Copyright

David Atkinson and Steve Roud

Published On

2023-09-04

Page Range

pp. 1–26

Language

  • English

Print Length

26 pages

1. Introduction

  • David Atkinson (author)
  • Steve Roud (author)
Chapter of: Cheap Print and Street Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century(pp. 1–26)
For cheap print and street literature, the eighteenth century represents a critical period both of continuity and of transition between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The essays in this volume begin with the period around the lapse of the Printing Act in 1695, which opened the way for printing outside of London, and also saw the transition from the use of black-letter to white-letter typefaces for items of cheap print. They then extend through to the end of the wooden hand-press period, in the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century. This introduction introduces the parameters of the subject, including questions around cheap print, literacy, and popular culture, London and the regions, chapmen and chapbooks, the matter of street literature, and the extent of the trade.

Contributors

David Atkinson

(author)
Honorary Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute at University of Aberdeen

David Atkinson is the author of The English Traditional Ballad (2002), The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts (2014), and The Ballad and its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory (2018). With Steve Roud he has co-edited Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America (2014), Street Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (2017), Cheap Print and the People: European Perspectives on Popular Literature (2019), Street Literature and the Circulation of Songs (2019), and Printers, Pedlars, Sailors, Nuns: Aspects of Street Literature (2020). He has published articles on cheap print in The Library, Publishing History, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society. He is the editor of Folk Music Journal, Honorary Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, and Executive Secretary of the Kommission für Volksdichtung (Ballad Commission).

Steve Roud

(author)

Steve Roud is a retired Local Studies librarian and now a freelance writer, researcher, and indexer specializing in the history of traditional song and street literature. He is the compiler of the online Folk Song Index and Broadside Index databases, and his Folk Song in England was published by Faber in 2017. Most recently, he has co-edited The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance (2021). With David Atkinson he has co-edited Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America (2014), Street Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (2017), Cheap Print and the People: European Perspectives on Popular Literature (2019), Street Literature and the Circulation of Songs (2019), and Printers, Pedlars, Sailors, Nuns: Aspects of Street Literature (2020).