Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century

This is the first book to detail the musical and cultural significance of the songster.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students who want to understand how songs functioned, were consumed and transmitted around the world from around 1790 to 1910.This book is a cultural history of the nineteenth-century songster: pocket-sized anthologies of song texts, usually without musical notation. It examines the musical, social, commercial and aesthetic functions songsters served and the processes by which they were produced and disseminated, the repertory they included, and the singers, printers and entrepreneurs that both inspired their manufacture and facilitated their consumption. Taking an international perspective, chapters focus on songsters from Ireland, North America, Australia and Britain and the varied public and private contexts in which they were used and exploited in oral and print cultures.