Oskar Cox Jensen is currently a Research Fellow at King’s College London working on the Music in London 1800-1851 project.  His work focuses on the political, social and cultural histories of Britain and Europe in the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on balladry, street music and mass culture.  Prior to taking up his post at King’s, he completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford, where he worked on the project that became his first monograph, Napoleon and British Song, 1797-1822, which was published in October by Palgrave Macmillan and which we discuss below.  As well as researching songs, Oskar is also a performer and recording artist; versions of many of the Napoleonic songs that his book examines can be heard on his Soundcloud.

1) How did you first become interested in the ways in which Napoleon was represented in popular song?

As an undergraduate historian, I was torn between two rather disparate interests: the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period (which is now so central to my thinking that I tend to forget to put ‘French’ before ‘Revolution’, just as ‘the ’90s’, to me, means the 1790s…) – and Viking-age Scandinavia.  Lacking the necessary six languages required for the latter, it became 1789 and beyond.  Song, meanwhile, has always mattered hugely to me, and I’ve been writing songs for more than a decade: drawn in by the thunder of the Marseillaise, I wondered if the two worlds might collide.

Of course, they did (for more of which, see question two!).  I needed a topic for my Master’s dissertation, ideally British, and while the 1790s seemed well covered, there was this immensely potent figure looming at the decade’s end that no one really had a handle on.  Stuart Semmel’s Napoleon and the British, the key work, focuses on London society and the press, rather than the people.  Folk musicologist Vic Gammon had published on the puzzling fact that later British songs of Napoleon seemed to idolise him.  There was clearly a story here.  I began with 15,000 words on 1814–16 and, encouraged by Mark Philp and David Hopkin, didn’t look back.

2) In your introduction, you assert that popular song was ‘the most widespread and influential form of literary expression of the day’, but remark that it has thus far received very little scholarly attention. What do you see as being the main benefits of recovering the importance of popular song?

The great attraction here, and the great danger, is the thought that we are recovering ‘lost voices’: that the silent, unlettered majority was actually making a lot of noise (or, rather, music).  In fact, many scholars from several disciplines have been drawn to the vast number of extant songs, often digitised, that we tend to label ‘broadside ballads’.  The issue is less, why has there been no work done, but rather, why has it proven so unproductive?  There remains a good deal of sober scepticism about what we can do with songs: they are ephemeral, and thus unquantifiable; they are usually anonymous; there is too little contextual material to bear their weight.  Their aesthetic worth, both musical and literary, has been seen as negligible.  The Romantic period was also a great age of propaganda, and many songs are polemical, didactic, seductive: with almost no evidence for their reception, how are we to draw any meaningful conclusions?

To claw back something more positive in answer to the question: song was the ubiquitous mass medium.  Generically, it was heterogeneous, assimilating elite poetry, theatrical hamminess, and street doggerel, just as it assimilated sacred, dance, or military music.  It simultaneously united and divided society both geographically and along class lines.  Its perceived potency was such that political and moral activists of every stripe made use of it.  Subject matter ranged from the same day’s news to medieval romance.  More people consumed canonical poetry as song than as verse; singing and listening, even in an age dominated by print, was simply what people did.  If we can get to grips with this, then we recover a living culture.  For how we might attempt this, see question three…

3) In composing your monograph, how did you seek to deal with the problems implicit in what you describe as ‘the fractured and contradictory incoherence of popular culture’?

I’m beginning to go off ‘popular’ as a useful label (maybe twenty years too late), preferring, if anything, to use ‘common’, especially for song.  But in this book, yes, I was specifically concerned with addressing plebeian experience and perception, which is a massive mess.  But there are some basic propositions that help shape things.  That quotation comes from a discussion of E.P. Thompson’s point that popular culture embodied a tradition of rebelliousness – a rather pleasing paradox.  And this is central to the book: we find a quite old fashioned top-down/bottom-up struggle, whereby various actors are trying to impose a set of values upon the people by cultural means that these actors do not quite understand.  Whilst being incoherent, especially in terms of party politics and a sense of identity, popular culture had its idioms and conventions, especially in song, and these conventions were cultural rather than political.

That is to say, for example, that it’s no good advancing the cause of temperance by publishing mass editions of teetotal songs, because these songs will not be fit for purpose: their lyrics will be sermonising, unsuitable to sing, and their functionality will be minimal: when would you sing them?  It is this idea of the fitness of songs that proved to be my way through the mess.  Were the words sympathetic?  Was the choice of tune, in particular, appropriate, and could the words be sung to it in the first place?  In the end, it was only by turning to contemporary aesthetic and performative considerations that I could evaluate this mass of material, and advance theories about its reception.  Thus the book begins with a contextual analysis of song as a practice, considering its writing, publication, performance and reception by real people in specific times and spaces, as a necessary precondition of any close readings.

4) To what extent might musical responses to Napoleon be systematised in chronological or class-based manners?

For convenience, I’ll take ‘musical’ to mean ‘song’ here, as the book does not look at instrumental music.  It all depends on whose response we are looking for: do we mean what was produced, or what was consumed?  The former is achievable. 1797: the first responses, mostly admiring.  1798: Napoleon as the worthy adversary to Nelson.  1799: he becomes a heathenish, usurpatory butcher.  1801–3: ambivalence.  1803–5: the blustering Ogre.  1806–9: silence.  1810–12: domestic comedy.  1813–14: triumphalism.  1814 and after: the disappearance of anti-Napoleonic propaganda and the mass assertion of a sympathetic song tradition.  Underneath, it’s far more complicated, and that goes for class too.  Geography is also central.  If sweeping generalisations are permitted, then take England south of the M4, and Wales: staunchly loyal and anti-Napoleon.  Everything north of that, including Scotland and Ireland: far likelier to hold Bonapartist sympathies.  And there is an obvious narrative of elite disdain versus popular affinity.  But press too hard and it all falls down.  Look at Cobbett or Byron, and they change year by year.  Look at the contested performance of song in almost every major city and town.  Most importantly of all, look very hard at any individual song, the relation of words to music, and the multivalent interpretations that could be read into both: the same song in two mouths could carry two opposing messages, which might be heard as half a dozen more.  This is not a medium that encourages systematisation.  Indeed, this would be my central plea.  Just because there are thousands of songs, and just because most of them don’t appear to be any good, doesn’t mean we should turn them into big data.  In the first place, it doesn’t work, because what is extant is entirely unreliable as a sample of what circulated at the time.  And in turning songs exclusively into statistics (not that statistics can’t be great when done properly), we both belittle their value as cultural objects, and lose any sense of what they actually meant to audiences.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

Music in London 1800–1851 is keeping me very busy.  I’d like to echo James Grande’s invitation in these pages to visit the website if you are interested in being involved.  Along with David Kennerley and Ian Newman, I am co-editor of a volume of essays, The Art of Miscellany: Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture, which looks at the world of Charles Dibdin the Elder with the aim of suggesting a new model of thinking about cultural production in the period, one that spans all sorts of media and networks.  This book is currently with readers.  I am also writing my second monograph, The London Ballad-Singer, 1792–1864.  In writing the Napoleon book I moved from political to cultural history, and this is where I’ve come to: a belief that we can best understand society and its texts by looking at the lived experience of culture, in this case on the London streets.  The book focuses on the representation, politics, performances, and repertoire of street singers – and ends (tragically?) with their ultimate disappearance.  Which seems like a good place to finish.

Ina Ferris is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.   She has written a series of important and influential contributions to Romantic Studies, particularly in the fields of book history and the history of the novel, for which she has received numerous deserved plaudits, including, most recently, the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.  Her major works include the monographs The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).  In recent years, her research has focused on the book cultures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, resulting in works including an edited volume for the Romantic Circles Praxis series on Romantic Libraries and a collection on Bookish Histories co-edited with Paul Keen.  One of the culminating achievements of this interest is her latest monograph, Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere, which we discuss below and which was published in August by Palgrave Macmillan.

1) How did you first become interested in the idea of the bookman?

I’d been interested for some time in the intense bookishness of the early nineteenth century and I’d started by looking at familiar essayists such as Hunt and Lamb who made books and reading a focal point in their writing.  But in thinking more generally about how print was incorporated in the period I became more and more interested in a form of bookishness that hadn’t received much attention and was represented by bookmen who joined together to insert themselves in the circuit of book production and distribution as an alternative to the commercial market.

What sparked this turn was my running across the Bannatyne Club, the antiquarian printing club founded by Walter Scott in 1823 to print historical documents (a forerunner of the later learned printing societies).  Two things struck me as I did the research.  First, the club was formed not to read, discuss or collect books, as we might have expected, but to sponsor and produce books.  Second, the Bannatyne books came under surprisingly vehement attack from periodical reviewers and other commentators who derided or dismissed them as regressive ‘rubbish’.  The question was why they were so agitated in the first place by an inoffensive circle of bookmen and minor publications with restricted circulation.  I became interested in how bookmen, especially when they formed associations, functioned as flash points in literary culture not just because of their perverse attachment to the material book but because, in involving themselves in the making of books, they put into play an understanding of literary and disciplinary categories at variance with those sustaining the literary sphere.

2) You characterise the bookman as an outlier in the literary field, invested more fully in books themselves than in reading or in notions of literariness.  How does the liminality of the bookmen you examine serve to inform and enrich their perspectives?

The original title of my book was in fact Bookish Outliers: On the Borders of Literary Culture.  I wanted to foreground their position as figures detached from the centre of the literary sphere but not entirely removed from the sphere itself.  In relation to the question of perspective what this position means is that the bookmen’s location on the border put them in contact with contiguous spheres, letting them establish connections and introduce protocols and practices from neighbouring areas.  In this sense, their perspective was informed by a broader matrix of book production and practice, and one of my aims in the book was to draw attention to how this led to a different configuration of book, author and readers than what was being promulgated in literary circles.

One of the most striking examples in the book is Thomas Frognall Dibdin, founder of the elite bibliomaniac Roxburghe Club but also involved in the workaday world of the printing trades.  As a book designer as well as an author, Dibdin produced hybrid bibliographic volumes that embody his understanding of the book as the product of the printing arts as much as the writing arts.  What’s most interesting about them from a conceptual point of view is the way this understanding led Dibdin to make visible in his books what the modern book sought to make invisible.  He put print itself on flamboyant display, for example, and played with the format of the page.  He also credited by name printers and other craftspeople who contributed to the production, so that authorship in Dibdin is situated rather differently from authorship in the novels of Austen or even (despite their bookishness) in Scott’s historical romances.

3) In your introduction, you describe book clubs as having ‘largely disappeared from critical view’, becoming ‘not so much absent as elided’.  What do you think critics can gain by thinking through and countering this elision?

Book clubs have been typically lined up with literary societies, subscription libraries, and reading societies in lists of organizations exemplifying the conversational culture of politeness and the historical narrative of improvement.  This is not wrong (the clubs are certainly related to these other literacy-based organizations) but it obscures the specificity of the clubs, lumping them in with associations dedicated to reading, discussion, lectures, and so forth.  Moreover, placing all these associations on the same plane implies a smooth passage from one term to the next, but the book clubs have a different genealogy and trajectory, and they don’t stand in the same relation to the model of improvement.  By restoring their specificity we open a window onto overlooked dimensions of the experience and uses of print in the period, and so bring into view a more uneven terrain of the book and a more tangled process of the absorption of print into the everyday.  This seems to me the first critical gain.  The second is that in order to counter an elision, we must first track the process of elision, and this move induces critical reflectiveness, drawing attention to the investments/assumptions that sustain central literary categories (not only in the Romantic period but in our own time).  The response to the book clubs seems to me particularly resonant, presenting from a different angle the way literary culture in the Romantic period carved out a place for itself within a dynamic book culture that pressed in on it in different ways.

4) How did you come to fix on your book’s final structure, which circles out from establishment bibliophilia and printing centres in the cities to provincial book clubs and circuits?

To spotlight the constitutive friction between book culture and literary culture that helped to entrench dominant literary categories in the period, I isolated issues of circulation, production and reception triggered by book clubs not primarily devoted to reading or discussion.  At the same time I also wanted to expand the spectrum of book practices and the geography of the book, and so decided to filter these issues through three case studies centred in different regions.  The book starts in London with the high-toned Roxburghe Club of wealthy rare book collectors, which garnered criticism for restricted circulation, then shifts to Edinburgh where the more middle-class Banntayne Club issued historical documents relating to the Scottish past, prompting debate about what should be moved out of the archive into publication.  The final section widens out to look at a type of book club rather than a specific club, concentrating on ‘circulating’ book clubs that proliferated in small towns and rural areas and did not fit readily into the notion of the reading public.  These different spaces of the book make for a kaleidoscopic structure, showing different configurations of the book club, but underlying this structure is a historical thread (or story) about a ‘bookish interim’ which opened up and then closed down over the course of the early decades of the nineteenth century.

5) Now that this project is complete, what new research are you planning to embark on?

One of the discoveries for me in researching Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere was the world of printers and the degree of literary activity linked to the printing house, and I’ve now begun to work on a project building out this interest in the printing trades.  I’m looking at the notion of authorship through figures who were involved in some way in these trades and who took to publication in their own right.  I have in mind figures such as William Hutton, who ran a paper factory and wrote the first history of Birmingham, along with various other works; or Pierce Egan, who trained as a compositor and produced the enormously popular Life in London.  What I want to do is revisit Foucault’s famous question ‘What Is an Author?’ by thinking about what happens if you pose this question not from the theoretical perspective of the function of a system of discursive regulation but from the historical perspective of those entering publication via unconventional paths.  How did they encounter or understand authorship?  What might this tell us about a period increasingly invested in the ‘literary character’?