ABSTRACT
The antiquarian Joseph Ritson responded with heated criticism to Percy’s portrait of bardic minstrels and accused the latter of irresponsible editing, demanding to see the manuscript. (It was published in the nineteenth century long after Percy’s death.) Despite Ritson’s adversarial stance, his outlook shared much with Percy’s, as Walter Scott was to observe. Both scholars proceeded from a retrospective focus on popular songs as providing links to a national heritage. Like Percy, Ritson recognized the factor of class with regard to the ballads, taking a position akin to Addison’s when he says that “there is nothing, perhaps, from which the real character of a nation can be collected with so much certainty as the manners and diversions of the lower or rather lowest classes of the inhabitants.” Ritson appreciated genuinely popular materials. While he lamented a contemporary “depravity of taste” that betrayed the national character and traditions he saw himself studying, Ritson did not share Percy’s disdain for the popular songs of the presses. Distrusting claims of antiquity for ballads, Ritson saw a repository of national popular song that was more recent and more complex in character, origins, and dissemination than that which Percy proposed. For Ritson’s bibliography, see Bertrand Bronson, Joseph Ritson, Scholar-at-Arms, 2 Vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939). On Percy and Ritson together, see Sigurd Hustvedt, Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain during the Eighteenth Century (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916), pp. 157–200; and M.L. Mackenzie, “The Great Ballad Collectors: Percy, Herd and Ritson,” Studies in Scottish Literature, 2 (1965), 213–33. For a Marxist analysis, see Dave Harker, Fakesong (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), pp. 15–37.
D.D.
