Ballad chanters and croakers

Nathaniel Hawthorne was the American Consul in Liverpool from 1853 to 1857, and during his posting he kept journals of his life in England. He published some of his impressions in his book Our Old Home, and further extracts from his journals were published in two volumes after his death as Passages from the English Notebooks.

Within these Notebooks there are several references to street musicians and singers; the references are not all complimentary but they do show us something about the kind of people who played or sang in public, and what they sounded like to an educated American gentleman. Hawthorne doesn't claim any musical expertise, and his tastes appear to be quite conventional; he appreciates the singing of Jenny Lind, but is more moved at hearing Samuel Lover sing his Irish songs, or by one of Robert Burns' sons singing one of his father's compositions.

Hawthorne clearly found the street singers quite difficult to listen to:- "The ballad-singers are the strangest, from the total lack of any music in their cracked voices." (Passages from the English Notebooks, entry for June 20 1854) This may be a general observation based on his first encounter with a ballad-singer in Chester; "I passed, to-day, a man chanting a ballad in the street about a recent murder, in a voice that had innumerable cracks in it, and was most lugubrious." (Passages, November 5 1853) At any rate he seems to have met enough similar examples to describe the style thus; "Ballad-singers, or rather chanters or croakers, are often to be met with in the streets," (Passages, 1 December 1853)

Later, while on a visit to London, Hawthorne was favourably impressed by one particular street singer - but it turned out there were extenuating circumstances:-
"There is a woman who has several times passed through this Hanover Street, in which we live, stopping occasionally to sing songs under the windows; and last evening, between nine and ten o'clock, she came and sang "Kathleen O'Moore" richly and sweetly. Her voice rose up out of the dim, chill street, and made our hearts throb in unison with it as we sat in our comfortable drawing-room. I never heard a voice that touched me more deeply. Somebody told her to go away, and she stopped like a nightingale suddenly shot; ... It seems she was educated to sing at the opera, and married an Italian opera-singer, who is now dead; lodging in a model lodging-house at threepence a night, and being a penny short to-night, she tried this method, in hope of getting this penny." (Passages, October 3 1855)

Hawthorne lived on the Wirral bank of the River Mersey in the elegant gated enclave of Rock Park, travelling across to his Consular offices in Liverpool by ferry. Aboard the ferry he was struck by the abject poverty of so many beggars, yet he recognised the dignity shown by these people and his journals describe one such "elderly beggar, with the raggedest of overcoats, two great rents in the shoulders of it disclosing the dingy lining, all bepatched with various stuff covered with dirt,...--a miserable object; but it was curious to see how he was not ashamed of himself, but seemed to feel that he was one of the estates of the kingdom, and had as much right to live as other men." (Passages, December 10 1853)

Among the beggars who travelled on the ferries were bands of musicians; Hawthorne may not have thought much of the music, but the sadness of their situation clearly affected him.
"On board the ferry, until the coldest weather began, there were always some wretched musicians, with an old fiddle, an old clarinet, and an old verdigrised brass bugle, performing during the passage, and, as the boat neared the shore, sending round one of their number to gather contributions in the hollow of the brass bugle. They were a very shabby set, and must have made a very scanty living at best. Sometimes it was a boy with an accordion, and his sister, a smart little girl, with a timbrel,--which, being so shattered that she could not play on it, she used only to collect halfpence in." (Passges, December 1 1853)

The young boy with the accordion made a deep impression on Hawthorne, as he recorded in his journal two years later: "There is a little boy often on board the Rock Ferry steamer with an accordion,--an instrument I detest; but nevertheless it becomes tolerable in his hands, not so much for its music, as for the earnestness and interest with which he plays it. His body and the accordion together become one musical instrument on which his soul plays tunes, for he sways and vibrates with the music from head to foot and throughout his frame, half closing his eyes and uplifting his face, as painters represent St.Cecilia and other famous musicians; and sometimes he swings his accordion in the air, as if in a perfect rapture. After all, my ears, though not very nice, are somewhat tortured by his melodies, especially when confined within the cabin. The boy is ten years old, perhaps, and rather pretty; clean, too, and neatly dressed, very unlike all other street and vagabond children whom I have seen in Liverpool. People give him their halfpence more readily than to any other musicians who infest the boat." (Passages, June 11 1855)

Elsewhere in the Notebooks Hawthorne also describes the holiday scenes of "pale-looking" factory workers enjoying days out on the river, or in resorts such as Southport, where music and dancing and fairground entertainments provided a release from the toil of the mills and factories.

This is a valuable contemporary account of England in the early 1850's as seen by a sympathetic outsider; Hawthorne made a record of scenes which others simply took for granted, and even if he didn't much enjoy the songs or music he heard in the streets he still was sensitive to the people who produced them.