In 1829 a large marble monument to Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was erected in Greenwich Hospital, paid for by a public subscription. Still there today, it incorporates a bust of Dibdin himself, looking like a Roman senator, set on a column before which kneels a ‘Weeping Muse’. The plinth below describes him as the ‘Author of the National Naval Ballads’.
This was perhaps the high-water mark of Dibdin being recognized as a ‘classic’, a household name who had made an almost immeasurable cultural impact. By 1829 the less savoury aspects of his life had largely been forgotten, along with the less successful of his numerous works. What remained were a few operas (we would probably call them musicals if they were performed today) that had become part of the standard theatrical repertoire, dozens of songs which had the same sort of cultural currency as the Beatles’ songs do now, and a deeply pervasive legacy that meant hardly anyone could write or sing an English song without being influenced in some way by Dibdin. Most of all, Dibdin was known for those ‘National Naval Ballads’, the sea songs widely credited with having played a significant role in Britain’s victory in the Napoleonic wars. He was the people’s poet, but most of all the sailor’s poet.
Dibdin left an enormous textual and musical legacy, and his name appears constantly in extant British newspapers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, standard accounts of the Romantic period generally don’t mention him at all. Of the canonical writers of the period, only Jane Austen seems to have had a serious interest in Dibdin: he is the best represented composer in her music collection. The major male writers simply ignored him. The fullest academic study, Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (OUP, 2018), starts with the hopeful claim that Coleridge recognized Dibdin as a ‘multifarious, polymathic’ talent, but alas, Coleridge was actually referring to Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847). This willful ignoring of the country’s most popular songwriter then became a feature of later critical constructions of the period.
Dibdin gradually found that his multifarious talents were best united in the form of the one-man musical shows in which he stood at a piano, alternatively singing and speaking to his audience. He called them ‘Table Entertainments’ and toured them extensively around the country. They moved fluently between elite and popular culture in a way scarcely seen before; Dibdin prided himself on his ability to entertain anyone willing to pay his entrance fee, and to adjust his performance to suit his listeners. His account of a performance he gave at the assembly rooms in Penrith, in April 1799, is particularly quotable:
… whenever I paused, I was publicly admonished by a drunken quaker, to the no small amusement of every one in the assembly room, and to no one more than myself; for knowing exactly how every thing would turn out, I humoured this new mode of chorus to my entertainment so comfortably, that a stranger might have been induced to fancy that I hired the man for the purpose. Towards the conclusion, I had occasion to introduce my song of the Auctioneer, which, by accident, I had found out to be Broadbrim’s profession. At this he was completely hung up or cut down, which are, I believe, both genteel expressions for this kind of non plus, and presently afterwards the spirit moved him to take himself off.
Of the three Table Entertainments that have survived in the most complete form, largely complete recordings have been issued of The Wags (1790)—which ends with ‘The Auctioneer’—and Christmas Gambols (1795), and a very abbreviated version of Readings and Music (1787), all on the Retrospect Opera label. Anyone intrigued by what I’ve written is invited to start with the video version of The Wags on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFbABKeLVGQ&t . And note that Christmas Gambols seems to be the fullest picture of an old English Christmas produced by anyone in the Romantic period. Given that Charles Dickens’s father-in-law, George Hogarth, spent years editing Dibdin’s songs, there is a fascinating possibility that he knew the work.
David Chandler