Child Ballads
This is a bibliography page, concerning a work to which reference is made elsewhere in this guide. (You may also like to see the Wikipedia article at [[1]].)
The collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads made by Francis James Child (1825-1896), a Professor at Harvard University from 1851, was for many years the greatest and most thorough collection of ballads in the folk tradition from England and Scotland. Child printed many variants of some 305 separate texts, along with much of the music (by and large less comprehensively recorded in the original texts).
The collection was originally published, between 1883 and 1898 (as the work progressed), in 10 parts, intended to be bound as five volumes. As a single publication, it appeared in five large (quarto) volumes in 1904.
- Child, Francis James (ed) (1882-98) The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols, Boston & New York, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.; London, H. Stevens, Son & Stiles. ([pt. 10 was "edited, with a memoir, by George Lyman Kittredge. With a portrait."] Kittredge, a student of Child's, was his successor in the collecting of ballads.)
- It has often been reprinted, and is currently (2008) available as
- Child, Francis James (1825-1896) (ed) (2003) English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 vols), New York, Dover Publications Inc.
- This is the 'New edition' of 2003, reprinted from Dover's 1965 edition. It is available in five volumes, of which the first four have 544 pages each, sized at 23 x 16.6 x 2.8 cm. and the fifth has 640 pages. The on-line bookseller Amazon.co.uk lists it (15-09-08) as costing, for new paperbacks, £17:99 per volume.
- The English and Scottish Popular ballads was the culmination of half a century of research whose first fruit was
- Child, Francis James (selected and edited) (1857-9) English and Scottish Ballads, Boston, Little, Brown; Shephard, Clark and Brown; Cincinnati, Moore, Wilstach, Keys; Cambridge, H.O. Houghton)
