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This essay looks at comments made by scholars on the quality of execution, range of possible meaning, and meaningfulness of chapbook woodcuts, primarily those that appeared on their title-pages, and weighs these comments against a loosely defined group of Scottish chapbooks, to consider the overall fairness and applicability of the criticisms made. In so doing, the paper tries to elucidate some of the theoretical issues involved.1
It is tempting to assume that chapbooks and other cheap print in Britain offered a common visual language at the period in question, and that readers derived a common understanding of either the same meaning from the images, or at least an appreciation of the functions that they performed on the various title-pages. But as far as chapbooks are concerned, such an assumption remains exactly that: any such assertion has yet to be properly examined. Moreover, this paper has limited aims in that any comments and provisional conclusions are not aimed at other forms of cheap print.
The Scottish chapbooks referred to in this paper show levels of similarity and elements of coherence. They are examples from a much larger and loosely grouped set of chapbooks that can be distinguished temporally (the period, roughly 1770s to the early 1830s is widely accepted as representing the decades of highest production), geographically, and, crucially, also in terms of content, both verbal and visual. Most of the chapbooks under immediate consideration were printed in Edinburgh or the towns and cities in, bordering, or near the Central Belt of Scotland (e.g. Glasgow, Stirling, Falkirk, Paisley).2 Considerations of place of printing are clearly very important, and such matters can feed into questions regarding subsequent distribution, prompting questions of where the readership was to be found.3 But what links these chapbooks just as firmly as any other criterion, are the elements of content and idiom. It is on Scottish garlands (song chapbooks) that this paper has its main focus, because they (along with many song chapbooks printed elsewhere in Britain) very frequently exhibit a single woodcut-on the title-page. This stands them as somewhat distinct from chapbook histories and other narrative tales that often have several woodcuts embedded within the main text. With the very extensive number of songs that appeared only in Scottish chapbook form,...