Saturday 23 February 2019
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
The Broadside Day is our annual one-day conference covering street literature in all its fascinating aspects as sold to ordinary people in city streets, at country fairs, and from pedlar’s packs up and down the country in past centuries.
In 2019 the conference was hosted by the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Glasgow has a strong history of street literature publication, with the early printers concentrated in the Saltmarket area of the city. The production of chapbooks was a particular speciality. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the emphasis had shifted to broadsides, and the proprietors of the Poet’s Box, a local printing-shop, were issuing new song-sheets every week and were boasting of the hundreds of songs they held in stock.
The day covered a range of topics, from songs of England’s Queen Elizabeth I to wood blocks used in Newcastle chapbooks collections, but will also feature a number of papers on Scottish ballads and writers.
9.15am
Registration
9.30am
Welcome
9.45am
Catherine Ann Cullen—Speckled Cats and Gravey Distillers
10.15am
David Stenton—The Forth Valley Songster
10.45am
E. Wyn James—‘The Black Spot’ and ‘The Old Man of the Wood’: Welsh Street Literature During the Long Eighteenth Century
11.15am
Tea
11.40am
Freyja Cox Jensen—‘In Good Queen Bess’s Golden Days’: Memories of Elizabethan England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
12.10pm
Jenni Hyde—Liege Ladies: Sixteenth-Century Broadside Ballads and Reigning Queens
12.40pm
Lunch
1.40pm
Peter Shepheard
2.10pm
Margaret Bennett—Robert Macleod, Fife Miner Poet and Broadside-Maker
2.40pm
Martin Graebe—Clift of Cirencester
3.10pm
Tea
3.30pm
Oskar Cox Jensen—Of Ballads and Broadsides: Mediating the Mainstream
4pm
Donald Meek - A nineteenth century Gaelic broadside from Australia
4.30pm
Farewell
Organised by EFDSS and Traditional Song Forum, and supported by The University of Strathclyde.