Chetham’s Library will be hosting this Saturday .this year’s Broadside Day, an annual one-day conference for people interested in Street Literature in all its fascinating aspects.
On show will be broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, woodcuts, engravings, last dying speeches, catchpennies, wonder-tales, almanacs, fortune-tellers, moral tracts, reading-made-easy alphabets, and all kinds of cheap printed material which was sold to ordinary people in city streets, at country fairs, and from pedlars’ packs up and down the country in past centuries.
Street literature, in the form of broadside ballads, was first produced in the early 16th century, and was at first concentrated in London, but later spread to every part of the British Isles and lasted into the 20th century. But its glorious heyday was in Victorian times when tens of thousands of items were produced every year by jobbing printers everywhere.
The material was often very badly printed, on the cheapest quality of paper, and might be genuine news or a complete fiction, but for most of this time it was one of the only forms of reading matter readily available to the poor, and is therefore tremendously interesting to a wide range of modern-day researchers and enthusiasts.
The day is is organised jointly by the English Folk Dance & Song Society (EFDSS) and the Traditional Song Forum and consists of short papers, presentations, displays, discussions, performances, and so on, and is suitable for beginners and experts alike, who will all enjoy its lively and informal atmosphere.
Manchester was one of the most important centres for the production of street literature in the 19th century. In recognition of this, speakers who can present topics specifically related to the trade in the Northwest have been invited.
