ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of an extensive print discourse about ballads. While a few early eighteenth-century commentators celebrated the press as contributing to "British Manufacture and Trade," most later commentators concurred that the nexus of print, commerce, and balladry had produced a "great quantity of sad trash". Whereas early eighteenth-century commentators tended to understand the oral and print dissemination of ballads as working in tandem, later commentators increasingly posited a distinct "oral tradition" of balladry that was antithetical to and threatened by commercial print. The primary function of both minstrels and ballad-singers was entertainment, and their chief audience was the "illiterate vulgar". The dichotomy between ancient minstrels and modern balladmongers that structures Samuel Percy's "Essay" is completely absent from Joseph Addison's papers on ballads in the Spectator. Mr Spectator makes no attempt to theorize an especially valuable "oral" tradition of balladry that is separable from print.
