Francis James Child
Encyclopedia
Francis James Child was an American
scholar, educator, and folklorist
, best known today for his collection of folk songs known as the Child Ballads
. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University
, where he produced influential editions of English poetry. In 1876 he was named Harvard's first Professor of English, a position which allowed him to focus on academic research. It was during this time that he began work on the Child Ballads.
The Child Ballads were published in five volumes between 1882 and 1898. They are a major contribution to the study of English-language folk music.
, described Child's father, a sailmaker, as "one of that class of intelligent and independent mechanics [i.e., skilled craftsmen], which has had a large share of developing the character of our democratic community, as of old the same class had in Athens or in Florence.” The family was poor, but thanks to the city of Boston's system of free public schools, the boy was educated at the Boston's Grammar and English High Schools. There his brilliance came to the attention of the principal of the Boston Latin School
, Epes Sargent Dixwell, who saw to it that the promising youngster was furnished with a scholarship to attend Harvard
. At Harvard, "Frank" (nicknamed "Stubby" on account of his short stature), excelled in all classes and also read widely outside his studies for his own pleasure. Although shy and diffident on account of his working-class origins, he was soon recognized as "the best writer, best speaker, best mathematician, the most accomplished person in knowledge of general literature" and he became extremely popular with his classmates. He was graduated in 1846, topping his class in all subjects and was chosen Class Orator by his graduating class (of sixty), who received his valedictory speech with "tumultuous applause". Upon graduation Child was appointed tutor in mathematics
at Harvard and in 1848 was transferred to a tutorship in history, political economy, and English literature
.
In 1848, Child published a critically annotated edition (the first of the kind to be produced in America) of Four Old Plays of the early English Renaissance. There were then no graduate schools in America, but a loan from a benefactor, Jonathan I. Bowditch, to whom the book was dedicated, enabled Child to take a leave of absence from his teaching duties to pursue his studies in Germany. There Child studied English drama
and Germanic philology
at the University of Göttingen, which conferred on him an honorary doctorate, and at Humboldt University, Berlin
, where he heard lectures by the linguists Grimm
and was much influenced by them.
In 1851, at the age of 26, Child succeeded Edward T. Channing as Harvard's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric
and Oratory
, a position he held until Adams Sherman Hill was appointed to the professorship in 1876. Harvard had at that time an enrollment of 382 undergraduates and a faculty of 14, including the president of the University, who was then James Walker
.
As a mathematician, wrote folklore scholar David E. Bynum, Child came to his interest "in what he variously called 'popular', 'primitive', or 'traditional' balladry'" (that is, in oral literature, then deemed "primitive" because its stylistic features antedate the invention of writing) not by accident "but by force of logic":
During the twenty-five years Child was Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard he undertook general editorial supervision of the publication of a 130-volume collection of the works of the British poets, many not previously generally available to the reading public, which began appearing 1853. The volumes on the works of Edmund Spenser
(five volumes, Boston, 1855) and the English and Scottish Ballads (in eight small volumes, Boston, 1857–1858), Child edited himself. Child planned a critical edition of the works of Chaucer
, as well. He soon realized that this could not be done, however, since only one early (and faulty) text was available. He therefore wrote a treatise, blandly titled "Observations on the Language of Chaucer", published in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1863), intended to make such an edition possible.
Child's linguistic researches are largely responsible for how Chaucerian grammar
, pronunciation, and scansion
are now generally understood.
Child's largest undertaking, however, grew out of the original English and Scottish Ballads volume in his British Poets series. The material for this volume was mostly derived from texts in previously published books. In compiling this work he realized that the folio manuscript of Percy's Reliques
, from which most of these texts were drawn, was not available for public inspection, and he set about to remedy this situation. In the 1860s he campaigned energetically for public support to enable the Early English Text Society
, founded by philologist Frederick James Furnivall
, to obtain a copy of Percy's Folio and publish it, which they did in 1868. Child and Furnivall then went on to found The Ballad Society, with a view to publishing other important early ballad collections, such as that of Samuel Pepys
.
In 1876 University of California President Daniel Gilman
offered Child a research professorship at the newly established Johns Hopkins University
in Baltimore
, which Gilman was in the process of organizing. Johns Hopkins was the first American university conceived on the German research model initiated by Humboldt
and divided into departments representing "the branches of knowledge", with elective subjects and a graduate school dedicated to advanced studies. In order to retain him, Harvard's president Charles William Eliot
created the tile of "Professor of English" especially for Child, freeing him from supervising oral recitations and correcting composition papers so that he could have more time for research. Thereafter, Child devoted himself to the comparative study of British vernacular
ballad
s, using methods adopted from historical comparative philology
to arrive at the earliest attested versions.
Child considered that folk ballads came from a more democratic time in the past when society was not so rigidly segregated into classes, and the "true voice" of the people could therefore be heard. He conceived "the people" as comprising all the classes of society, rich, middle, and poor, and not only those engaged in manual labor as Marxists sometimes use the word. Although Child concentrated his collections on manuscript texts with a view to determining their chronology, he also gave a sedulous but conservative hearing to popular versions still surviving. Child carried his investigations into the ballads of languages other than English, engaging in extensive international correspondence on the subject with colleagues abroad, primarily with the Danish literary historian and ethnographer Svend Grundtvig
, whose monumental twelve-volume compilation of Danish ballads, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser
, vols. 1–12 (Copenhagen, 1853), was the model for Child’s resulting canonical five-volume edition of some 305 English and Scottish ballads and their numerous variants. Since the ballads were known to have been a pan-European, Turkish, and North African phenomenon, Child and Grundtvig also consulted with numerous scholars in other parts of the world, such as, for example, the Sicilian physician, folklorist, and ethnographer Giuseppe Pitrè
. Professor Child served two terms as president, in 1888 and 1889, of the American Folklore Society
, which was founded with the mission of collecting and preserving African-American and Native American folklore equally that of European derivation.
Worked and overworked to the last, he died in Boston after completing his task – apart from a planned general introduction and bibliography. A biographical introduction was prefixed to the work by his student and successor George Lyman Kittredge
.
Child added to the Harvard University Library one of the largest folklore collections in existence. Kittredge succeeded him as Professor of English literature and modern languages at Harvard and considered himself the custodian of Child's scholarly legacy. Kittredge was president of the American Folklore Society in 1904.
He is buried in the cemetery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the "Sedgwick Pie
", since (like his good friend Charles Eliot Norton), he had married into the Sedgwick family. Child's grave is not far from that of Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett), the first enslaved African American to sue for her freedom in the courts based on the law of the 1780 constitution of the state of Massachusetts
, which held that "all men are born free and equal
." The Jury agreed and in 1781 she won her freedom. Her lawyer had been Theodore Sedgwick
.
, at first in ten parts (1882–1898) and then in five quarto volumes, and for a long time was the authoritative treasury of their subject. The "English" and "Scottish" of the title notwithstanding, it was an international piece of research, with references that include thirty different language sources.
A commemorative article in the 2006 edition of the Harvard Magazine states:
Since Child did not live to complete the planned introduction to his work which was to have explained his methodology, it has sometimes been alleged his selection was arbitrary and based purely on personal taste. The most recent edition of the ballads, however, published in 2002, now includes Child's rediscovered essay, "Ballad Poetry," which he had published anonymously in 1874. Reviewing the new edition, Ian Olson notes that the rediscovered essay:
For a listing of all the Child ballad types, and links to more information on each individual type, see List of the Child Ballads.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
scholar, educator, and folklorist
Folkloristics
Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore. The term derives from a nineteenth century German designation of folkloristik to distinguish between folklore as the content and folkloristics as its study, much as language is distinguished from linguistics...
, best known today for his collection of folk songs known as the Child Ballads
Child Ballads
The Child Ballads are a collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century...
. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, where he produced influential editions of English poetry. In 1876 he was named Harvard's first Professor of English, a position which allowed him to focus on academic research. It was during this time that he began work on the Child Ballads.
The Child Ballads were published in five volumes between 1882 and 1898. They are a major contribution to the study of English-language folk music.
Biography
Francis James Child was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His lifelong friend, scholar and social reformer Charles Eliot NortonCharles Eliot Norton
Charles Eliot Norton, was a leading American author, social critic, and professor of art. He was a militant idealist, a progressive social reformer, and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States.-Biography:Norton was born at...
, described Child's father, a sailmaker, as "one of that class of intelligent and independent mechanics [i.e., skilled craftsmen], which has had a large share of developing the character of our democratic community, as of old the same class had in Athens or in Florence.” The family was poor, but thanks to the city of Boston's system of free public schools, the boy was educated at the Boston's Grammar and English High Schools. There his brilliance came to the attention of the principal of the Boston Latin School
Boston Latin School
The Boston Latin School is a public exam school founded on April 23, 1635, in Boston, Massachusetts. It is both the first public school and oldest existing school in the United States....
, Epes Sargent Dixwell, who saw to it that the promising youngster was furnished with a scholarship to attend Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. At Harvard, "Frank" (nicknamed "Stubby" on account of his short stature), excelled in all classes and also read widely outside his studies for his own pleasure. Although shy and diffident on account of his working-class origins, he was soon recognized as "the best writer, best speaker, best mathematician, the most accomplished person in knowledge of general literature" and he became extremely popular with his classmates. He was graduated in 1846, topping his class in all subjects and was chosen Class Orator by his graduating class (of sixty), who received his valedictory speech with "tumultuous applause". Upon graduation Child was appointed tutor in mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
at Harvard and in 1848 was transferred to a tutorship in history, political economy, and English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
.
In 1848, Child published a critically annotated edition (the first of the kind to be produced in America) of Four Old Plays of the early English Renaissance. There were then no graduate schools in America, but a loan from a benefactor, Jonathan I. Bowditch, to whom the book was dedicated, enabled Child to take a leave of absence from his teaching duties to pursue his studies in Germany. There Child studied English drama
English drama
Drama was introduced to England from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose. By the medieval period, the mummers' plays had developed, a form of early street theatre associated with the Morris dance, concentrating on themes such as Saint George...
and Germanic philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
at the University of Göttingen, which conferred on him an honorary doctorate, and at Humboldt University, Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, where he heard lectures by the linguists Grimm
Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Grimm , Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm , were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular...
and was much influenced by them.
In 1851, at the age of 26, Child succeeded Edward T. Channing as Harvard's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
and Oratory
Elocution
Elocution is the study of formal speaking in pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone.-History:In Western classical rhetoric, elocution was one of the five core disciplines of pronunciation, which was the art of delivering speeches. Orators were trained not only on proper diction, but on the proper...
, a position he held until Adams Sherman Hill was appointed to the professorship in 1876. Harvard had at that time an enrollment of 382 undergraduates and a faculty of 14, including the president of the University, who was then James Walker
James Walker (Harvard)
James Walker was a Unitarian minister, professor, and President of Harvard College from February 10, 1853, to January 26, 1860....
.
As a mathematician, wrote folklore scholar David E. Bynum, Child came to his interest "in what he variously called 'popular', 'primitive', or 'traditional' balladry'" (that is, in oral literature, then deemed "primitive" because its stylistic features antedate the invention of writing) not by accident "but by force of logic":
Child well understood how indispensable good writing and good speaking are to civilization, or as many would now prefer to say, to society. For him, writing and speaking were not only the practical means by which men share useful information, but also the means whereby they formulate and share values, including the higher order of values that give meaning to life and purpose to human activities of all sorts. Concerned as he thus so greatly was with rhetoric, oratory, and the motives of those mental disciplines, Child was inevitably drawn into pondering the essential differences between speech and writing, and to searching for the origins of thoughtful expression in English.
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English...
(five volumes, Boston, 1855) and the English and Scottish Ballads (in eight small volumes, Boston, 1857–1858), Child edited himself. Child planned a critical edition of the works of Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
, as well. He soon realized that this could not be done, however, since only one early (and faulty) text was available. He therefore wrote a treatise, blandly titled "Observations on the Language of Chaucer", published in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1863), intended to make such an edition possible.
Child's linguistic researches are largely responsible for how Chaucerian grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
, pronunciation, and scansion
Scansion
Scansion is the act of determining and graphically representing the metrical character of a line of verse.-Overview:Systems of scansion, and the assumptions that underlie them, are so numerous and contradictory that it is often difficult to tell whether differences in scansion indicate opposed...
are now generally understood.
Child's largest undertaking, however, grew out of the original English and Scottish Ballads volume in his British Poets series. The material for this volume was mostly derived from texts in previously published books. In compiling this work he realized that the folio manuscript of Percy's Reliques
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry is a collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Thomas Percy and published in 1765.-Sources:...
, from which most of these texts were drawn, was not available for public inspection, and he set about to remedy this situation. In the 1860s he campaigned energetically for public support to enable the Early English Text Society
Early English Text Society
The Early English Text Society is an organization to reprint early English texts, especially those only available in manuscript. Most of its volumes are in Middle English and Old English...
, founded by philologist Frederick James Furnivall
Frederick James Furnivall
Frederick James Furnivall , one of the co-creators of the Oxford English Dictionary , was an English philologist...
, to obtain a copy of Percy's Folio and publish it, which they did in 1868. Child and Furnivall then went on to found The Ballad Society, with a view to publishing other important early ballad collections, such as that of Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys FRS, MP, JP, was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man...
.
In 1876 University of California President Daniel Gilman
Daniel Coit Gilman
Daniel Coit Gilman was an American educator and academician, who was instrumental in founding the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale College, and who subsequently served as one of the earliest presidents of the University of California, the first president of Johns Hopkins University, and as...
offered Child a research professorship at the newly established Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
in Baltimore
Baltimore
Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
, which Gilman was in the process of organizing. Johns Hopkins was the first American university conceived on the German research model initiated by Humboldt
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a German philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of Humboldt Universität. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice...
and divided into departments representing "the branches of knowledge", with elective subjects and a graduate school dedicated to advanced studies. In order to retain him, Harvard's president Charles William Eliot
Charles William Eliot
Charles William Eliot was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. He transformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university...
created the tile of "Professor of English" especially for Child, freeing him from supervising oral recitations and correcting composition papers so that he could have more time for research. Thereafter, Child devoted himself to the comparative study of British vernacular
Vernacular
A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...
ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
s, using methods adopted from historical comparative philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
to arrive at the earliest attested versions.
Child considered that folk ballads came from a more democratic time in the past when society was not so rigidly segregated into classes, and the "true voice" of the people could therefore be heard. He conceived "the people" as comprising all the classes of society, rich, middle, and poor, and not only those engaged in manual labor as Marxists sometimes use the word. Although Child concentrated his collections on manuscript texts with a view to determining their chronology, he also gave a sedulous but conservative hearing to popular versions still surviving. Child carried his investigations into the ballads of languages other than English, engaging in extensive international correspondence on the subject with colleagues abroad, primarily with the Danish literary historian and ethnographer Svend Grundtvig
Svend Grundtvig
Svend Hersleb Grundtvig was a Danish literary historian and ethnographer. He was one of the first systematic collectors of Danish traditional music, and he was especially interested in Danish folk songs. He began the large project of editing Danish ballads. He also co-edited Icelandic ballads. He...
, whose monumental twelve-volume compilation of Danish ballads, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser
Danmarks gamle Folkeviser
Danmarks gamle Folkeviser is a collection of all known texts and recordings of the old Danish popular ballads.It was started in 1853 by Svend Grundtvig...
, vols. 1–12 (Copenhagen, 1853), was the model for Child’s resulting canonical five-volume edition of some 305 English and Scottish ballads and their numerous variants. Since the ballads were known to have been a pan-European, Turkish, and North African phenomenon, Child and Grundtvig also consulted with numerous scholars in other parts of the world, such as, for example, the Sicilian physician, folklorist, and ethnographer Giuseppe Pitrè
Giuseppe Pitrè
Giuseppe Pitrè , the great Italian folklorist was also a medical doctor, professor, and senator in Sicily. As a folklorist he is credited with extending the realm of folklore to include all the manifestations of popular life. He was also a forerunner in the field of medical historyPitrè was born in...
. Professor Child served two terms as president, in 1888 and 1889, of the American Folklore Society
American Folklore Society
The American Folklore Society is the US-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world. It was founded in 1888 by William Wells Newell, who stood at the center of a diverse group of university-based scholars, museum anthropologists, and men...
, which was founded with the mission of collecting and preserving African-American and Native American folklore equally that of European derivation.
Worked and overworked to the last, he died in Boston after completing his task – apart from a planned general introduction and bibliography. A biographical introduction was prefixed to the work by his student and successor George Lyman Kittredge
George Lyman Kittredge
George Lyman Kittredge was a celebrated professor and scholar of English literature at Harvard University. His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare' as well as his writings and lectures on Shakespeare and other literary figures made him one of the most influential American...
.
Child added to the Harvard University Library one of the largest folklore collections in existence. Kittredge succeeded him as Professor of English literature and modern languages at Harvard and considered himself the custodian of Child's scholarly legacy. Kittredge was president of the American Folklore Society in 1904.
He is buried in the cemetery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the "Sedgwick Pie
Sedgwick Pie
The "Sedgwick Pie" is one of the more unusual family cemetery plots in the United States. It is the family burial plot of the Sedgwick family in Stockbridge Cemetery, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and gets its nickname from its shape and layout.-Description:...
", since (like his good friend Charles Eliot Norton), he had married into the Sedgwick family. Child's grave is not far from that of Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett), the first enslaved African American to sue for her freedom in the courts based on the law of the 1780 constitution of the state of Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
, which held that "all men are born free and equal
All men are created equal
The quotation "All men are created equal" has been called an "immortal declaration", and "perhaps" the single phrase of the United States Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance". Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase in the Declaration of Independence as a rebuttal to the...
." The Jury agreed and in 1781 she won her freedom. Her lawyer had been Theodore Sedgwick
Theodore Sedgwick
Theodore Sedgwick was an attorney, politician and jurist, who served in elected state government and as a Delegate to the Continental Congress, a US Representative, and a United States Senator from Massachusetts. He served as the fifth Speaker of the United States House of Representatives...
.
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
Child's monumental final collection was published postumously as The English and Scottish Popular BalladsChild Ballads
The Child Ballads are a collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century...
, at first in ten parts (1882–1898) and then in five quarto volumes, and for a long time was the authoritative treasury of their subject. The "English" and "Scottish" of the title notwithstanding, it was an international piece of research, with references that include thirty different language sources.
A commemorative article in the 2006 edition of the Harvard Magazine states:
Child’s enthusiasm and erudition shine throughout his systematic attempt to set the British ballad tradition in context with others, whether Danish, Serbian, or Turkish. He made no attempt to conceal or apologize for the sexuality, theatrical violence, and ill-concealed paganism of many ballads, but it is characteristic of the man that in his introduction to “Hugh of Lincoln,” an ancient work about the purported murder of a Christian child by a Jew, he wrote, “And these pretended child-murders, with their horrible consequences, are only a part of the persecution which, with all moderation, may be rubricated as the most disgraceful chapter in the history of the human race.”
Since Child did not live to complete the planned introduction to his work which was to have explained his methodology, it has sometimes been alleged his selection was arbitrary and based purely on personal taste. The most recent edition of the ballads, however, published in 2002, now includes Child's rediscovered essay, "Ballad Poetry," which he had published anonymously in 1874. Reviewing the new edition, Ian Olson notes that the rediscovered essay:
gives considerable insight into Child’s thinking after he had published his "first go" of English and Scottish Ballads in 1857-59 and was in the process of researching and reconsidering his last great work. It may not be Child’s "final statement" that we all wish he had lived to make, but it comes close in many ways, and nicely compliments the original Introduction to the 1880’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads made by Child’s successor, George Lyman Kittredge (retained in this volume).
For a listing of all the Child ballad types, and links to more information on each individual type, see List of the Child Ballads.
Online Resources
- Biography of Francis James Child at The Contemplator
- Burgess, John. "Francis James Child: Brief Life of a Victorian Enthusiast: 1825-1896". Harvard Magazine, May-June, 2006.
- Olsen, Ian. Review of Mark and Laura F. Heinman's, Corrected Second Edition of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, volume 1, in Musical Traditions internet magazine, May 14, 2002.
- "Francis James Child" entry 43 in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). Volume XVIII. Later National Literature, Part III, XXV. Scholars, no. 43. "Francis James Child".