel” collections, because these socially “low” and seditious productions originating in print were not thought fit to be preserved by the gentlemen ballad collectors. These topical broadsides also became dated very quickly, tied as they were to particular political contexts and events.
Chapter 8, “Conjectural Oral Societies: Global to Gaelic,” tells the story of Macpherson’s translations of Ossian from the Johnsonian, English point of view. McDowell reminds us that Samuel Johnson’s father was a bookseller, citing Johnson’s consequent belief in the primacy of books, print, and the extension of literacy. This point of view is offered in relation to Johnson’s expectation of Scottish backwardness and the “primitive” culture of the Highlands. Like Johnson, she seems unaware of the Scottish Education Act of 1696, which provided for a school and schoolmaster in every parish--and which made Scotland one of the most literate nations in Europe in the eighteenth century.
McDowell does not always recognize that Scotland and England were very different countries, with distinctly different attitudes towards literacy and orality. To be fair, this is hardly unusual; scholars of eighteenth-century studies have long tended to neglect Scotland, viewing it as a minor offshoot of England. But McDowell’s story would have been strengthened if she had drawn on Scottish as well as English sources for her more controversial material--for example, Howard Gaskill and Fiona Stafford as well as Thomas Curley on the question of Macpherson’s oral Gaelic sources; Allan Ramsay’s printing the airs to his songs fifty years before Joseph Ritson did; or the number of Scots philosophers besides Dugald Stewart who were focused on writing and signification at this time, and whose interest in conjectural history derived as much from their high national levels of literacy as from the “primitivism” of the Highlands.
On the positive side, The Invention of the Oral contains some fascinating case studies of the re-evaluation of the oral, and is a worthy addition to McDowell’s distinguished career as an historian of the book and the culture of print. The questions she asks about orality and literacy are important ones, the controversies she identifies in the period are the relevant ones, and the materials she canvasses are always thoroughly examined. Any scholar studying in literacy and orality in the eighteenth century will have to consult this significant new volume from one of our leading practitioners.
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[Review length: 995 words • Review posted on August 23, 2018]