Copyright

David Atkinson and Steve Roud

Published On

2023-09-04

Page Range

pp. 347–354

Language

  • English

Print Length

8 pages

12. Afterword

  • David Atkinson (author)
  • Steve Roud (author)
Chapter of: Cheap Print and Street Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century(pp. 347–354)
After the lapse of the Printing Act in 1695, printing, especially cheap printing, began to spread outside of London and become established in the regions. In the second half of the century, there were major booksellers issuing street literature titles in almost every area of the country. This afterword draws attention to some directions for future research. Preceding chapters have complicated easy assumptions about what actually counted as cheap print, for both producers and consumers, what is a ‘chapbook’, what sorts of titles best characterized the itinerant trade, and what they might say about their purchasers and readers, both economically and culturally. Other issues include the extent of the trade outside of London, concepts of ownership in particular titles, the role of women at the cheap end of the book trade, and the impact of cheap print on the cultural life of the country at large.

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).