Mary Ellen Brown’s Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads makes a useful contribution to Anglo-American folksong scholarship, although it leaves incomplete an assessment of the distortions, as well as the discoveries, with which Child’s ambitious project still marks the field of ballad study. Brown gives an instructive glimpse at nineteenth-century scholarly practice, which entailed a lavish exchange of correspondence and manuscript- and book-dealing that—for better and worse—formed libraries and laid conceptual foundations for canons and commentary across disciplines. Francis James Child (1825-1896) and his collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, greatly shaped the study of Anglo-American folksong. At once massive and surprisingly narrow, his work enriches and limits our understanding to this day. Brown states that her purpose is “revisiting this work, and particularly the manuscript and primary sources behind it” (1). The new book is, like its subject, monumentalizing and detailed. Its descriptive approach unfortunately stops far short of analyzing the import and implications of Child’s legacy for song study.
Scholars define a ballad as a narrative song set to a stanzaic tune, or a literary poem modeled on such songs, which have flourished in oral traditions in many languages for centuries. Ballad study in Britain dates to the eighteenth century, when scholars began to collect and examine the form as representative of a collective national identity and as a link to a vanishing medieval past. Folklorists came to give pride of place to those ballads having earmarks of orality and freedom from print. For the English-speaking world, no work of scholarship more decisively established this demarcation between more prized and less prized folk songs than The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (ESPB) published by Harvard professor Francis James Child, whose extensively annotated edition appeared between 1882 and 1898. Since that time, folk song scholarship, especially in North America, has been shaped by a somewhat distorting distinction between the so-called “medieval” ballads included in ESPB and the wide range of other ballads and songs that English speakers have been singing before and since. While admired and venerated as a monumental edition, the collection from the first found questioners and detractors, especially as Child died before writing an intended preface giving his general view of the project; his understanding of terms like “critical,” “popular,” and “traditional”; his criteria for inclusion; his ordering of texts, and so on.
It is past time for a thorough examination of Child’s work. As Brown’s book attests, the project requires a daunting investigation of primary materials, especially the exhaustive correspondence that traces “how Child came to the ballad and introduce[s] his many collaborators” (5). Brown demonstrates that Child relied upon a formidable cohort of correspondents across Europe constituting “his republic of letters, a kind of social authorship… essential to the making of ESPB” (5) and to the formation of “that now established category of vernacular literature, the Child ballad, an appellation that, like the Grimms’ tales, suggests a pedigree and evokes authenticity” (6). But how exactly are we to understand this “evocation” and filtering that hovered like an eclipse over other kinds of songs and the study of Anglo-American singing traditions for a century?
Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece sketches Child’s life, then surveys his making of a monumental annotated collection of narrative songs in English chiefly from manuscripts, earlier publications and prints, and some recitations and singing by informants. Brown’s overview of the creation of the edition is based on a meticulous reading-through of reams of correspondence in Harvard’s Houghton Library and other archives. Herself not under-attentive to detail, Brown follows the assembly and arrangement of the edition—305 ballads in multiple versions—as Child’s publication took shape from materials he gathered, primarily from scholarly letter-writers in Britain. The description of the contributions of the correspondents, Child’s “army of auxiliaries” is eye-opening, especially the chapter on the indefatigable Scottish legal clerk William Macmath, who collaborated for some thirty years as Child’s “partner in the ballad cause.” Indeed, Brown’s suggestion that “evidence suggests… it would probably have been accurate and appropriate to list him on the title page… as William Macmath, corresponding editor in Scotland” (212) seems an understatement whose implications for Child’s scholarship and the edition itself beg for more comment. One wishes that Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece took up its subject with more assessment of the implications of its evidence and more analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of this collection.
Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece ends with what I find its most compelling discussion, a postlude consideration of conceptions and presuppositions about the ballad that infused Child’s work. As Brown concludes, “Child needed a second edition, an introduction, and most of all, a clear articulation of what constituted a popular ballad in order to make his purpose clear, to organize and arrange more effectively, to sift the texts further, to create the perfect new context, to clarify the salient characteristics of the ‘Child ballad.’ …The ESPB, as we have it, is not the definitive critical edition of popular ballads; nor did Child ever clarify his terms critical, popular, and traditional” (346). Brown’s study would be stronger had it begun with this conceptual discussion and more straightforwardly articulated what the collection does represent—indeed, taking on the implications of Thelma James’s pithy observation that a “‘Child ballad’ means little more than one collected and approved by Professor Child” (3).
As it is, Brown’s book takes a hagiographical approach, reflected in the lengthy survey of Child’s life from modest beginnings to a long career as a Harvard professor. Based on chatty and businesslike letters, accounts of meetings and repasts, conjectures about reading habits and possible reactions to events, this does not make a compelling story. Brevity would better grace the limitations of incident in the life of this college professor. Oddly, the painstaking and often redundant account fails to crystallize a sense of Child’s ideas, personality, relationships, or life-context, despite minutiae about gardening, correspondence, and appointments. We miss a more biographical portrait of character, morality, and intellect.
However, Brown’s meticulous examination of primary sources and detailed descriptions of the making of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads and the complex collaborations in its formation are impressive and supply an important resource for further study. Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece directs itself to an audience familiar with and admiring of F.J. Child and his now canonical edition. As such, Brown’s project gives Anglo-American folksong scholarship a formidable point of reference to reexamine Child’s ongoing impact on song scholarship and practice, and to revisit our still vexed notions of orality and print, ancient and modern, popular and elite.
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[Review length: 1087 words • Review posted on January 15, 2014]