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Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) was one of the most popular and influential producers of late Georgian culture. The huge diversity of his work and career defies simple categorization. He was, often at one and the same time, an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian, theatre-manager, journalist, and author of novels, historical works, polemical pamphlets, and guides to musical education. Consequently, he is important to many different fields for often quite dissimilar reasons. This means that a sense of his overall accomplishments—never mind the powerful reverberations of his influence—across numerous areas and in different periods may only truly be appreciated from the multiple perspectives that an interdisciplinary collaboration can offer. The chief aim of this volume is to illuminate the breadth and depth of Dibdin’s impact, and in the process offer fresh insights into previously hidden aspects of late Georgian culture. Dibdin’s importance lies in his ability to make visible the connections between various kinds of cultural production; he provides a model for thinking about late Georgian culture as a system of interconnected parts. This book illustrates the variety of Dibdin’s cultural output as characteristic of late-eighteenth-century entertainment, while also addressing the challenge mounted by specialization in the early nineteenth century. What emerges is not the elimination of miscellany, but rather the establishment of new cultural hierarchies in which a specialized elite culture increasingly defined itself against a continuing and vibrant culture of miscellany.

Focusing on the ballad “Sandman Joe” from Francis Place’s collection of flash ballads remembered from his youth, this article tracks how and where bawdy ballads were performed in London in the 1780s in order to understand better the soundscapes of late eighteenth-century London. Questioning narratives that assume the “civilizing process” begins with the middling sorts and spreads belatedly to the lower orders, attention to bawdy urban ballads makes visible the complex dynamics affecting elite and popular culture in the late eighteenth century and the subsequent desire to affix stable meanings on to urban space.

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