2. ‘The Assemblage of every female Folly’: Lavinia Fenton, Kitty Clive, and the Genesis of Ballad Opera

8. ‘The Arethusa’: Slip Songs and the Mainstream Canon

“…Finally, they may have been men, but as recent scholarship has underlined, the songs often owed their initial success to the performances and celebrity of female singers, a fact that became unavoidable during the first flush of ballad opera and that remained the case well into the nineteenth century, when Catherine Stephens, Eliza Vestris, and many others became household names. 34 None of which is to try and retrofit a progressive narrative on to what was clearly a deeply patriarchal society, a fact reinforced by the series of father and son songwriters, including not only Arne and Carey but also the Linleys and, if the writers of the words are taken into account, the Arnolds and Dibdins too. There are subtleties to be teased out and the cosmopolitan nature of 'English' song should certainly be highlighted, but this was essentially a clubbable metropolitan culture of relative (if not absolute) privilege which became, if only through the work of the slip song press, perhaps the single most significant cultural force of the century.…”