THUS JOHN HARLAND, journalist of the Manchester Guardian in the mid-nineteenth century and editor of a rich collection of Lancashire songs and ballads, introduces the small body of ‘Sea Songs’ contained in the volume, all by Edward Rushton. The group includes a few poems about sea life; the opening ballad is ‘Will Clewline’, whose added subtitle, ‘A Tale of the Pressgang’, singles out its political significance. The inclusion of those poems in an anthology of that kind and the writer being dubbed a ‘local Dibdin’ by the volume's editor are both indications of the generic affiliation within Rushton's poetic corpus to the articulate tradition of songs and balladry, whose distinctive traits decisively contributed to defining eighteenth-century culture and canon formation in Britain and Ireland. These included the foregrounding of the oral and performative dimensions, intended to express ‘collectivized voices’ in a plurality of media; at the same time the emerging study of ballad and song coincided with the rise of British literary history and criticism. By the end of the century, ballads ‘had of course […] existed in many media: oral tradition, broadsides, chapbooks, book form. As a poetic “kind,” ballads intriguingly ran the gamut from anonymous orality to highly elaborate, authored literary productions’.

Rushton's mostly narrative poetry was actually produced and circulated across different media, aptly epitomizing the inherent hybridity of the genre. Captured in between orality and print culture, but also music and text, narrative and lyric modes, Rushton's experience of writing has Romantic generic contamination as its own underlying generative principle, as will be explored in the following pages.