Roger deV. Renwick

The oral quality of a printed tradition

While folklorists know that texts of the same ballad from different printers of street-broadsides were seldom exact replicas of each other, we have rarely examined the actual range and nature of the variations printed transmission manifested. Grouping variations into three categories - printing mechanics, vocabulary, and narrative content - this essay discusses twenty-one different nineteenth-century broadside prints of the same British highwayman ballad, “The Wild and Wicked Youth”, to show just how each printer was in varying degrees “recreating” and not just “reproducing” the text he was passing on. .