American scholar Francis James Child (February 1, 1825 – September 11, 1896) was the first person to hold the title of Professor of English at Harvard University. Had he done nothing else he would today be remembered for his critical editions of the English poets; but he also assembled, from a comparative study of manuscripts and printed sources, what came to be known as the 305 canonical Child Ballads and their numerous variants, published in five volumes. "It was a massive and monumental work", writes folklorist Ian Olsen,

for despite the "English" and "Scottish" in the title, it was an international piece of research – his references alone include thirty different language sources.

Although there have been arguments about some of the ballads he canonised, very few omissions have come to light (the late David Buchan suggested "The Trees They do Grow High" and its close cousin "Young Craigston" should be "Child 306 and 307" respectively), and the work has proved invaluable to both scholars and singers.

As fashion has swung away from "purely literary" and "text-based" studies to more "oral/aural" and "context-based" ["performance"] research, there has arisen an unfortunate modern tendency to belittle Child’s great achievement, usually by those who themselves display not a tenth of his scholarship, industry, and understanding.

Fortunately, of late, serious scholarly aficionados such as Sigrid Rieuwerts and David Atkinson have ably redressed this state of affairs.

Biography

The son of a sailmaker, Francis James Child was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His family was very poor but thanks to the city of Boston's system of free public schools he was educated at the Boston's Grammar and English High Schools. There his brilliance came to the attention of Epes Sargent Dixwell, the principal of the Boston Latin School, who saw to it that the promising youngster was furnished with a scholarship to attend Harvard. He was graduated in 1846, topping his class in all subjects and was chosen Class Orator. In 1846 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, he published a critically annotated edition (the first of the kind to be produced in America) of Four Old Plays: Three interludes: Thersytes, Jack Jugler and Heywood's Pardoner and frere: and Jocasta, a tragedy by Gascoigne and Kinwelmarsh, with an introduction and notes. America had no graduate schools at this time, but a loan from a benefactor, Jonathan I. Bowditch (to whom the book was dedicated) enabled him to take a leave of absence from Harvard to pursue his studies in Germany. There he 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.

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, but he felt this could not be done 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.According to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907–21), Child's:

"Observations on the Language of Chaucer" (1863) put definitely out of date the random and arbitrary opinions — favourable or unfavourable, untrue or accidentally true — which critics had ever since the Renaissance been pronouncing upon Chaucer’s versification, and placed the matter henceforth upon a basis of exact knowledge. Child’s work has not had to be done over again; it has been the point of departure for later research, and remains the classic memoir in this field.

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. Hopkins was the first American university conceived on the German research model initiated by Humboldt and divided into departments representing "the branches of knowlege", 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 ballads, 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 divided into classes, and the "true voice" of the people could therefore be heard. Although he 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 Golkeviser, 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. He also consulted numerous others, such as, for example, the Sicilian physician, folklorist, and ethnographer Giuseppe Pitrè.

Child's final collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 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. Professor Child worked and overworked to the last, dying in Boston after completing his task – apart from a planned general introduction and bibliography. A biographical introduction was prefixed to the work by his son-in-law and chosen successor George Lyman Kittredge.

A commemorative article in 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.”

Child added to the Harvard University Library one of the largest folklore collections in existence. He 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. George Lyman Kittredge succeeded Child 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.

For a listing of all the Child ballad types, and links to more information on each individual type, see List of the Child Ballads.

See also

• Il Pesceballo

Notes

1. Musical Traditions
2. His Spenser, according to Professor Kittredge, “remained after forty years the best edition of Spenser in existence” (quoted in Cambridge History of English and American Literature, 1907–1921, Vol. XVIII).
3. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, (1907–1921), cit.
4. See Sigrid Rieuwerts, "'The Genuine Ballads of the People': F. J. Child and the Ballad Cause," Journal of Folklore Research: 31: 1–3 (1994): 1-34.
5. See Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
6. Jill Terry Rudy, "Transforming Audiences for Oral Tradition: Child, Kittredge, Thompson, and Connections of Folklore and English Studies," College English: 66: 5 (May 2004): 532.
7. Later scholars engaged directly in field research from oral sources, and some, like music educator Cecil Sharp, who was primarily interested in finding the tunes for the Child ballads, also collected music and dances.
8. For more about Grundtvig and Child, see Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), pp. 175-204 and 205-229, as well as their correspondence, pp. 247–300.
9. Pitrè, who was the founder of the Italian Folklore Society and became an honorary member of the American Folklore Society in 1890.
10. John Burgess, "Francis James Child: Brief life of a Victorian Enthusiast: 1825–1896" ( | Harvard Magazine, May–June 2006).

References

• Atkinson, David. "The English Revival Canon: Child Ballads and the Invention of Tradition". The Journal of American Folklore: 114: 453 (Summer, 2001): 370-80.
• Atkinson, David. The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method, and Practice. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002.
• Cheeseman, Tom, and Sigrid Rieuwerts, editors. Ballads into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child. Selected Papers from the 26th International Ballad Conference (SIEF Ballad Commission), Swansea, Wales, 19-24 July 1996. Berlin (etc.): Peter Lang Verlagsgruppe, (Second Revised Edition) 1999.
• Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
• Rieuwerts, Sigrid. "'The Genuine Ballads of the People': F. J. Child and the Ballad Cause". Journal of Folklore Research, 31: 1-3 (1994): 1-34.
• Rudy, Jill Terry. "Considering Rhetoric's Wayward Child: Ballad Scholarship and Intradisciplinary Conflict." Journal of Folklore Research: 35: 2 (May 1998): 85–98.
• Rudy, Jill Terry. "Transforming Audiences for Oral Tradition: Child, Kittredge, Thompson, and Connections of Folklore and English Studies." College English: 66: 5 (May 2004).

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.
• "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".