Evidence of Impact, A Decade Later

Way back in August of 2000 (four years before I finished my PhD!) I contributed to a discussion on the C18-List prompted by an exchange between Ellen Moody and Betty Rizzo about whether Frances Burney ought to be called Fanny Burney today. To me, this is a simple feminist argument. We don't use familiar names for male writers (Billy Shakespeare anyone?), so why should we do so for female writers?

As one contributor observed "Questions on the meaning of Fanny in the 18th c. are central." So I passed a few of the posts onto my cousin James Lambert, a lexicographer with an encyclopedic knowledge of sexual slang. He replied at some length, but those who wanted to believe that Fanny had an obscene meaning in the eighteenth century remained unconvinced. The debate shifted to Fanny Hill (is the name a pun?), and the true believers cited more dubious scholarship.

Eventually, the debate wearied the list and it died out. James and I went away, read the articles mentioned, remained skeptical and—some months later—said so. But the debate was over. Nobody who believed that Fanny was an obscene pun in the eighteenth century was interested in debating the subject online.

Early in the debate, John Dussinger had asked: "Won't some brilliant person on this list write an essay on the use of 'Fanny' in our long period?" This seemed like an excellent idea, so James and I decided that is what we would do. The only problem was, we were both rather busy so … *cough* … it was March 2007 before I started working on my part of the article and March 2008 before the first draft of the article was ready for submission.

We sent it to Studies in Philology who sent it off for refereeing and in October 2010 they graciously accepted the article, agreeing to publish it in their first number of 2011. We have just sent off the final galley edits and, all going well, our article will be printed just over a decade after John posed his challenge.

When I was attempting to answer John's question, I realised that we needed to consult the original songbooks that provide the earliest evidence for the obscene use of the word Fanny (in the early nineteenth century). I was unable to do so because I do not live in London (the songbooks are in the British Library) and they have never been published in full.

So, I suggested to a colleague in musicology that we should propose to Pickering and Chatto a full edition of these bawdy songbooks. Pickering and Chatto were delighted with the idea, the proposal was accepted, work is now underway and this four-volume edited collection will be published in the first half of 2011.

* * * * *

A few months ago I filled in the final report for my ARC grant. I held off on doing this for as long as possible, because the central questions in that report concern "Research Outputs" and "Evidence of Impact." The only "Impact" that the ARC is interested in is the impact of your research on others, and so the "Evidence" and "Outputs" that the ARC are interested in take the form of published books, articles, chapters, reviews and citations of the same etc.

The ARC are not interested in anything that has been researched, written, submitted, or even accepted, only items that have been printed or are being printed now. All of which is well and good in its way, but you are supposed to submit this report on your global impact immediately, on the day your money stops!

When it can take a decade—as here—between the prompt for an article and its publication, and when it can take three years between the submission of an article and it being printed, there seems little chance that an ARC final report, submitted on the day your funding stops, will capture even a fraction of your "Research outputs" and, as for "Evidence of Impact," it could be years again before any of the arguments we have presented gain any traction.

Which is why questions like these seem so stupid. It is also why filling in reports, and answering questions like these, is so disheartening. I am terribly sorry, I only managed to get half a dozen conference papers presented, three articles published, an exhibition and an international conference organised, but according to the citation indexes compiled a day or two after these articles were published: nope, no impact.

This is also why, no doubt, it seems like anyone whose speech is not peppered with "affectless references to DEST points, citation indices, ERA rankings, ARC applications …" is either a failure or a radical who belongs to one of the "secretive cells of idealistic academics" that Joseph Gora and Andrew Whelan have written about here.

Index to Early American Songsters

Here is something useful for our Bawdy Songbook project: Robert M. Keller has compiled, and The Colonial Music Institute of Annapolis, MD has published, Early American Songsters, 1734-1820: An Index with the following description (here):

This is an index of all extant songsters published in America before 1821 and includes 35,384 songs from 621 songsters. The list was developed from Irving Lowens’s Bibliography of Songsters Printed in America before 1821 (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1976) and draws on this work for titles, locations, and other bibliographical information. Lowens defined a songster as “a collection of three or more secular poems intended to be sung.” Most of the songsters do not include music, although many contain references to the names of tunes to which the song could be sung. Many of the songsters have been microfilmed or digitized and are available through Early American Imprints Series I and II microform editions or the on-line Archive of Americana.

Contents: Indexes:
  Texts: First lines, Titles, Burdens, Refrains, Theatre Works/Venues
  Names: Performers, Authors, Composers
  Bibliography: Source data & locations, with Tables of Contents

NB: The Index (USD25) only runs on Windows XP, Vista or 7.

Bawdy Songbooks Online

Below are links to any early nineteenth-century bawdy songbooks—such as we will include in our Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period (2011)—that are on Google Books, The Internet Archive, or anywhere else. There are very, very few online, but I'll add whatever items I can find, as I find them.

Fanny Hill's Bang-up Reciter, Friskey Songster (1835)

Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period

Because three book projects are not enough to keep me busy Paul Watt and I have embarked on an editing project with four of the finest music scholars on the planet: Rachel Cowgill, Edward Cray, David Gregory and Derek B. Scott.

For now it may be best to keep details to a minimum, but once work has begun I will set out some details about the project below.

Meanwhile, here are a few useful links and references:

Project News

"Research News," Dually Noted: School of Music—Conservatorium, no. 3 (May 2009): 5 (pdf here).

Books

Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966).

George Speight, Bawdy Songs of the Early Music Hall (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1975).

Ed Cray, The Erotic Muse: American Bawdy Songs, 2nd ed. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

David Gregory, Victorian Songhunters: The Recovery and Editing of English Vernacular Ballads and Folk Lyrics, 1820–1883 (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006)

Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Links

The late Bruce Olson's online archive can be found here and here.

John Patrick's Bibliography of Erotic Songs, Toasts and Recitations is here (it includes our very own Ed Cray's Checklist of Chapbooks and Songbooks from April 1998).

Jack Horntip's Collection is here

Links to Books on Google Books etc

William Clarke, Every Night Book: Or, Life After Dark (London: T. Richardson, 1827). ¶ Contains descriptions of the Cider Cellar, Coal Hole, Offleys etc, all of which feature in the songbooks.

Pierce Egan, Life in London, or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, with numerous colour illustrations from Real Life Designed by I. R. and G. Cruikshank (Hotten, 1869).

Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 3rd ed. (1796)

Francis Grose, Lexicon Balatronicum. A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence (1811)

Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, revised and corrected … by Pierce Egan (1823).

John Timbs, Club Life of London with Anecdotes of the Clubs, Coffee-Houses and Taverns of the Metropolis during the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, vol. 1, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1866).

[William West], Tavern Anecdotes and Reminiscences of the Origin of Signs, Clubs, Coffee-Houses, Streets, City Companies, Wards (London, 1825; repr. New York, 1830).

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared (again) I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]