ABSTRACT
In societies with limited literacy, the printed song needed to be performed in order to show its potential. In more literate societies, there was still a strong preference for hearing a song before it was purchased, because this unlocked its musical potential. Samuel Lover (1797-1868), a childhood musical and artistic prodigy, was elected Secretary of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1828, but moved to London in 1835, where he became a well-known miniaturist and humorous writer. The 'Liberties' of Dublin, the area around and to the west of St. Patrick's Cathedral, was a weaving area. Lover's ponderous humour matches his rendering of some of the typographical peculiarities of ballad books and sheets. Moving on to the Polemical ballads, Lover claims: no other country, we believe, sings polemics; but religion, like love, is nourished by oppression; and hence a cause may be assigned why the Roman Catholic population of Ireland enjoyed, with peculiar zest, the ballads that praised their persecuted faith.
