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STREET
SONGS: WRITERS AND URBAN SONGS AND CRIES, 1800-1925
By Daniel Karlin
Reviewed by Jim Burns
Are there any street singers now? Some people will say “Yes”, and
point to the young men in town centres who strum a guitar and try to
imitate Bob Dylan and other popular entertainers. Others will
dismiss this suggestion, and say that such people are hardly
original in terms of them using mostly well-known songs, but how
original were earlier street singers?
Still, the contemporary singers certainly seem a long way
from the man I remember walking down the middle of a street in a
working-class area of a Northern industrial town, singing loudly.
That would have been in the mid-1940s and I can’t remember what song
he was singing, though I doubt it was one he’d composed himself or
even an old folk song. He clearly wasn’t a local drunk on his way
home from the pub, and I can only assume that he was something of an
elderly leftover from the 1930s and the dark days of the Depression.
Around the same time, I also still heard the voice of the
rag-and-bone man calling out as his horse-and-cart trundled along
the street.
Daniel Karlin surveys how some writers incorporated references to,
and sometimes quotes from songs and street cries of a (mostly) 19th
century provenance, into their work. His study largely focuses on
Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Wordsworth, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, and Marcel Proust, with
numerous additional acknowledgements to a wide range of novelists,
essayists, and poets. There were no doubt plenty of other writers,
including minor and now-forgotten figures, whose work could be
usefully explored for traces of old songs and vanished street cries,
even if they were used only for local colour. Clarence Rook’s 1898
detective story, “The Stir Outside the Café Royal”, contains the
following line: “flower girls were selling ‘nice vi’lets, sweet
vi’lets, penny a bunch’ ”.
Writers, on the whole, appear to have delighted in the noises that
could be encountered in the streets, to the extent that some thought
that it wasn’t just the songs to be heard, and the voices of traders
advertising their wares, but all the additional sounds (carriages,
conversations, etc.), that added up to what might be called the
symphony of the streets. But not everyone shared this view, and
Karlin uses Hogarth’s illustration, “The Enrag’d Musician”, to
demonstrate how a man practising with his violin has found it
impossible to concentrate because of the noises from the street. A
child beats a drum, a baby wails, a knife-grinder is busy at his
trade, a milkmaid is passing by, and the musician despairs. What one
person finds appealing another dislikes. There is often an
assumption that everyone will enjoy the cacophony of contemporary
life. Take a walk down
Karlin, in fact, refers to people who complained about the noise
from the street, and wanted street singers and traders shouting out
what was on offer, actually banned. The mathematician Charles
Babbage, who “waged a vigorous campaign against all forms of street
music in the 1860s”, included ‘The human voice in its various forms’
in his pamphlet, A Chapter on
Street Nuisances (1864)”. He was, of course, unsuccessful, it
being a fact of life that urban living inevitably brings one into
close contact with other people’s noise. And some people enjoy the
familiarity and the noise of urban life.
It’s perhaps only marginally relevant, but there was a popular song
, “Tenement Symphony”, sung by Tony Martin in an early-1940s Marx
Brothers movie, The Big Store,
which was built around the various sounds – a child crying, someone
practising on a musical instrument,
a gramophone blaring out, kids running down the stairs, etc.
– to be heard when living in a tenement. It had a romantic feeling
to it, perhaps almost influenced by a Popular Front ideology, which
may not have been shared by anyone experiencing on a daily basis the
realities of life in a tenement.
Karlin mentions a letter that Charles Lamb wrote to William
Wordsworth in which he declined “to join the nature-worshipping
choir”, giving a Whitmanesque catalogue on the sights and sounds of
Fleet Street and Covent Garden, and declaring that he ‘often shed
tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life’ “.
Karlin will perhaps forgive me if I say that this reminds me of the
poet Frank O’Hara’s response when asked if he’d like to live in the
country. He wouldn’t mind, he said, provided there were bookshops
and bars, theatres and cinemas, galleries and other signs that
people hadn’t given up on life.
I’ve talked a little about the general outline of
Street Songs, but Karlin
is, of course, concerned to deal with specifics in terms of pointing
out where examples of a song or street cry can be discerned in a
piece of literature. It should also be noted that his book “is about
what street songs are doing in works of literature, not about the
songs themselves……..I am not “a musicologist or a historian or a
social geographer; street song has found its way into works of
literature…….what interests me is something that goes beyond mere
reference, or that adds local colour to a realist fiction: something
that plays a specific part in an artistic design”.
A good idea of what Karlin is aiming for can be seen in his chapters
on the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) and Robert Browning
(RB). Living in
Other questions occur. The Brownings were not living in Casa Guidi
when she started writing the poem. Various versions of the poem have
different titles, and so on. Does it matter? The test is whether or
not the finished poem achieves the effect the poet was striving for?
: “The child singer is a made-up figure; he is not there by
accident”. The poem is a construct, meant to impart a message about
liberty, and, as Karlin notes, it is something of a riposte to those
poets and others who indulge in a “self-indulgent, lettered
tradition of melancholy, of lamentations over
I have to say that Karlin’s attention to the historical and
political background in the work he discusses is extremely helpful.
I don’t imagine that all that many people are familiar with the
intricacies of nineteenth century Italian history before
unification. They may know a little more about events in
In Ulysses a one-legged
sailor wanders the streets and sings a few words from “The Death of
Nelson”, a “well-known ballad”. Other songs and poems – around 400,
according to Karlin, quoting Don Gifford’s
Ulysses Annotated – are
scattered around Joyce’s book, though not in an arbitrary fashion.
They are mostly there to buttress the narrative by illustrating what
is going in the minds of the characters, who, as Karlin says,
remember occasions when they heard the song or poem in question. And
there are songs that are performed on the streets in varying
circumstances.
The one-legged sailor singing “The Death of Nelson” has already been
mentioned. “The Boys of Wexford” is an Irish rebel song, with its
roots in the failed 1798 uprising and the battle of Vinegar Hill. A
prostitute sings a bawdy song about “the leg of the duck” that
hasn’t been identified, though Karlin doubts it was something that
Joyce made up. A
popular song, “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl”, is played on a pianola
in a brothel. Is its use an indication of the presence of British
soldiers in
It’s fascinating to follow
Karlin’s line of analysis as he places these songs in context and
explains their relevance to the development of the novel. And
instructive for those, like me, who love to read about the origins
of fragments of songs that crop up in novels. When Molly whistles
the tune of “there is a charming girl I love”, Karlin says that the
correct title is “It is a charming girl I love”, and it derives from
“The Lily of Killarney, a
light opera based on Dion Boucicault’s high Victorian melodrama
The Colleen Bawn (1860)”.
Boucicault’s play is still occasionally performed, but it’s doubtful
if The Lily of Killarney
will see the light of day again.
What enhances Karlin’s close textual analysis of the poems and books
he studies is his enthusiasm, something which is especially evident
in his chapter on Walt Whitman. And what a pleasure it is to see
someone paying attention to the American poet. Karlin looks at
Whitman’s poem, “Sparkles from the Wheel”, in which the poet joins
(not just observes) a group of children as they watch a
knife-grinder at work. My own memories stretch back far enough to
seeing what must have been one of the last of his kind at work in
the street, and to being interested in what he was doing.
Karlin draws our attention to the fact that it was hard work. We
talk about the “daily grind” and “keeping our noses to the
grindstone”, a phrase that brings to mind the knife-grinder bent
over his wheel. There is an amusing passage which deals with a
satirical poem, “The Friends of Humanity, and the Knife-grinder”, in
which a well-meaning liberal questions a down-at-heel knife-grinder
because his impoverished appearance suggests exploitation “by the
rich and powerful”. The man turns out to be fiercely independent,
rejects any interest in politics, and indicates that the liberal’s
concern and philanthropy ought to extend to giving him sixpence so
he can buy a pot of beer.
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway, an old woman is seen near Regent’s Park underground
station “singing” what seems to be a wordless and most probably
tuneless song: “ee um fah um so/foo swee too eem so”, which puts me
in mind of the Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich
in 1916, and of children chanting nonsense rhymes. But Karlin,
quoting an “incomprehensible song” that some children sing in
another work by Virginia Woolf, asserts that it is “fundamentally
different” to the old woman’s “song”, being well in the
compositional tradition of “innumerable ballads, hymns, popular
songs, and nursery rhymes”.
There is so much more packed into each page of
Street Songs that it
would be possible to carry on talking about it almost endlessly.
Proust makes an appearance, and in
Remembrance of Things Past,
Marcel “may be thought of as a kind of aural
flâneur, enjoying and
consuming the sounds of the city as they are brought to his ears”.
He “hears or mentions a score of cries relating to food”, and the
cries of numerous other street traders, such as the old-clothes man,
the knife-grinder, and many more. There is an “erotic energy of the
great city” and street cries suggest this. Karlin brings in
references to Charpentier’s opera,
Louise, in which
Street Songs
is clearly an academic work, thoroughly researched, with extensive
notes, and intense analysis of its basic material. But it strikes me
that it can be read to advantage by those who may not be involved in
academic studies, but who have an interest in literature. It is
clearly written, and even entertaining, which is not something that
can always be said about academic texts.
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