Street Songs: Writers and urban songs and cries, 1800-1925 (Clarendon Lectures in English)

This book, based on the Clarendon Lectures for 2016, is about the use made by poets and novelists of street songs and cries. Karlin begins with the London street-vendor's cry of 'Cherry-ripe!', as it occurs in poems from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: the 'Cries of London' (and Paris) exemplify the fascination of this urban art to writers of every period. Focusing on nineteenth and early twentieth century writers, the book traces the theme in works by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, George Gissing, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. As well as street-cries, these writers incorporate ballads, folk songs, religious and political songs, and songs of their own invention into crucial scenes, and the singers themselves range from a one-legged beggar in Dublin to a famous painter in fifteenth-century Florence. The book concludes with the beautiful and unlikely 'song' of a knife-grinder's wheel. Throughout the book Karlin emphasizes the rich complexity of his subject. The street singer may be figured as an urban Orpheus, enchanting the crowd and possessed of magical powers of healing and redemption; but the barbaric din of the modern city is never far away, and the poet who identifies with Orpheus may also dread his fate. And the fugitive, transient nature of song offers writers a challenge to their more structured art. Overheard in fragments, teasing, ungraspable, the street song may be 'captured' by a literary work but is never, finally, tamed. The Introduction presents an overview of the topic of street song and summarizes the main chapters of the book. It begins by discussing poems by Robert Herrick and Thomas Campion based on the traditional street-vendor’s cry of ‘Cherry Ripe’ as an example of the way in which writers appropriate street songs for their own purposes, and includes discussions of other images and texts such as Donald Davie’s poem ‘Cherry Ripe’. ‘Cherrie-ripe’ traces an arc from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, encompassing literature, art, music, and social history. It suggests the broad scope of the subject, but although attention is paid to its rich and varied contexts, the focus of this book is on the ways in which street song has found its way into works of literature. Explores the use made by poets and novelists of street songs and cries with a particular focus on nineteenth and early twentieth century writers including William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, George Gissing, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust.