Just to add;

1) although some have looked for it, no communication from Huxtable seems to have survived; this does not necessarily mean much, because other documents that we know Lloyd actually possessed have also not survived. But Paul Adams told me in an email some time ago that he never succeeded in tracking Huxtable down, though he has lived for a long long time in the same city (Workington) where Huxtable was reported by Lloyd to have lived.

2) The Anderson book is a devil to get ahold of in the US, though it was popular and went through many printings in Northern England and Scotland in the nineteenth century. I used Inter-library Loan to get a copy for a paper I've written on Lloyd. One important thing to mention is that Anderson was the author, not the collector, of "Ballads in the Cumberland Dialect." In the preface he is very specific about the fact that he wrote the ballads, and that many of the ballads were written to refer to real people that he knew. He did sometimes also collect songs, and some printings featured a supplementary section of ballads he collected, but "Jenny's Complaint" is always in the section of original poetry. Although a couple of Anderson's original ballads did enter oral tradition, I don't think any survived as late as the 1950s--but I'd have to check the relevant article, which is at home.

3) What really points to something fishy is that Lloyd knew the Anderson version (he mentions it in his note), yet allows the reader to believe that Anderson collected rather than wrote it (he says "A version of this ballad appears in R. Anderson's Ballads in the Cumberland Dialect," not "the original version.") It's also notable that the song never appeared on a broadside or in a chapbook, and was never collected from oral tradition, Indeed was never apparently published at all without Anderson's name on it, until Lloyd's book. So, if Huxtable had simply sent Lloyd a manuscript or a printed copy, how would Lloyd know there was a version in Anderson's book--which was not a folksong book and therefore unlikely to be consulted?

A few possibilities:

1) Huxtable simply sent Lloyd Anderson's poem and said "I got this from Anderson's book"

or

2) Lloyd saw the poem in Anderson's book, fancied it, fiddled with it, liked the result, and wanted to put it in the book. Since it was originally not industrial and not a folksong, to do so he'd have to "collect" it from someone, and so he ascribed it to Huxtable.


In either case, Lloyd must have re-worked the ballad from Anderson's original.

3) Huxtable did the adaptation and sent it to Lloyd, acknowledging Anderson as a source. Lloyd then simply concealed Huxtable's and Anderson's roles in writing the song and pretended it was a folksong.

Any of these options is dodgy practice for a folklorist, but it remains a great song. Interestingly, I don't find, as Roy Palmer does, that "I'se Leetin'" fits badly in the song. What jars on me is

"As I walked ower the stubble fields--
Below it runs the seam--
I thought of Jimmy hewing there,
But it was all a dream."

The sort of parenthetical structure, involving a ninety degree turn in which the seam is suddenly inserted and the field deserted, is odd for folksong. It comes about because Lloyd had to take one of Anderson's stanzas which begins "As I walked ower the stubble fields" and somehow make it apply to a collier.

Also, the idea that the soldiers hve taken Jimmy far, far away (which is in the first stanza) is incompatible with the idea that he is always talking about the wars and making Jenny cringe, then joking with her, which is in stanza three. This came about because Lloyd eliminated a third party named Nicol, who in Anderson's original talks about the wars after Jemmy has already left. By giving Nicol's role to Jemmy, Lloyd creates what in film would be called an error in continuity: Jemmy is gone to the wars, but still talks to Jenny about them!

One funny thing: Sedley calls Anderson's version of Jenny's Complaint a "mostly garbled text!" Somehow he missed the fact that it was the original! As I've tried to show above, it's really only garbled if you take the Lloyd text as standard. If you look at it objectively, Lloyd's is prettier but Anderson's makes more sense.