ABSTRACT
This chapter traces continuity and development in the artistic intersection of print culture in Britain between 1830 and 1850, and the promotion of romantic singing within aristocratic and middle class entertainment consumption, to show that intersection was a dynamic and meaningful process. It investigates music in the novels Zanoni and Alton Locke, finding that fiction of this period defined itself along an increasingly unsettled boundary between elements of realism or romance. The chapter examines the equally controversial career of the female singer as evidenced in fiction and song of the 1840s, when two additional figures alongside the minstrel emerged to champion song performance; thus the minstrel's dominance as representative for the singer was declining in the early Victorian era, whilst it still stood for editorship and publication. Both mermaids and nightingales are invoked to depict Viola throughout the romance, and both symbolise romantic singing in wider print culture throughout the 1840s.
