have sometimes minimised its more robust and rowdy features. All that we can do is bear the warning in mind. We need more studies of the social attitudes of criminals, of soldiers and sailors, of tavern life; and we should look at the evidence, not with a moralising eye (“Christ’s poor” were not always pretty), but with an eye for Brechtian values—the fatalism, the irony in the face of Establishment homilies, the tenacity of self-preservation. And we must also remember the “underground” of the ballad-singer and the fair-ground which handed on traditions to the 19th century (to the music-hall,
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