Cheap Print
and the People
Cheap Print
and the People:
European Perspectives
on Popular Literature
Edited by
David Atkinson and Steve Roud
Cheap Print and the People: European Perspectives on Popular Literature
Edited by David Atkinson and Steve Roud
This book first published 2019
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2019 by David Atkinson, Steve Roud and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-5275-3514-2
ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-3514-5
CONTENTS
Illustrations................................................................................................ vii
Note on Terminology ................................................................................. xi
Chapter One................................................................................................. 1
Introduction
Steve Roud and David Atkinson
Chapter Two................................................................................................ 7
Popular Literature in Spain: A Mouse’s Tale
Alison Sinclair
Chapter Three............................................................................................ 33
Female Transgression and Gallows Literature in the Spanish literatura
de cordel
Inmaculada Casas-Delgado and Juan Gomis
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 60
Ballads and Broadsides in France: Accounting for an Absence
David Hopkin
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 95
Itinerant Ballad Singers and Songs Printed on Broadside Sheets
in Lower Brittany
Daniel Giraudon
Chapter Six.............................................................................................. 121
Devotional and Demonic Narratives in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury
Dutch Penny Prints
Jeroen Salman
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 139
The Scandinavian Skilling Ballad: A Transnational Cultural Heritage
Siv Gøril Brandtzæg and Karin Strand
Contentsvi
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 170
Singing Out Loud: Selling Skillingstrykk in Nineteenth- and Early
Twentieth-Century Norway
Astrid Nora Ressem
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 191
Images, Words, and Book Production in the Russian Empire:
Popular Prints, Lubok Books, and Illustrated Magazines
Hanna Chuchvaha
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 223
Cheap Print for the Ukrainian People: Lubok Books, “Little Russian
Literature”, and “Literature for the People”
Viktoriia Voloshenko
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 252
Street Literature in South-Eastern Europe: The Example of Bulgaria
Klaus Roth
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 274
Cheap Print in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hungary
Éva Mikos and Rumen István Csörsz
Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 307
The Cultural Importance of Broadside Songs in Slovenia
Marija Klobčar
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 324
Cheap Printing and Street Sellers in Early Modern Italy
Laura Carnelos
Contributors............................................................................................. 354
Index........................................................................................................ 360
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 2.1. Desdichas de un hombre gordo (Cambridge University
Library).
Figure 2.2. Xacara nueva en que se refiere y da cuenta de veinte muertes
que una doncella llamada Doña Teresa de Llanos (Cambridge University
Library).
Figure 3.1. Romance trágico del casamiento entre dos damas (Serrano
Morales Library).
Figure 3.2. Curioso romance de la vida, hechos y atrocidades de Don
Agustín Florencio (Serrano Morales Library).
Figure 4.1. Le chanteur de cantiques, engraving by Madeleine Cochin
after a drawing by Charles-Nicolas Cochin fils (Victoria and Albert
Museum).
Figure 4.2. Le marchand de crimes, illustration by Eugène Forest,
originally published in L’illustration (1844) and subsequently in Edmond
Texier’s Tableau de Paris (1852).
Figure 4.3. Scènes de foire, produced by the Pellerin firm of Epinal
(1842).
Figure 4.4. Le marchand d’images, by Alexandre Antigna (c.1862)
(Musée des beaux-arts de Bordeaux).
Figure 5.1. Breton ballad sheets (author’s collection).
Figure 5.2. Popular singer and his wife in Lannion, Côtes d’Armor,
nineteenth century (author’s collection).
Figure 5.3. Pardon de Sainte Anne-la-Palud at Plounevez-Porzay (author’s
collection).
Illustrationsviii
Figure 5.4. René Le Gac and his wife (Collection Erdern Bastard).
Figure 6.1. Jacob Perkois, De prentverkoper (Amsterdam University
Library).
Figure 6.2. Duyfken en Willemeynkens Pelgrimagie, by Boetius à Bolswert
(National Library of the Netherlands).
Figure 6.3. Het leven van Jan met zijn Griet, fragment (Amsterdam
University Library).
Figure 6.4. Geschiedenis van Robert de duivel / Aventures de Robert le
diable (Rijksmuseum).
Figure 6.5. Kinders siet dit schouwspel aan / Wat Doctor Faustus heeft
gedaan (“Children, watch this spectacle / About the deeds of Doctor
Faustus”) (Amsterdam University Library).
Figure 7.1. Tvende betragtninger over den comete (Gunnerus Library).
Figure 7.2. En botfärdig synderskas swane-sång, af hustrun Bengta
Anders Dotter (National Library of Sweden).
Figure 7.3. En bedrøvet synderindes navnlig Margretha Nielsdatter
Halstads veemodige klage-sang (Gunnerus Library).
Figure 8.1. Tre nye viser (National Library of Norway).
Figure 8.2. Anton Andersen, alias “Jumbo”, beside Akerselva in the
eastern part of Oslo in 1910.
Figure 8.3. Railway builders in Kvam, Gudbrandsdalen, in 1896
(photograph by Hans H. Lie).
Figure 8.4. Sketch by C. F. Diriks of Christiania market in 1875 (National
Library of Norway).
Figure 9.1. “Adam and Eve”, Koren’ Bible (1696) (National Library of
Russia).
Figure 9.2. “Cat of Kazan’”.
Cheap Print and the People: European Perspectives on Popular Literature ix
Figure 9.3. Russian Art Leaflet (Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok), with
commemorative portraits by Vasilii Timm (University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign Library).
Figure 9.4. Title page of World Illustration (Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia)
(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library).
Figure 10.1. Buvalshchyna, abo na chuzhyi korovai ochei ne poryvai,
printed by Stepan Homolynskyi (1888) (Vernadsky National Library of
Ukraine).
Figure 10.2. Tarasova nich: Poema Tarasa Shevchenka, a metelyk
(“butterfly”) printed by Panteleimon Kulish (1862) (Vernadsky National
Library of Ukraine).
Figure 10.3. “Ukrainian patriot”, illustration by Fotii Krasytskyi (1906)
(Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine).
Figure 11.1. Parvata krachka, by Iv. St. Andreychin (1896) (author’s
collection).
Figure 11.2. Nastradin Hodja and Hitar Petar (1921) (author’s
collection).
Figure 11.3. Narodna pesnopoyka, by Yanko S. Abadzhiev (1926)
(author’s collection).
Figure 11.4. Nay-nova pesnopoyka na P. M. Parushev, izvesten iz tsyala
Balgariya kato naroden pevets (1934) (author’s collection).
Figure 11.5. Patriotichni narodni pesni (c.1985) (author’s collection).
Figure 11.6. Karvava lyubovna drama v stolicata (1912) (author’s
collection).
Figure 11.7. Plennikat v carskoe selo: Roman iz ruskata revolyucia (1917)
(author’s collection)
Figure 11.8. Sirota Tsvetana, by N. M. Karamzin (1933) (author’s
collection).
Illustrationsx
Figure 12.1. Két dallok (1838) (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek).
Figure 12.2. Argirus és Tündér Ilona (1858) (Österreichisches
Nationalbibliothek).
Figure 13.1. Kuhnovci v Bosni (National and University Library of
Slovenia).
Figure 13.2. Ain newes lied von den kraynnerischen bauren (National and
University Library of Slovenia).
Figure 13.3. View of Ljubljana between 1690 and 1800 (National and
University Library of Slovenia).
Figure 13.4. “Dva nesrečna Italjana”, transcribed by A. Krajnc (ZRC
SAZU, Institute of Ethnomusicology Archive).
Figure 14.1. Hornbooks and Books for Children, from a drawing by
Annibale Carracci (private collection).
Figure 14.2. Pietro Faccini, Blind Beggar with Dog (MiBACT, Archivio
fotografico del Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe della Pinacoteca
Nazionale di Bologna).
Figure 14.3. Seller of prints and rosaries (Rome, post-1870), from a
drawing by Annibale Carracci etched by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (c.1660)
(Collezioni d’Arte e di Storia della Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio).
NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
The purpose of this volume is to introduce readers to the variety of cheap
literature that was produced and sold right across Europe from early
modern times through to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Inevitably, the historical, political, chronological, and commercial
circumstances vary in important ways from one place to the next, and a
consequence of this is that there are some differences in terminology that
need to be noticed, if not entirely resolved.
• Almanac is the term used for an annual book containing a calendar of
months and days, astronomical data and calculations, anniversaries and
notable dates, astrological and meteorological forecasts, lists of
markets and fairs, and the like. An almanac is more expansive than a
calendar, which implies little more than a list of dates.
• Broadside is the fairly straightforward description for a single sheet of
paper printed on one side, with text in verse of prose, frequently with a
woodcut illustration. Occasionally, a single sheet would be printed on
both sides, and this is sometimes called a broadsheet, although the
distinction is not always maintained.
• Chapbook is both a particularly useful and potentially confusing term.
Strictly speaking, a chapbook comprises a single sheet of paper printed
on both sides and folded to form a small booklet or pamphlet, normally
of between eight and thirty-two pages, of small size, and issued
without stitching or binding. The term chapbook is a back-formation
from chapman + book. A chapman was, from medieval times to the
nineteenth century, an itinerant pedlar or hawker selling myriad kinds
of wares, including cheap print; the word itself derives from Old
English céap = sale (from cípan = to sell) + mann. Accordingly, to call
a publication a chapbook implies this method of itinerant distribution
and sale, in streets and byways, at markets and fairs. A false etymology
that derives chapbook from “cheap book” is sometimes quoted and, if
not correct, is not altogether inappropriate. While the bibliographical
definition of a chapbook is a small book printed from one sheet of
paper, the term can usefully be applied to any kind of book that was (or
might have been) carried by a chapman and might extend to, say,
ninety-six pages or three folded sheets. The terms booklet and
Note on Terminologyxii
pamphlet encompass a rather broader range of small books, sold in
more conventional ways and not necessarily aimed at the popular end
of the market, although the distinction is far from absolute and some
scholars treat pamphlet and chapbook as interchangeable terms.
• Print or “popular print” in English usage usually refers to a woodcut or
copperplate illustration printed as a broadside with very little in the
way of accompanying text – a cheap picture, in other words. Elsewhere,
“popular prints” or “penny prints” would also carry some explanatory
text. Sometimes, however, the term print is used as a convenient
shorthand for “printed item”. Although this volume tries to avoid using
the word in a potentially ambiguous way, the different implications
should be borne in mind.
Nevertheless, it is not always easy to translate the terms used in the
different languages without forcing everything into an English-language
mould or adding further confusion. Translating the French bibliothèque
bleue as “blue books”, for example, would hardly be useful, and to render
the Scandinavian skilling ballad as “shilling ballad” would be downright
confusing, as in Britain one could normally buy twelve or even twentyfour
ballads for one shilling. We have therefore adopted the plan of asking
our contributors to describe the physical materials with which they are
concerned, explain the local terms, and then use those in their writing
without further comment.
***
Note: All online resources were accessed and verified between 15 and 21
March 2019.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
STEVE ROUD AND DAVID ATKINSON
The subject of this collection of essays is the many kinds of publications
that emerged across Europe from early modern times to the twentieth
century that fall within the categories of “street literature” (the term most
commonly used by scholars of literature and folklore) and “cheap print”
(the term favoured in studies of book trade and printing history). While all
kinds of material might in principle be drawn in under the rubric of cheap
print, the terminology of street literature narrows the field down
somewhat, to printed works that, however humble, display a degree of
syntactical structure and imaginative compass. Empirically, the printed
items under consideration here are broadsides, chapbooks, pamphlets, and
other small booklets. Their contents were ballads and songs, tales, and
works of non-fiction, intended variously to inform, educate, and entertain.
They could be in verse or prose (or a mixture thereof), and they were
frequently illustrated (in some instances with little printing besides the
illustration). Street literature was usually, though not invariably, presented
for sale, and a degree of intended permanence may be imputed to it, in
theory if not necessarily in practice. These definitions are porous all round,
but on the whole the essays here are not concerned with other kinds of
cheap printed things such as posters, handbills, advertisements, or trade
cards which can be more intuitively described as “ephemera”. Nor are we
usually concerned with the later reading materials, such as popular novels,
magazines, and newspapers, that developing print technology allowed to
become increasingly “cheap” as the nineteenth century progressed.
The sale of street literature was characteristically carried out through
networks that involved publishers and printers selling wholesale, modest
retailers operating from shops or stalls, and itinerant sellers who would
carry cheap print into public places – streets, marketplaces, fairs – and
would sometimes sell from door to door. Travelling sellers are variously
described by names such as pedlars, hawkers, chapmen, colporteurs.
Chapter One2
Another feature was that these retailers of cheap print would cry their
wares. This performance element meant that there was something of a
crossover between the print trade and street singers, musicians, and other
itinerant entertainers. From a scholarly perspective this crossover has
sometimes given rise to a rather uneasy situation whereby a largely
idealized conception of oral “folk song” has come up against the hard
evidence of the circulation of song texts in cheap print. Some of the songs
and tales that appeared in cheap print also circulated orally, and some of
them may have been in existence prior to print, but print enhanced their
distribution and preservation, and it is largely print that provides the
evidence for their currency especially before, but also after, the Romantic
era “discovery of the people”, to use Peter Burke’s phrase.
***
If this book fulfils its aims, it will operate on two levels. Each chapter
should stand as a much-needed introduction for English-language readers
to the street literature of a particular country or region. Then, taken in
combination, they offer a comparative perspective on the genre on a
continental scale. It has not been possible to cover every country or region
(Germany, for instance, is a notable absence) and to do so would have
required a much larger book, but if there is a chance of a second volume it
will aim to cover some of the areas and topics not included here. Nor
could we hope to elucidate all the intricacies and fine details of the history
of cheap literature in the countries that are included. Cheap print is a much
wider field than first meets the eye and it has to be studied from a range of
perspectives. But we are confident that the contributions gathered here are
sufficiently broad in geographical spread, and diverse enough in terms of
genre and local situation, to serve as an effective introduction and to map
out the field.
The editors deliberately avoided giving the contributors a strict
template in which to operate. To do so would have forced them into one
mould based inevitably on the view from one locality, and while
accentuating similarities it may well have disguised the underlying
differences that we hoped to make plain. We wanted the local situation to
dictate the style and content, and our authors have therefore produced
chapters that are pertinent to the circumstances of the subject in their
locality. While this may have lost a little in terms of ease of
straightforward cross-national comparison, it has gained immeasurably in
readability and fidelity to the subject in each region.
Introduction 3
One function of this short introduction is, therefore, to highlight some
overarching themes that will help the newcomer to the subject to identify
the main points of comparison. First, our conception of “cheap print” is
normally concerned with the purchaser or recipient – the material was
cheap to buy. It may be a truism, but it is surely one that needs repeating,
that cheap to buy means cheap to print. Except in special cases where
some person or organization has subsidized production, there is a direct
correlation between the method of production and the price to the
consumer, which impacts on the quality of materials, the time spent on the
production of individual items, the quality of printing presses and type, the
size and skill of the workforce, business arrangements such as the
availability of credit, and so on.
The first prerequisite for a local trade is a printing press in operation,
someone to own it, someone sufficiently skilled to operate it, and adequate
access to consumables such as ink and paper. Nevertheless, just how local
the press must be to its market is highly variable. In most countries where
printing technology was introduced early the trade was initially highly
centralized and controlled, and only gradually managed to break out into
the country as a whole. Elsewhere, the presses serving a particular
population remained for a long time in a different country altogether,
controlled by “outsiders”. This situation has ramifications for any attempt
at understanding how close the literature came to the mentalities of its
consumers – it may well have been at some variance with their world
view.
For the historian who wishes fully to understand the genre and its place
in society one of the first questions to be tackled concerns the conditions
of production. Who were the authors and publishers, were they working
under their own volition, what were the constraints upon them? And
perhaps most importantly of all, how close were they – in terms of class,
ethnicity, gender, education, and so forth – to the people they hoped would
buy their works? The readership for cheap print is usually assumed to have
been the “common people”. While this is true to a large extent, several
chapters in this book go to show that the market could be a particular
segment of that population, defined by language, ethnicity, religion, or
some other social category. As some of the chapters reveal, the choice of
language was an especially important indicator of the target audience for
cheap print. Furthermore, many publications had the appearance of street
literature but without meeting the usual definitions of the genre. Especially
in the early days of printing, cheaply printed items were very often official,
in the form of proclamations, announcements, legal warnings, and the like.
They were not intended for sale and were aimed at the general populace
Chapter One4
only in so far as the people were expected to comply with the regulations
they promulgated.
In practice, it is probably a universal principle that state and church
authorities across Europe have been at least highly suspicious of, if not
overtly hostile to, cheap popular print, whether in the early modern period
or the nineteenth century. Ruling elites were everywhere extremely wary
of anyone but themselves speaking directly to the people without their
oversight and control. The source of their wariness could be political,
religious, moral, or social, or might even be couched in paternalistic terms
of protecting the people from subversive messages for their own good. The
outright banning of particular types of publication, pre-publication
censorship, licensing of printing presses, post-publication prosecution,
taxes on printed matter or materials such as paper were all tried at different
times, and likewise the authorities attempted to control the distribution of
print through means such as the issuing of hawkers’ licences.
***
The sort of cheap print discussed in this book inevitably falls under the
widely used heading of “popular culture”, a term that owes much to Peter
Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, first published in 1978,
which constructed a “withdrawal thesis” whereby over the course of some
three centuries up to c.1800 European elites withdrew from a shared
culture, which was increasingly abandoned to the lower classes or the
“common people”. Popular culture is thus readily understood as
comprising shared meanings, attitudes, and values, expressed in forms
such as cheap print. Yet as the foregoing remarks indicate, and as the
following chapters reveal in much greater depth, cheap print of the kind
considered here was never so bounded – never confined just to the
peasantry, or the working classes, or even the middling sort, and
conversely influenced by sources that would normally fall under the
heading of elite culture. The “popular” description remains a useful one in
so far as it implies widespread dissemination and reach, and a volume of
sales flowing from cheapness of production and itinerant distribution, but
it is also fraught with implications about social structures and literary
origins that are potentially misleading. This is not a debate that is going to
be resolved here, but the reader should at least be aware of the
terminological minefield.
Across the board, and especially in the later periods, cheap print has
attracted the derision of perhaps a majority of educated people, although
occasional individuals have taken an interest and made collections to pass
Introduction 5
down to us. In like manner, albeit with some notable exceptions, modern
scholarship has been very slow to come to an understanding of how
interesting and valuable cheap print can be. Several contributors to this
volume write that in their country the mass of surviving examples awaits
scholarly attention. Paradoxically, it is precisely those areas where the
social elites and educated middle classes have taken the least interest that
we now value the most. So many other types of historical source have
been mediated by the elites that it is a pleasure to find materials that were
largely beneath their notice and which therefore remained largely
uncontaminated.
Nevertheless, we must avoid the trap of presuming that cheap print
gives us direct, unproblematic access to the mentalities, experiences, and
desires of the common people. We must always remember that the
material as printed had already gone through the mediation of the writer,
the printer/publisher, and the distributor, any one of whom might not have
been “of the same people” as the individual consumer. Material produced
for the people is not synonymous with material produced by the people.
Some social historians have presumed too much in that direction. In fact,
we rarely know much about purchasers’ preferences beyond the notion
that an item that sold well was presumably in some way more to their taste
than one that did not. Similarly, we can assume that printers had some
notion of what people wanted, or they would not have stayed in business
very long. But crucially, we have no idea what the people would have
liked but were not offered.
Another pitfall we must avoid is to fail to take into account the
chronology – or better still, chronologies – laid out in each chapter. There
will be great differences between countries where general printing was
adopted relatively soon after its invention and those places where the
technology was introduced much later, when it had already been
“democratized” by technological development and increased availability.
Similarly, continuity of types of printed material can disguise important
underlying differences.
***
Throughout the chapters in this collection there are recurrent patterns in
the production, distribution, and consumption of cheap print across Europe
– with the caveat that consumption, or reception, is much harder to recover
than are production and distribution. But equally there are differences of
chronology, technology, and authority which comparative studies must
take into account. It is this recurrent sense of difference within similarity,
Chapter One6
or similarity within difference, that we perceive as the overarching context
for the chapters that follow.
SR, DA, March 2019
CHAPTER TWO
POPULAR LITERATURE IN SPAIN:
A MOUSE’S TALE
ALISON SINCLAIR
“Spain is different” – so proclaimed Manuel Fraga, Spanish minister for
information and tourism from 1962 to 1966. His dictum poses an initial
and crucial question for the study of popular literature. In numerous
contexts of comparative study, Spain has found itself excluded: it seems
that the Pyrenees have constituted a barrier that is more than physical. The
presence of Spanish culture in the current volume provides the opportunity
for us to explore whether in this context Spain really is different or just
comparable but distinct, resonating and occasionally contrasting with
popular literature elsewhere in Europe.
My subtitle alludes to the winding, complex, but ever eventful history
of popular literature in Spain. The mouse in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in
Wonderland declares that “my tale is a long and a sad one” – long,
winding, and diminishing towards its tip. In part, this shape resonates with
the form and growth of popular literature in Spain, at least of the type that
is the primary material for this chapter, the pliego suelto (literally “loose
folded piece”), or chapbook, a genre that has strong early beginnings but
scant, or rather a different, existence in modern times. But Carroll’s
mouse’s tale also tells of a legal wrangle with no certainty that there is
evidence for the conflict, and that, too, is an appropriate image for popular
literature in Spain which is notable for having been, at least through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a contested critical territory. But we
might also be aware that one of the things the mouse says is not applicable
to popular literature in Spain: it is not clear that the tale will be a sad one.
The evidence we have for popular literature in Spain – patchy and difficult
to put together, and still more to interpret, though it may be – is that it was
vigorous, that it inspired affection and enthusiasm, and that it formed a
major part of Spain’s culture over several centuries.
Chapter Two8
The setting for “difference” in the case of Spain can be sketched out
initially with reference to the country’s physical nature and location.
Geographical realities have consistently been to the fore in Spain’s history,
both political and cultural. There are notable internal differences between
the regions, with tough, impenetrable chains of mountains and vast, arid
inland stretches contrasting with a fertile seaboard on which outwardlooking
ports have been situated for centuries.1
This geography poses
problems for travel in general and for the transmission of goods, printed
matter included. Yet while the Pyrenees on the north-eastern boundary
impose a type of limitation within Europe, the coastal borders with the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean act not just as a barrier to be overcome but
also as a route to communication and trade overseas.
Defining the Field
It will be evident to the reader that the authors in this volume have a high
degree of agreement about the nature of their field. But each of us will
need to define our own limits according to the type of content we are
dealing with. I am concerned primarily with pliegos sueltos and associated
forms such as the aleluya. I shall also make reference in passing to other
forms such as goigs, a short form of religious publication usually
combining text and image.2
Spain also had, in common with other
European countries, its share of ephemeral publications of a broadly
political nature. These hojas volantes (literally “flying sheets”), printed
usually on one side, were produced in times of political stress and
excitement – and, curiously, they can frequently be identified by the fact
that the title begins with “A”, indicating that they are addressed to the
1
There are linguistic differences, too, observable in terms of lexical and phonetic
variation but also separately defined languages such as Basque and Catalan. In
relation to popular literature these are less obvious, with the exception of the
varieties of Catalan that can be observed through the nineteenth century, and
occasional examples of gallego or aragonés. References to Andalusia and texts
that in part aim to give the impression of an andaluz accent constitute a separate
case and suggest an early awareness of Andalusia as somehow internally exotic.
See, for example, Colección de canciones andaluzas (Madrid: Imprenta á cargo de
José M. Marés, plazuela de la Cebada, núm. 96) [London, British Library,
11450.f.24.(16.)]. Here and elsewhere in this chapter original spelling is used. The
nature of linguistic variation in Spanish popular literature requires separate study.
2
See Josep Martí, “Los goigs: Expression de religiosidad e identidad local en
Cataluña”, in Palabras para el pueblo, ed. Luis Díaz G. Viana, vol. 1,
Aproximación general a la literatura de cordel (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), pp. 191–
225.
Popular Literature in Spain 9
population, or a specific sector of the population.3
They imparted
information, or purported to do so, but rarely without a specific slant or
agenda. Spain also saw, in common with much of Europe, the publication
of almanacs and similar materials such as calendars.4
The pliegos sueltos constitute a genre that falls within what Botrel has
termed el no libro (“what is not in book form”) and the discussion here
takes note of Botrel’s recommendation for a flexibility of approach that
responds to a lack of definition, an approach that is ecological and
evolutionary as opposed to “eternal” or “structural”.5
The material under
discussion is thus distinct from bulky publications such as novels intended
for a popular audience, different from newspapers (although sometimes
produced by the same printers), and with an unclear relationship to hojas
volantes (broadsides).6
In common with the chapbook in Britain, it has a
history of being difficult to define.7
More usefully within the Spanish
context, the field can be understood as literatura de cordel (“string
3
See Carmen Ortiz García, “Papeles para el pueblo: Hojas sueltas y otros impresos
de consume masivo en la España de finales del siglo XIX”, in Palabras para el
pueblo, ed. Luis Díaz G. Viana, vol. 1, Aproximación general a la literatura de
cordel (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), pp. 145–90; Jesusa Vega, “Fernando VII: Resistencia y
deseo”, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 14 (2014), 348–99. The nature of hojas
volantes is problematic for cataloguing; if catalogued alphabetically by title and
not by either date or subject matter it is difficult for the reader to narrow down
specific fields of interest.
4
See Honorio M. Velasco, “Cultura tradicional en fragmentos: Los almanaques y
calendarios y la cultura ‘popularizada’”, in Palabras para el pueblo, ed. Luis Díaz
G. Viana, vol. 1, Aproximación general a la literatura de cordel (Madrid: CSIC,
2000), pp. 121–44.
5
Jean-François Botrel, “El género de cordel”, in Palabras para el pueblo, ed. Luis
Díaz G. Viana, vol. 1, Aproximación general a la literatura de cordel (Madrid:
CSIC, 2000), pp. 41–69 (pp. 42, 50). Botrel’s work is fundamental for our
understanding of this field in Spain, as is the Luis Díaz G. Viana (ed.), Palabras
para el pueblo, vol. 1, Aproximación general a la literatura de cordel (Madrid:
CSIC, 2000) volume. For some summary and discussion of definitions, see
Inmaculada Casas-Delgado, “Ecos de modernidad y paneuropeísmo en la literatura
española (1750–1850)” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Seville, 2017),
p. 21 and n. 2 http://hdl.handle.net/11441/61292.
6
See the example of Rafael García Rodríguez y Cuenca (17¿?–1844), of Córdoba
discussed by Inmaculada Casas-Delgado, “Marcas del sur: Autores e impresores
andaluces en la literatura de cordel”, Cuadernos de Ilustración y el Romanticismo,
24 (2018), 437–65.
7
See Laurence Fontaine, “Colportage”, in Dictionnaire encyclopédique du livre,
ed. Pascale Fouché, Daniel Péchoin, and Philippe Schuwer, 4 vols (París: Éditions
du Cercle de la Librairie, 2002–11), I, 578.
Chapter Two10
literature”), a reference to the way in which publications on sale were
hung on strings or cords, either on a stall or to accompany the seller.8
The
pliego is slight, habitually a single sheet folded once or twice, cheaply
produced, and was sold (typically and traditionally by a blind person) in
the street or by travelling pedlars.9
Reaching the Audience
There are two ways in which we can consider reaching the audience: how
did the material in question travel across Spain? and how did it reach and
touch the lives of individuals, many of whom were unable to read?
Geography impinges on the first question and education and culture on the
second. Both can be considered within the context of wider transEuropean
transmission.
The nature of literatura de cordel is such that research into its internal
and external dissemination is tantalizing, but insufficient. Certain kinds of
information can be ascertained from the contents of catalogues and some
work has been done on the activities of specific printers and cities.
Catalogues can give us some idea of what happened at specific dates and
in specific places but leave us without a sense of the overall picture in
Spain for the period under discussion. We can see where there is a
coincidence between texts and titles produced in different cities, whether
at the same period or at different times, which suggests that the material
did indeed travel within Spain, but we have not yet been able to map just
how this happened or by what means.10
Most useful among the catalogues are those from the history of
bookselling, notably the landmark work of Rodríguez-Moñino and more
8
Botrel, “El género de cordel”, esp. pp. 41–47, 47–49, on the physical aspects of
the genre; Juan Gomis, Menudencias de imprenta: Producción y circulación de la
literatura popular (Valencia siglo XVIII) (Valencia: Institución Alfonso el
Magnánimo, 2015), pp. 29–146; Casas-Delgado, “Ecos de modernidad”, pp. 65–
139. The work that most directly addresses the genre at large is the classic study by
Julio Caro Baroja, Ensayo sobre la literatura de cordel (Madrid: Revista de
Occidente, 1969).
9
Further details in Gomis, Menudencias de imprenta, pp. 39–44.
10
Items catalogued by the “Wrongdoing in Spain, 1800–1936: Realities,
Representations, Reactions” project https://www.wrongdoing.mml.cam.ac.uk/ reveal
a number of repeated printings: La renegada de Valladolid (27), El Alarbe de
Marsella (15), El Conde de Alarcos (14), Josefa Ramírez (14), and El maltés en
Madrid (13). For discussion of La renegada de Valladolid and Josefa Ramírez, see
the chapter by Casas-Delgado and Gomis in this volume.
Popular Literature in Spain 11
recent work by Rueda and Agustí.11
Here we can see which titles they
have in common, albeit listed for different printers and locations. The
catalogue of the printer Agustín Laborda, studied in depth by Gomis,
reveals that this printer had an extensive and closely connected chain of
distribution agents located in numerous parts of Spain, including Madrid,
Cádiz, Cuenca, and Málaga, who bought popular material in bulk for sale
across the whole of the country.12
It should also be noted that printers did
not necessarily limit their activity to the production of sueltos and other
comparable items (what Gomis terms menudencias or “slight forms”), so
our view of what they actually did probably needs to conceptualize the
idea of a mixed market rather than one operating according to a cultural
dichotomy.13
Whatever the degree to which we might be able to ascertain just how
items of popular literature went from one place to another in Spain (and it
is probably destined, at least for the time being, to be a patchy mapping of
the ground), there are two further problems. The term “popular” is an area
of debate as much in Spanish as in other languages, the difficulty arguably
exacerbated by the political weighting that the term pueblo (“the people”)
has come to have. There are two further aspects to the question: to what
degree was the population in Spain through the period in question able to
read? and secondly, in the case of those who were not able to read, how
might they have related to this literature?
Literacy in Spain has been variable according to region, gender, and
whether people lived in cities and towns or in rural areas. The period under
discussion is no exception to this. A recent overview of literacy in Spain
11
Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino, Historia de los catálogos de librería españoles
(1661–1840): Estudio bibliográfico (Madrid: Montero, 1966); Pedro Rueda and
Lluís Agustí (eds), La publicidad del libro en el mundo hispánico (siglos XVII–
XX): Los catálogos de venta de libreros y editores (Barcelona: Calambur, 2016).
12
See Juan Gomis and Antonio Serrano, “Una aproximación comparada a la imprenta
popular del siglo XVIII en España y Gran Bretaña: Agustín Laborda y Cluer
Dicey”, Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo, 24 (2018), 303–26. Laborda’s
catalogue is reproduced by Jaime Moll, “Catálogo de pliegos sueltos de la
imprenta de Agustín Laborda y Campo”, Cuadernos de bibliofilia, 8 (1981–82),
57–66 http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/un-catalogo-de-pliegos-sueltos-de-la-
imprenta-de-agustin-laborda-y-campo/.
13
Gomis, Menudencias de imprenta, p. 141, and more generally pp. 299–490. One
line of investigation open to us is to run the information about individual printers
not only against the overall profile of printing that can be derived from a major
digital catalogue (see below) but also against the data on printers in Alison
Sinclair, Madrid Newspapers 1661–1870: A Computerized Handbook (Leeds:
Maney and Son, 1984).
Chapter Two12
through the nineteenth century sets the question in a European context and
also discusses the limits of “city” and “country” as terms.14
In addition,
there are various snapshots of literacy and its forms in Spain. The 1860
census revealed a population of which 80 per cent were illiterate.15
The
study by Gómez Bravo of prison populations in the nineteenth century
(incarceration proved a good source for written records) found that by
1885 some 46 per cent of that specific population could neither read nor
write.16
While there was an evident contrast in terms of literacy between
rural and urban populations, there were also marked differences between
north and south.17
In many cases references in records to literacy will have meant not
“reading” in the sense of “reading books” or “reading items of literature”
but rather the competence to sign a contract or to make out words in a
simple manner. This limits the extent of a “fully reading” population. But
14
Rafael Barquín, Pedro Pérez, and Basilio Sanz, Literacy in Spain in the 19th
Century: An Econometric Analysis, Asociación Española de Historia Económica,
Documentos de trabajo, July 2016 [ISSN 2174-4912, consulted 19 June 2018]. See
also Jacques Soubeyroux, “La alfabetización en la España del siglo XVIII”,
Historia de la educación, 14–15 (1995–96), 199–233; Jacques Soubeyroux,
“L’alphabétisation dans l’Espagne moderne: Bilan et perspectives de recherche”,
Bulletin Hispanique, 100.2 (1998), 231–54; Jaime Reis, “Economic Growth,
Human Capital Formation and Consumption in Western Europe before 1800”, in
Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-being in Asia and Europe,
ed. Robert C. Allen, Tommy Bengtsson, and Martin Dribe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 195–225; Carlo Cipolla, Literacy and Development in
the West (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
15
Mercedes Vilanova and Xavier Moreno Juliá, Atlas de la evolución de
analfabetismo en España de 1887a 1871 (Madrid: Centro de Publicaciones del
Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, 1992), p. 62. For a full discussion of the 1860
census in Spain, see Vicente Gozálvez Pérez and Gabino Martín-Serrano
Rodríguez, “Spain’s Population Census in 1860: Its Methodological Problems –
The Introduction of Social Variables to the Censuses”, Boletín de la Asociación de
Geógrafos Españoles, 70 (2016), 515–20. For further discussion, see Alison
Sinclair, Trafficking Knowledge in Twentieth-Century Spain: Centres of Exchange
and Cultural Imaginaries (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009), p. 140. On
regional variation, see Jean-François Botrel, Libros y lectores en la España del
siglo XX (Rennes: Jean-François Botrel, 2008), for an overview of how the
situation evolved into the early twentieth century.
16
Gutmaro Gómez Bravo, Crimen y castigo: Cárceles, justicia y violencia en la
España del siglo XIX (Madrid: Catarata, 2005), p. 222.
17
Sinclair, Trafficking Knowledge, p. 140; Botrel, Libros y lectores, p. 11; Adrian
Shubert, A Social History of Modern Spain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp.
145–53.
Popular Literature in Spain 13
it still leaves the question of how a population that was not literate in the
modern sense of the word might have related to the popular literature
made available to it. It is one thing to talk of the ability to read, another to
think of how the illiterate exist in relation to a literate world. Botrel argues
for the recognition of a relationship between the illiterate and the
surrounding context of a written culture, given that written culture is
multifaceted and not limited to a pure form such as books or newspapers.
Those who lived – indeed, those who now live – in a world of public
announcements, advertisements, and other forms of communication will
have had to find a way to navigate through information to which they did
not have direct access.18
The Mediation and Activity of Printers
Others in this volume rightly insist on the importance of mediation
between popular literature and its consumers. The prime players in
mediation have been the printers, who at least in the case of Spain outstrip
editors or publishers in importance for the transmission of popular
literature to readers (and listeners) via the printed word. Data about
printers allow us to dig deep into the history of this literature, providing
two types of information: what was published when and where, and (in
some cases) the amount of material produced. Our information about
printers of pliegos sueltos comes primarily from the colophons of items
printed, but they are not always complete. At times there is no date of
printing, at times no place of publication. In contrast, at times there is
almost more information than one would wish. A mid-eighteenth-century
suelto on the infamous doings of Pedro Vázquez and his brothers informs
the reader or purchaser that it could be found “En la imprenta de Francisco
Xavier Garcia, se hallarà en la Lonja de papel de Andrès de Sotos, mas
abaxo de la Porteria de San Martin” (“In the printing shop of Francisco
Xavier Garcia, to be found in the Andrès de Sotos Paper Market, below St
Martin’s Gate”).19
Some individual sueltos printed on their last page details
18
Jean-François Botrel, “Los analfabetos y la cultura escrita (España, siglo XIX)”,
in Culturas del escrito en el mundo occidental: Del Renacimiento a la
contemporaneidad, ed. Antonio Castillo Gómez (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez,
2015), pp. 251–67.
19
Nuevo y curioso romance donde se da cuenta de la vida, prision y muerte de
siete hermanos vandoleros y en que se refieren las grandes crueldades, insultos,
muertes y robos que hizo Andrès Vazquez y sus hermanos como lo verà el curioso
letor [. . .] (en la imprenta de Francisco Xavier Garcia, se hallarà en la Lonja de
Chapter Two14
of other related material produced by the same printer, as in the case of El
parto del gallego.20
The information available from printers’ colophons is one way in
which details about production activity can be studied. The law also offers
a way in which we can track activity. One might imagine that having
literatura de cordel made available through blind street sellers was a less
than official channel, but that is not the case. Pura Fernández has studied
the relationship between the law and blind street sellers, and the discussion
of how venta ambulante was regulated by (primarily local) legislation
reveals a public awareness of a market that was mobile and marginal but
clearly visible.21
Gomis has examined disputes between the hermandad de
ciegos (“brotherhood of beggars”) in eighteenth-century Valencia and
other would-be purveyors of the sueltos that they sold, giving us access to
details of production as well as an insight into early (and perhaps
unexpected) levels of trade unionism in this field.22
Collecting, Stewardship, and Selection:
Questions of Ownership and Attitude
A prime question for those who work on popular print culture is that of
how the items studied came to be in the collections in which they are
currently found. The nature of this material is such that it has traditionally
evaded the blanket collection that would apply to “serious” items. Disparate,
papel de Andrès de Sotos, mas abaxo de la Porteria de San Martin, con licencia en
Madrid, 1761) [London, British Library, T.1957.(13.)].
20
El parto del gallego (Barcelona: en casa Juan Llorens, calle de la Palma de Sta.
Catalina, 1858) [London, British Library, 11450.f.27.(66.)]. In this case, some of
the material referred to constitutes popularized domestic information.
21
Pura Fernández, “El estatuto legal del romance de ciego en el siglo XIX: A
vueltas con la licitud moral de la literatura popular”, in Palabras para el pueblo,
ed. Luis Díaz G. Viana, vol. 1, Aproximación general a la literatura de cordel
(Madrid: CSIC, 2000), pp. 71–120.
22
Gomis, Menudencias de imprenta, pp. 275–380. Here Gomis follows the line of
discussion advanced by Botrel in his work on the hermandad de ciegos de Madrid
(Brotherhood of the Blind in Madrid), where the blind are seen as fundamentally
supporting state power of the time. See Jean-François Botrel, Libros, prensa y
lectura en la España del siglo XIX (Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez,
1993). Gomis’s one reservation is that, even if in the eighteenth century the
monarchy granted to some brotherhoods of the blind the right to sell pliegos, that
does not mean that the blind were necessarily always submissive mouthpieces for
official propaganda. See also Fernández, “El estatuto legal del romance de ciego en
el siglo XIX”.
Popular Literature in Spain 15
fragile, and fragmented, these brief pieces of literature originally sold on
the street are known for their ephemeral nature. What we have is what has
(generally) been collected by individuals rather than institutions, so the
matter of provenance – indeed their passage through the book trade to
library or archival collections – becomes of interest. Survival is clearly
variable.23
Subsequent to the initial purchase others may have perused and
interpreted the original purchases and they may have been considered
“unworthy” forms of literature. An example is the relegation to the Tower
of Cambridge University Library of items that fell under copyright and
were therefore automatically lodged with the library but that were not
thought suitable material for an academic library. These items, the oldest
of which date from 1710 and the most recent from the early twenty-first
century, were catalogued only in 2014.
This “unworthy” or “less than official” status has been a part of the
history of popular literature in Spain, and here we enter the arena where
the collecting and understanding of the genre has become political. Certain
collections were acclaimed as part of the history of the genre at the same
time as they were appropriated for what was thought to be their status in
relation to the Spanish national “character” or “nature”. Among prominent
Spanish collectors we might single out Cecilia Böhl de Faber (pseudonym
Fernán Caballero), the daughter of German Hispanists, whose balladcollecting
activity dates back to 1819.24
The two thousand romances
(ballads) collected by Agustín Durán and published in 1851 represent the
most substantial reprinting of a significant body of popular material.25
It is here that we enter, in the words of Jordana Mendelson, “contested
territory”.26
Here, too, it is enlightening to turn to the landmark study by
Caro Baroja, produced towards the end of the Franco years, which is not a
23
On the survival of early material, see Alexander S. Wilkinson, “Bum Fodder and
Kindling: Cheap Print in Renaissance Spain”, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 90
(2013), 871–93 (pp. 881–85). I am extremely indebted to him for information both
within and outwith this article.
24
Carmen de la Vega de la Muela, “Fernán Caballero, pionera en la recolección
del romancero de tradición oral moderna”, Revista de humanidades, 19 (2012)
http://www.revistadehumanidades.com/articulos/28-fernan-caballero-pionera-en-la
-recoleccion-del-romancero-de-tradicion-oral-moderna.
25
Agustín Durán, Romancero general o colección de romances castellanos
anteriores al siglo XVIII (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1851).
26
Jordana Mendelson, “Contested Territory: The Politics of Geography in Luis
Buñuel’s Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan”, Locus Amoenus [Universitat Autónoma de
Barcelona], 2 (1996), 229–42. The discussion of Las Hurdes as a region
appropriated for political meaning by others is apposite to the interpretation of
popular literature, albeit an extreme case.
Chapter Two16
collection or a recopying of material but an assessment and an interpretation.
The following features are of note. First, the study is the work of an
anthropologist intent upon understanding the meaning of objects in the
widest possible cultural and social framework. Secondly, it is largely
based upon the rich collection of pliegos sueltos amassed by his uncle, the
twentieth-century novelist Pío Baroja. This was supplemented by a
collection of a little under five hundred items belonging to Gerónimo
Fuenmayor y La Fuente, but there was little consultation of what is
referred to as a substantial holding of pliegos sueltos in the Biblioteca
Nacional in Madrid.27
Lastly, the study is marked by an ongoing critical
reappraisal of the work of others in the field at the same time as it reveals
at every step the warm enthusiasm with which Caro Baroja approached his
subject matter. Contrasting with some of his predecessors who entertained
a critical dislike for various aspects of the material, Caro Baroja embraces
the field wholeheartedly. Consonant with his enthusiasm is his observation
that Durán was “very severe” both with those who wrote romances
vulgares (“common ballads”) and with those who enjoyed them. For
Durán the items of literatura de cordel were “detestable” because they
contained the traces of a civilization that was “degraded”.28
Behind some of this disapproval there is, as Francisco Aguilar Piñal
noted in the introduction to his own collection of popular ballads of the
eighteenth century, a type of class-based difficulty.29
The “degraded” form
of popular poetry (Aguilar Piñal uses the term “plebeian”) found towards
the end of the seventeenth century was something of an embarrassment
because the genre was held to be part of the “national soul” – an idea that
lay behind at least some of the nineteenth-century collections, arguably
influenced at least in part by ideas about the Volk from German
Romanticism. If the poetry was not as good as its elite supporters would
have wished, or if its supposed social origins were less than ideal, it was
difficult to take it on without reservations.30
27
Caro Baroja, Ensayo sobre la literatura de cordel, p. 50.
28
Luis Díaz G. Viana, “Se venden palabras: Los pliegos de cordel como medio de
transmisión cultural”, in Palabras para el pueblo, ed. Luis Díaz G. Viana, vol. 1,
Aproximación general a la literatura de cordel (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), pp. 15–38
(p. 16).
29
Francisco Aguilar Piñal, Romancero popular del siglo XVIII (Madrid: CSIC,
1972), p. xiii.
30
See Viana, ‘Se venden palabras’, p. 16 ff., for a full discussion of the difficulties
posed by collections of popular literature and their conflicts with various agendas.
For background, see Derek Flitter, Spanish Romanticism and the Uses of History:
Popular Literature in Spain 17
A somewhat kinder approach to the material so spurned by some of its
collectors would be adopted by Edward Wilson, a specialist in Golden Age
literature, when he announced to an audience in 1984 that he would talk
about “popular” poems, adding that “these poems seem to me to be very
bad” but one should nonetheless pay attention to them in order to acquire a
complete picture and “to see the masterpieces in perspective” – “This
afternoon we shall go slumming.”31
It is relevant that Wilson himself was
a major collector of popular material from which Cambridge University
Library has benefited.
Pliegos sueltos and aleluyas: Show and Tell
Pliegos sueltos and aleluyas carry images as a fundamental part of their
communication but the nature of the images is different because of the
different formats of the two genres. The pliego suelto, as noted above, was
a folded piece of paper. The terminology therefore refers to the physical
nature of the object and not to its subject matter. But the other prime
feature of the suelto is the use of images as well as text. Normally,
illustration took the form of a single image, or a range of images, on the
first page. At times a suelto might be in two parts with a second image
used to head the second part, but such instances are relatively rare. The
norm is a visually striking but often artistically crude image which, in
combination with a long written title, full of promises of excitement in the
tale to be told, provides an instant prompt to the audience either to buy or
to linger and listen to a full recitation.32
This format was used from the
earliest examples of the suelto through to the twentieth century, although
more modern publications often dispense with the visual appeal to the
purchaser or reader.
The images used in sueltos were originally woodcuts, and if calculated
as part of the basic cost of a publication the illustration represented, then
Ideology and the Historical Imagination (London: Legenda, 2006); also the full
account and references in Casas-Delgado, “Ecos de modernidad”, pp. 27–57.
31
Edward M. Wilson and Kathleen Kish, ‘“Some Spanish Dick Turpins, or Bad
Men in Bad Ballads”, Hispanic Review, 52 (1984), 141–62 (p. 141).
32
On excitement in the sueltos, see Jean-François Botrel, El sensacionalismo en la
era premediática”, in Sensacionalismo y amarillismo en la historia de la
comunicación, ed. Celso Almuiña Fernández, Ricardo Martín de la Guardia, and
José Vidal Pelaz López (Madrid: Editorial Fragua, 2016), pp. 25–37; Alison
Sinclair, Against Seemliness: Excess and Limitations in Popular Literature”, in
Writing Wrongdoing, ed. Alison Sinclair and Samuel Llano (Woodbridge: Boydell
and Brewer, 2017), pp. 107–23.
Chapter Two18
as now, a major investment. As a result we find, particularly with earlier
items, some duplication of material. One imagines a text coming into a
printer’s shop and the craftsman in charge of putting the item together
looking at a range of figures and emblems to see which might be most
suitable. A slightly more enterprising approach was to put together two
images, which did not necessarily have the same proportions. The
frequently reproduced story of Rosaura de Trujillo illustrates this well.33
A
feature of sueltos that were so popular that they were printed many times
over is that sometimes they carried images from an earlier period, such as
the eighteenth century, while actually appearing in the nineteenth century.
This happens with various sueltos that commemorated the lives and deaths
of famous bandits, so those executed in the late eighteenth century were
still having their stories, with the accompanying account of their
executions, circulated well into the following century.34
Later, the images
would be made by engraving which allowed them to be more subtle. There
are some cases where it is not possible to tell whether the image is a
woodcut or an engraving, but when images are more akin to the
illustrations in novels and a clear narrative is conveyed the mode of
production is probably the more sophisticated one.35
33
See Alison Sinclair, “Historias de dos desgraciadas: Estereotipos de la culpa en
la literatura popular española de los siglos XVIII y XIX”, in Gentes de mal vivir:
Ejemplaridad e infamia en el siglo XVIII, ed. Juan Gomis and Alison Sinclair,
Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo, 22 (2016), 57–78 (pp. 68–71).
34
For a discussion of some of these images and their re-publication, see Sinclair,
“Historias de dos desgraciadas”; Alison Sinclair, “Que se le eche la culpa a la
criada: Historias de ejemplaridad y culpabilidad en la literatura popular española
de los siglos XVIII y XIX”, in Mujeres a contraluz: Criadas en la literatura
española de los siglos XVIII y XIX, ed. Eva María Flores Ruiz, Cuadernos de
Ilustración y Romanticismo, 20 (2014), 75–91. For the many versions of Diego
Corrientes, see Jean-François Botrel, “Diego Corrientes ou le bandit généreux:
Fonction et fonctionnement d’un mythe”, in Culturas populares: Diferencias,
divergencias, conflictos, Actas del Coloquio celebrado en la Casa de Velázquez,
los días 30 de noviembre y 1–2 diciembre de 1983, ed. Yves-René Fonquerne and
Alfonso Esteban (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1986), pp. 241–66.
35
Examples of differences between crude woodcuts and more sophisticated
illustrations can be seen in Sinclair, “Que se le eche la culpa a la criada”, and
Sinclair, “Historias de dos desgraciadas”. The references to sueltos in these articles
are to items digitized by the “Wrongdoing in Spain, 1800–1936” project. For
further examples and discussion, see Henry Ettinghausen, “The Illustrated Spanish
News: Text and Image in the Seventeenth-Century Press”, in Art and Literature in
Spain, 1600–1800: Studies in Honour of Nigel Glendinning, ed. Charles Davis and
Paul Julian Smith (London: Tamesis, 1993), pp. 117–33. For a discussion of
illustration in early religious publications, see Pierre Civil, “Iconografía popular en