Welsh Ballads of the French Revolution provides for the first time an edition, with parallel English translations, of Welsh-language ballads composed in reaction to the momentous events of the Revolution in France and the two decades of war which followed. Ballad writers were first spurred to respond in 1793, when the French monarchs were executed, France declared war upon Britain, and paranoia regarding the possible threat of internal revolt in Britain reached a crisis point. As the decade proceeded, ballads were sung in thanks for the victory of British forces and local people against an invasion of Pembrokeshire by French troops, and in reaction to key naval battles and to the extensive mobilization of militia and volunteer forces. Scholars working on the British response to the Revolution have showed increasing interest in exploring the contents of ballads and songs. The ballad in particular is seen as a vital source of information, since it represents ordinary people's awareness of the developments of the period. Balladry is also subject to continued research within Welsh scholarship, and this volume, with its focus on a clearly defined historical period and its revelation of new voices within the canon of Welsh ballad writers, will drive this field of study forwards. Regional reactions to the Revolution within the British Isles are also now seen as crucially important, but Wales, partly because of the inaccessibility of material composed in the Welsh language, has repeatedly been omitted from the general picture. This volume aids in rectifying this situation, ensuring (by use of translation, copious contextualizing notes, and a lengthy introduction) that both the ballad genre and Welsh reactions receive the attention they deserve from the wider scholarly community.

An important re-evaluation of radicalism, loyalism and republicanism in British political thought during the French Revolution.

Lively, exciting, amusing - this collection of ballads reveal the bawdy, anarchic sub-culture of England before the Industrial Revolution. Drawn from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it demonstrates the great wealth and variety of the English broadside ballads during these periods. At this time political balladry was rife and Irish ballads began to be composed in English - their distinctive background giving them a unique range of poetry. Indeed, these ballads represent an extensive, varied and important area of English literature. Written, as the editors observe, 'to provide a moment in which listeners could enjoy verse, wit and song', they very much reflect the lively observation, love of detail and social awareness of the age of the novel. This volume includes 127 ballads, ranging from 'Admiral Benbow' and 'The Jolly Bacchanal' to 'The Bottle the Best Companion' and 'The Young Man's Fortune'. Reprinted from contemporary or near-contemporary broadsides in the Madden Collection at the University Library, Cambridge, the head and tail blocks, a distinguished feature of the original texts, are also reproduced for this edition. The introduction is designed to enable individuals to read the texts in perspective and with pleasure. The book further includes a select bibliography and an index of ballad titles. This book was first published in 1975.

Now in paperback, Napoleon’s return to the throne in Paris, as imagined by the incomparable Joseph Roth Joseph Roth paints a vivid portrait of Emperor Napoleon’s last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica—an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates. Roth’s signature lyrical elegance and haunting atmospheric details sing in The Hundred Days. “There may be,” as James Wood has stated, “no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile.”

Includes its Report, 1896-1945.

This study offers a radical reassessment of a crucial period of political and cultural history. By looking at some 400 songs, many of which are made available to hear, and at their writers, singers, and audiences, it questions both our relationship with song, and ordinary Britons' relationship with Napoleon, the war, and the idea of Britain itself.

Broadside or 'Street' ballads not only give the flavour of English life and history more vividly than much historical evidence of more conventional kinds, but their sheer poetic quality often makes them substantial poems, light or serious, in their own right. This second volume, taking examples mainly over the years 1800-40 from the immense Madden Collection in the University Library, Cambridge, continutes the same literary emphasis, especially with a large number of pieces exploiting all the bustle, humour and variety of life in London - the colourful, crowded, rapidly-expanding metropolis of the period. Other sections concentrate on more traditional themes like crime and transportation, religion (some moving 'freemason' songs), love-making, sex and the 'sex war': or on fashion, the Royal Family and its escapades, and life in the army or navy. There is also an extensive collection of 'Napoleon' ballads, ranging from the early years through to his final re-internment in Paris. This book, illustrated with some remarkable large-scale contemporary woodcuts, should interest not only social historians and students of literature, but also all who have an ear for the verse of the people. This book was first published in 1979.