• 4 R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) 121.
• 5 R. Williams 122.
• 6 R. Williams 122.
• 7 R. Williams 121.
• 8 R. Williams 124.
• 9 R. Williams 125.

1Which of these quotations speaks most directly to your experience? And how might they be related? The purpose of this paper is to address the second of these questions, with a glance at the first. Raymond Williams has argued that ‘in authentic historical analysis it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific and effective dominance.’4 This complexity can be seen in terms of the shifting relations of dominant ideology to what Williams terms ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ ideologies. The first ‘has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process’ and ‘may have an alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture’.5 Some of these residual formations can operate as escapist ‘leisure functions of the dominant order’6—but this is not to say that all leisure functions are constituted by residual nostalgia. Williams’s own critique of dominant ideology is from a standpoint which he hopes is emergent (‘socialist culture’)7 and he is not much concerned with escape-leisure functions, though he admits ‘there is always a social basis for elements of the cultural process that are alternative or oppositional to the dominant elements’.8 Such oppositional elements always exist.9

• 10 M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. C. Emerson, (Manchester: Manchester Un (...)

2For escapist leisure functions, Mikhail Bakhtin’s model of the carnivalesque might seem more appropriate.10 For in spite of the fact that pornography seems to have developed as a separate area of the literary market-place around 1750, and in spite of the increase in the hegemonic policing of sexual material throughout the nineteenth century, the celebration of unlicensed forms of sexuality is not something that can easily be tied in to linear historical developments. Class changes are easier to chart. This may be partly because patriarchy, with its control of female sexuality, has been the dominant ideology, in various manifestations and to different degrees, in almost all cultures and periods known to us. Of what would sexual licence form a residual part? However, I would not want to claim that the desire for transgressive excess in sexual terms is necessarily an exclusively masculine one, though it may be largely so in the nineteenth century. Such a claim seems to me to replicate some of the patriarchal prohibitions against free female choice. In a sense, the pornographer you have always with you.

• 11 In ‘That’s About the Size of It’, Nancy Dawson’s Cabinet of Choice Songs 24–26.
• 12 G. Speaight, (ed.), Bawdy Songs of the Early Music Hall (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1975) 8.

3We could, of course, simply junk Williams’s model as simplistic, in favour of another Bakhtinian model, that of struggles for dominance between strands of discourse which are constantly shifting but nevertheless identifiable, within particular texts and timeframes. However, to do so is to lose some of Williams’s organising sense of historical process, and what I propose to do for the purposes of this paper is to see the subversive discourse of the songsters as something that operates as a submerged discourse running alongside the dominant and constructed as a parodic parallel to some of the most restrictive behavioural provisions of that dominant ideology, rather than residual or emergent. This seems to me particularly important since it is all too easy to abstract ideology from pronouncements in dominant forms of writing that serve the hegemonic interests of ruling groups, forms such as conduct books, sermons, and journalism in established and respectable newspapers. However, much ideological writing is pre- and proscriptive, rather than descriptive of the way in which people actually do conduct their lives. Many of the written testaments to this are private, inaccessible, or actually suppressed by ideologically dominant interests. Such is the case with the material I want to deal with today: early songsters. These are little (about 70 by 110 cm.) booklets of up to forty eight pages of songs selected from the repertoire of the song-and-supper clubs that preceded the music-hall in Britain. They were held in taverns which provided food and drink and, often, paid singers, and were designed for an all-male clientele who joined in the singing. The clubs were not themselves brothels, or ‘knocking shops’ to use a term found in one of the songs,11 although an evening spent there might easily lead to a more practical application of the art of love later. George Speaight has provided an excellent introduction to the genre in his Bawdy Songs of the Early Music Hall, and points out that ‘they have never been reprinted, and indeed, their existence was practically unknown and unrecorded, apart from an entry in Ashbee’s bibliography of pornographic books and an inaccurate reference in Ivan Bloch’s Sexual Life in England of 1901’.12

• 13 R. Burns, The Merry Muses of Caledonia, ed. J. Barke & S. Goodsir Smith (Edinburgh: Macdonald, 1982 (...)
• 14 Some more modern songs are accessible on a tape, Sods’ Opera, Beautiful Jo Records, in association (...)

4This fact alone might imply that such songsters were a curiosity of a very limited interest, but this is not the case. They are examples of a genre that can be found over a much wider period than those of the 1830s and 1840s which I focus on today. Unless the British Library is mistaken in its dating, some originally issued by W. West around 1834 were still in print in 1865, long after West’s death in 1854. Their most famous predecessor is Robert Burns’s Merry Muses of Caledonia (1800?) a series of ribald parodies and adaptations of verses for the entertainment of the Crochallan Fencibles club.13 Songs of this type are a prominent feature of Tom D’Urfey’s more heterogeneous Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719). Moreover, this type of song, its jokes, anxieties, strategies and attitudes, is alive and well in oral tradition, especially the tradition of homosocial organisations such as Rugby clubs and the armed forces.14

• 15 One of their publishers, Dugdale, was a pornographer, though; See G. Speaight 13.
• 16 Thackeray is to be found regretting their passing in 1855, but Blanchard Jerrold sounds similarly n (...)
• 17 For further discussion of these issues in Dickens and Thackeray, see my own ‘The Cheek of the Young (...)

5Nor was interest in these songs the prerogative of a slight and sorry band of furtive pornographers.15 Song-and-supper clubs were open to pretty well any man with the money to purchase food and drink, and some of them, such as the Cider Cellars, the Coal Hole, Offleys, and the Cave of Harmony at Evans’s, were regarded as an essential part of town life for the actual or would-be man-about-town in the 1830s until well on into the 1850s at least.16 They were visited by such figures as Dickens, Mayhew, Sala, Jerrold and Thackeray. What is more, the imagery and vocabulary of the song texts forms a gender-based subtext in Dickens’s works. His early novels are full of double entendres. Why is the Artful Dodger’s best friend so insistently referred to as Master Bates? Martin Chuzzlewit (1843) is full of the sexual metaphors found in these songs-meat, pudding, gravy, etc. Though Dickens later came rather to resemble the consummate hypocrite Podsnap he created in Our Mutual Friend (1865), even in that novel he gave the heroine’s father a nickname based on one of the common nonsense choruses in these songs. ‘Rumty’ Wilfer is so named because of his expertise in social singing. In Chapter I of The Newcomes (1853–55) Thackeray gives an extended account of Colonel Newcome’s visit to the Cave of Harmony with his young son, and his leaving in disgust at hearing a ribald song among the otherwise very mixed repertoire. What was so offensive is never specified. The author appeals to a complicit masculine knowingness to fill the significant gap he outlines.17

• 18 The Bang-up Songster, [London]: W. West, [c. 1834].

6The Colonel takes his leave accompanied by taunts about his lack of full adult masculinity (‘Why do you bring young boys here, old boy?’) The club both endorses and expects a broad-mindedness that accepts and even actively pursues records of sexual transgressiveness in song. The title pages of the songsters construct a bond of homosociality where sex takes clear precedence over class. Many of them make claims such as ‘never before printed and adapted for Gentlemen only’. This is ‘gentlemen’ only in the sense of the binary choice found on lavatory doors, since the title page of a typical specimen continues, ‘a Famous Collection of Flash, Fancy, Friskey, Amatory and Clamatory Staves’.18 Most of these adjectives, together with ‘luscious’, ‘out-and-out’, ‘delicious’, ‘smutty’ and ‘rum’, clearly indicate material that by conventional (‘gentle’) standards is indecent, and indeed would still be thought so today. Many title pages are quite specific that these are songs actually sung at Offleys, the Cider Cellars and the Coal Hole. They are insistent that the songs are for men only, though the (less respectable) Coal Hole also had female singers.

• 19 See for example G. Speaight 27, 58, 60.
• 20 See for example G. Speaight 51, 55 and 85.
• 21 G. Speaight 27, 39.
• 22 G. Speaight 35. For more tasteful versions, see Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ (1832 and (...)
• 23 ‘The Squire’s Thingumbob’, The Bang-up Songster 21.

7Some of the songs could be described as pornographic. They manifest a single-minded assumption that defloration is the pinnacle of human bliss for both parties,19 that all women are secretly devoured by desire for men, and a prurient curiosity about female masturbation and lesbianism, which is nevertheless always dissipated by the arrival of the bearer of a real phallus. A common viewpoint is the wilfully desperate one of the exposer, that girls are at the same time so ignorant that they are incapable of distinguishing a penis from a stick used for agitating laundry, and so knowing that a mere glimpse of the male sexual organ will induce unbridled desire.20 Plausibility flees as songs vie to construct the most outrageously transgressive scenarios, such as the young woman troubled by a flea up the vagina who will welcome treatment with a patent ‘fleashooter’, or the notion that one can make a living marketing beetroots as dildos.21 The sexual is sometimes augmented by the scatological: in Mrs Bond the experienced but frustrated lover parodies traditional fantasies of metamorphosis into some object near the beloved by wishing to be the chamber pot Mrs Bond holds between her thighs.22 This material subverts the gender ideology which was at exactly this time reinforcing the long-standing patriarchal binary division of women into the innocent and the fallen. They are always essentially both, since sex is enjoyment, not sin. The significant threshold of defloration merely converts posse into esse; there is no moral distinction, unless one adopts the view of one song that ‘there is nothing so disgusting as a maid’.23

• 24 The Rambler’s Flash Songster, [London]: W. West, [post 1840] 18–20.
• 25 The Rambler’s Flash Songster 47.
• 26 See the notes to Sods’ Opera, side 2, track 1.

8There is a simultaneous admiration and fear of women manifest in these texts which is not so much a feature of the dominant ideology of patriarchy as an alternative to the more rigidly prescriptive moral divisions rising to dominance in the 1830s. It could be argued that it is a permanent feature of the male psyche, and that the exaltation of the power of the phallus is a response to womb envy—the jealousy of and wonder at the power of the woman to give birth. If this is the case, then, paradoxically, this is the norm, and it is the repressions of respectable Victorian society that are deviant. Whatever the case, such envy of women is certainly manifest in these songs, and is still found in similar songs current in the twentieth century and even today. This envy is manifested largely in terms of sexual stamina. The Original ‘Black Joke’ is a somewhat reluctant tribute to female sexual attraction, to which men of all professions are subject: ‘One hair of her joke draws a ship on the shore’ and ‘The lawyer his cause and brief will quit/To dip his pen in a bottomless pit’.24 A Quim (cunt) converses with a Jock (penis) and tells him, ‘I twenty such jocks could have eaten.’25 The all-devouring womb as receptacle of male sexual effort, and indeed everything else, is, of course, a trope traceable in a disguised form in much more complex verse as well, such as the opening of Tennyson’s Maud: ‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, /Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath.’ Here, though, it is made the main focus of the piece. The continuity of this anxiety can be found in comparable pieces such as the World War II The Sailor’s Wife, itself an adaptation of a nineteenth-century piece: ‘in one corner of her funny little thing she had a hundred dead’.26

• 27 See for example G. Speaight 44, 47.
• 28 The Cuckold’s Nest, [London]: W. West, [c. 1837 and c. 1865] 45.
• 29 Discussed in S. Marcus, The Other Victorians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966) 29-32.
• 30 The Comic Songster and Gentleman’s Private Cabinet, [London]: W. West, [c. 1836] 35–38, and Nancy D (...)

9Most common, though, is the woman’s discontent at the man’s inability to repeat his performance often enough. Complaints start at three times and go up to six.27 These demands can be terminal, as in A Wife’s Appetite: ‘in less than a week she worked him to death’.28 Those who have wondered why Dr William Acton felt it necessary to reassure young men anxious that married life might be too much for them might like to consider some of the songs the young men had been listening to.29 This anxiety about performance appears in two comic songs where the man is taken over by a prosthesis, The Spring Leg, where the artificial penis, once erect, won’t go down again, and The Steam Tool, where the twenty-foot long, steam-driven, rubber phallus flies off like a rocket with its owner attached.30

• 31 Fanny Hill’s Bang-up Reciter, Friskey Songster and Amarous Toast Master [sic], [London]: G. K. Edwa (...)
• 32 The Rambler’s Flash Songster 31. This song is also unusual in actually using the word ‘erection’.
• 33 The Flash Chaunter, [London]: W. West, [c. 1834] 40.
• 34 The Cuckold’s Nest 41–42.
• 35 Nancy Dawson’s Cabinet 36–37.

10Both these ludicrous examples are linked to another and more practical anxiety. The first mentions Dr Eady, apparently renowned for curing venereal diseases, and both heroes required penis replacements because their own were lost or amputated as a result of the pox. Some of the songsters caught their customers coming both ways. Fanny Hill’s Bang-up Reciter, Friskey Songster and Amarous Toast Master includes an advertisement for a pamphlet on venereal disease from the same publisher on the verso of the title page.31 The horrors of VD are distributed with even-handedness between the sexes. Occasionally the topic is treated with realistic detail, as in Put It Up; victims ‘cannot hold their water’ and have a ‘peculiar strut’.32 More often, necrosis is used as the closure of an amorous career, as in one of the two songs dealing with the deceptively masculinized Mike Hunt, one of which ends ‘with Mike Hunt I am now laid up in the Lock’, i.e. the VD hospital.33 The heroine of The Fine Young Common Prostitute dies when a client with advanced syphilis loses his prick inside her and she is unable to extract it.34 The fear here is evident from the improbability of the fantasy. However, disease is an unfortunate chance, not a moral punishment. The cast of The Amiable Family take their mutual amiability too far, and end up passing VD from the son to the servant to the husband to the wife to the boyfriend to the daughter.35

• 36 The Rambler’s Flash Songster 15.
• 37 The Luscious Songster, [London]: W. West, [c. 1834] 11.
• 38 The Cockchafer, London: [London]: W. West, [c. 1836] 26–27.
• 39 G. Speaight 12.

11Clearly, disease is both practical reality and Gothic anxiety trope. But the songs do contain some acknowledgement of the mundane aspects of life. These range from initial encounter to post-coital deflation. Hurrah for the Girls describes roaming gas-lit London streets in search of prostitutes: ‘Stop, stop’s the word you’re sure to hear, /Or, are you good natured, love?’36 The Great Unmentionable is a song about a monstrous penis, sardonically set to the traditional tune to another song popular in the song-and-supper clubs, The Derby Ram. Mighty as this organ is, after sex it appears ‘like a pickled eel, sirs, /Or a washerwoman’s thumb’.37 Some songs admit that sex is not an uncomplicated matter, and involves more than rapturously competent instinct. The hero of The Wedding Secret is surprised to find that his wife does not swoon with ‘fear and shame’ and is as well versed in the practical joys of sex as if she had been married for a year. He is less surprised, though not exactly relieved, to find out that she has been practising with two or three others for three years beforehand.38 A New Version of Regent Street, by the minor comic actor J. H. Munyard,39 directly challenges our assumptions about the ways in which sexual ignorance was gender-aligned in the nineteenth century. The speaker praises a prostitute he regularly patronizes:

• 41 For the last four, see G. Speaight, ‘The Female Workwoman’, 71. For a discussion of such usage in t (...)
• 42 For commonplace examples of both sorts, see G. Speaight 76.
• 43 Fanny Hill’s Bang-up Reciter 12–14; The Flash Chaunter 39.
• 44 For one of the many versions, see T. Mccarthy, (ed.), Bawdy British Folk Songs (London: Wolfe, 1972 (...)

12On the basis of this song, one could argue that the songster material is a kind of submerged parallel of the conduct book, and in some ways this is true. Certainly, it reinforces a hegemonic alternative to the dominant theoretical ideology. However, the discourse of the songsters is not a transparent one. Though it is not difficult to learn, its language is oblique and predicated on a prior knowledge of sexuality. The three most noticeable stylistic features are metaphor, punning, and parody. Sexual parts and actions are routinely (and traditionally) represented metaphorically commonly as the tools or processes of a trade—slaughtering veal, dipping a wick, marlin spikes, portholes, awls, gimblets, sawpits, tanning, needles—41or as the objects of other bodily desires, notably food. Thus, male and female sex organs and secretions are figured as pudding, mutton or other meats, and gravy. They are also personified in a way that gives the organs independent volition, Roger, Bob, Jock, and Fanny being the most frequent.42 Personification and pun are combined in two songs based on the smutty possibilities of the common English name Mike Hunt.43 In each case one feels the inventiveness rather ran out after the pun had been discovered, but one of the songs gets an extra frisson from being set to an older frank but more widespread song about the female sexual organ, The Cuckoo’s Nest.44 Practice on colleagues suggests it is actually quite easy to miss the pun when reading silently, or if the name is pronounced with two heavy stresses and clear word junctures. However, it is very difficult to sing the spondee, or to maintain the juncture separation, and the tune makes the pun apparent:

• 46 G. Speaight 36–38 gives both the original and the parody.

13With Mike Hunt is more pastiche than parody, but actual parody, through the use of a well-known tune and the adaptation of words, keeps respectable and submerged discourse running parallel. Of the twenty seven songs in The Flash Chaunter, which is the source of With Mike Hunt eleven are parodies. Come Sleep with Me exemplifies all three of the stylistic features mentioned above, plus a characteristic unspoken ellipsis. It is a parody of a sentimental ditty by T. H. Bayly about an idealised seaside cottage home. The speaker invites the girl to bed with him to view his ‘jewel case’ and to ‘plough the deep deep C’.46 ‘C’ here, of course, is a punning ellipsis for ‘cunt’, as well as part of a metaphor for the sex act.

• 47 The Cockchafer 6.
• 48 The Frisky Vocalist, [London]: W. West, [c. 1836] 13.
• 49 The Cockchafer 7; The Cuckold’s Nest 40.

14The objects of parody are those most sacred to conventional ideology. The lesbian sex threesome who dildo each other with candles till this is superseded by their footman do so to the music of There’s Nae Luck About the House [When our Goodman’s Away] in which the wife awaits her husband’s return to fulfil a domestic rather than an amatory role. There is a parody of The King, God Bless Him as Here’s a Health to Quim, and God Bless it.47 The Death of Nelson is reshaped as The Death of the Mot [whore], who, like the naval hero, but in a different field, did her duty.48 The Fine Old English Gentleman was replaced in at least two songs by a fine young English prostitute, who dies of the pox.49 One of them (the one where the woman dies with her client’s syphilitic cock lodged inside her) opens with ‘I’ll sing you a moral song’. Raymond Williams is alert to the possibilities of parody as subversive device, but he sees it as ultimately resolvable into either residual or emergent discourse, whereas I think it is, in these examples, a more constant reflection of the theorized rather than realized dominant ideology.

• 50 Ian Watt, ‘Oral Dickens’, Dickens Studies Annual 3 (1974): 168.
• 51 C. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, Chapter XI.
• 52 The Rambler’s Flash Songster 25.

15In that they are mutually compensating, the two discourses are strictly speaking inseparable. This means that reading either of them fully involves a competence at reading the other. Fortunately, this is not difficult to what Ian Watt calls ‘the normally contaminated mind’.50 Paradoxically, though, the idea of purity envisaged by the nineteenth-century thought police, from Thomas Bowdler onwards, is not one that they themselves are ever capable of achieving; it is merely projected onto a non-male, non-adult ‘other’. The anxiety of Dickens’s consummate hypocrite Podsnap, that nothing should bring a blush to the cheek of the young person, is doubly self-defeating.51 This is, first, because his ability to see corruptive potential in everything implies his own corruptibility, and secondly, because the blush is itself recognition of what Podsnap wants to forbid recognition of. This recognition is consciously exploited by the songsters, which ironically acknowledge the power of the dominant repression by their determination to undermine it. The use of indirect, coded discourse—the metaphors, puns and parody—is part of this. To the pure, all things are pure, so what does it say about you if you understand? A number of songs depend wholly on either ellipsis or substitution for their effect, while anticipating that every listener will be able to fill in the gaps or alternatives. It is obviously impossible to sing an omission. The coarseness of The Dog is achieved precisely by inviting the reader to fill the gaps between ‘f’ and ‘g’ (‘f––––g’) or ‘b’ and ‘r’ (‘b––––r’), the number of syllables being dictated by the verse rhythm.52 Roger and Flora: or, Raking Among the Hay is a sophisticated parody to the tune of Tamaroo that allows the audience to think rude words, but then implicitly condemns that audience by continuing with clean ones:

• 54 Sods’ Opera, Side 1, track 10.
• 55 The Cuckold’s Nest 19–21.

16This technique is alive and well in a World War II song, Come on Chaps.54 Sam Swipes operates by enforcing the insertion of a rhyme word. It makes the point about the audience’s complicity quite directly in the chorus: ‘This way and that way, and which way you will/I’m sure I’ve said nothing that you can take ill.’55