6. Elizabeth Davison and the Circulation of Chapbooks in Early Nineteenth-Century Northumberland

Broadsides, chapbooks, and other small books carried across England and Scotland by itinerant pedlars were sold in the streets, at markets and fairs, and even door to door. They were also available from small retail premises or directly from printers. This chapter looks at one collection of 283 chapbooks made by Miss Elizabeth Davison in the Northumberland market town of Wooler during the early nineteenth century. These are predominantly song chapbooks, covering the full range of Napoleonic War songs, ‘Scotch songs’, alongside lyric, sentimental, and pastoral pieces, local and topical songs, folk songs and ballads, as well as other eighteenth-century narrative ballads. Their provenance shows that publications from Scottish printing centres outnumbered those from Newcastle and other English centres, indicating just how integrated was the cheap print trade in Scotland and the north-east of England. Davison’s collection, though empirically substantial, does not readily fit into a book trade model such as Robert Darnton’s ‘communications circuit’ because the cheap print trade seems to have been characterised as much by trial and error as by feedback mechanisms. The model put forward by Thomas Adams and Nicholas Barker, which concentrates on events in the life of a book, is more applicable.