Broadside Day is the annual one-day conference for people interested in Street Literature and Cheap Print in all its fascinating aspects – broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, woodcuts, engravings, last dying speeches, catchpennies, news (real and fake), almanacs, carol sheets, wonder tales, and all kinds of cheap printed ephemera sold or distributed to ordinary people in the streets and at fairs, from pedlars’ packs, and in back-street shops, up and down the country. Organised jointly by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and the Traditional Song Forum, the 2025 Broadside Day will be an in-person event at Cecil Sharp House.
Food will not be provided but refreshments will be available throughout the day from the onsite café.
Talks will include:
Jon Coley: ‘Diverting the minds of servants from their Masters business’: A more complex audience for broadsheet ballads
Catherine Ann Cullen: Representation, Imitation, Appropriation? The Commodification of Dublin Street Life and Working-Class Print Culture in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Martin Graebe: ‘A Dreadful Tale We Have To Tell’, The Murder of Harriet Lane, 1874
Marie Hanzelková: Promised Land, Cursed Land. Czech Emigrant Ballads, 1780–1900
Gary Kelly: Street-cleansing in the Hungry Forties: ‘Penny Rubbish’, ‘Pure Literature’, and the Book-hawking Movement
Abi Kingsnorth: Ballad Hawking: Sharing Soundscapes of the Early Modern World
Rebecca Loughead: ‘Modern Ballads’ and the Irish antiquary: a curious collection of 19th-century Cork ballads at the Society of Antiquaries of London
Martin Nail: Powell, printer, Spitalfields
Bob Strom: Broadside Ballads of Salem, Massachusetts
Jennifer Goodman Wollock: Robin Hood and the Printers
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Library Lectures
