Oskar Cox Jensen – författare

Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was one of the most popular and influential creative forces in late Georgian Britain, producing a diversity of works that defy simple categorisation. He was an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian, theatre-manager, journalist, artist, music tutor, speculator, and author of novels, historical works, polemical pamphlets, and guides to musical education. This collection of essays illuminates the social and cultural conditions that made such a varied career possible, offering fresh insights into previously unexplored aspects of late Georgian culture, society, and politics.Tracing the transitions in the cultural economy from an eighteenth-century system of miscellany to a nineteenth-century regime of specialisation, Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture illustrates the variety of Dibdin's cultural output as characteristic of late eighteenth-century entertainment, while also addressing the challenge mounted by a growing preoccupation with specialisation in the early nineteenth century. The chapters, written by some of the leading experts in their individual disciplines, examine Dibdin's extraordinarily wide-ranging career, spanning cultural spaces from the theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, through Ranelagh Gardens, Sadler's Wells, and the Royal Circus, to singing on board ships and in elegant Regency parlours; from broadside ballads and graphic satires, to newspaper journalism, mezzotint etchings, painting, and decorative pottery. Together they demonstrate connections between forms of cultural production that have often been treated as distinct, and provide a model for a more integrated approach to the fabric of late Georgian cultural production.

Whether accompanying a march, a sit-in, or a confrontation with police, songs and protest are inextricably linked. As a tool for political activism, the protest song spells out the issues at the heart of each cause. Over a surprisingly long history, it has been used to spread ideas, inspire political imagination, and motivate political action.The protest song is - and has always been - a form of political oratory as vital to political representation as it is to performance. Investigating five centuries of English history, Our Subversive Voice establishes that the protest song is not merely the preserve of singer-songwriters; it is a mode of political communication that has been used to confront many systems of oppression across its many genres, from street ballads to art song, grime to hymns, and music hall to punk. Our Subversive Voice traces the history of the protest song, examines its rhetorical forms, and explores the conditions of its genesis. It recounts how these songs have addressed discrimination and inequality, exploitation and the environment, and immigration and identity, and how institutions and organizations have sought both to facilitate and to suppress them. Drawing on a large and diverse corpus of songwriters, this book argues that song does more than accompany protest: it choreographs and communicates it.The protest song, Our Subversive Voice shows, is an enduring, affecting, and effective means of expression and an essential element in understanding the drive to create political change, in the past and for the future.

For three centuries, ballad-singers thrived at the heart of life in London. One of history's great paradoxes, they were routinely disparaged and persecuted, living on the margins, yet playing a central part in the social, cultural, and political life of the nation. This history spans the Georgian heyday and Victorian decline of those who sang in the city streets in order to sell printed songs. Focusing on the people who plied this musical trade, Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates their craft and their repertoire, the challenges they faced and the great changes in which they were caught up. From orphans to veterans, prostitutes to preachers, ballad-singers sang of love and loss, the soil and the sea, mediating the events of the day to an audience of hundreds of thousands. Complemented by sixty-two recorded songs, this study demonstrates how ballad-singers are figures of central importance in the cultural, social, and political processes of continuity, contestation, and change across the nineteenth-century world.

For three centuries, ballad-singers thrived at the heart of life in London. One of history's great paradoxes, they were routinely disparaged and persecuted, living on the margins, yet playing a central part in the social, cultural, and political life of the nation. This history spans the Georgian heyday and Victorian decline of those who sang in the city streets in order to sell printed songs. Focusing on the people who plied this musical trade, Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates their craft and their repertoire, the challenges they faced and the great changes in which they were caught up. From orphans to veterans, prostitutes to preachers, ballad-singers sang of love and loss, the soil and the sea, mediating the events of the day to an audience of hundreds of thousands. Complemented by sixty-two recorded songs, this study demonstrates how ballad-singers are figures of central importance in the cultural, social, and political processes of continuity, contestation, and change across the nineteenth-century world.