Napoleon and British Song, 1797–1822, by Oskar Cox Jensen

In this lively and engaging study, Oskar Cox Jensen surveys and analyses a neglected corpus of approximately 400 songs that circulated in England before, during and after the Napoleonic Wars. These songs, according to the author, have been seriously neglected by scholars, particularly but not only in their musical dimensions. This is a book about the experience of singing and, fittingly, it is accompanied by sixty-two recordings, easily accessible online. These were made, with heroic stamina, by the author’s sister and fellow historian, Freyja Cox Jensen, during a three-day period in September 2015. All in all, this is an exciting resource and it deserves to be widely read and heard. The author’s understanding of song is sophisticated and well informed. He avoids any simple association of ‘popular song’ with the lower orders in society, describing it instead as ‘a heterodox amalgam of Elizabethan balladry and the latest light-operatic hits, of elite patriotic effusions and obscene gutter cant, of provincial beggars’ improvisations and Romantic poetry’. Songs, he argues, should not be treated by scholars as merely illustrative of other trends, nor as static and exclusively textual. Instead, songs were ‘active objects’ that both constructed and contested socio-political identities and opinions. Song was thus ‘a cultural space in which politics of all kinds was done’. Cox Jensen also introduces the concept of ‘fitness’, a term that denotes the capacity of an individual song to exert a significant influence in its own age by combining elements such as a strong tune, a workable fit between melody and lyrics, and an awareness of existing audience tastes and sensibilities. The concept is designed partly to avoid the imposition of modern aesthetic standards, though at times there is more than a suspicion that these continue to play a role. Nevertheless, the attempt to focus in this analysis of songs on ‘how well they functioned’ on the streets and in the public houses of early nineteenth-century England is commendable.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Elite · Literature · Musical · oskar · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Popularity · Romance · Singing · Sociology · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law