ABSTRACT
A particularly intense symbiosis between popular interest and the period's mass media produced at least six broadside ballads on the case, whose respective handling of these same events can usefully be compared as a means of appreciating the craft of news-ballad composition. Less speculatively, looking forwards, two of the ballads on the Maria Marten case were themselves recovered from oral tradition on multiple occasions seventy or more years later, offering further insights into the relationship between broadside and 'folk' traditions. Here, the perspective will be reversed, for oral tradition also constitutes a highly practical form of retrospective evaluation in identifying both which ballads, and which parts of those ballads, proved unforgettable. The stanzaic perspective also illustrates one of the more technical distinctions between broadside and oral traditions. And while oral tradition could transform journalistic sensation into something more resembling the stark drama of traditional balladry, it could achieve nothing without substantial and robust narrative material to work on.
