Fornication with fairies and other imaginary, dead and mythical objects is omnipresent, not only among late Victorians and Edwardians but throughout musical/literary history. It depends on how you interpret it. Present day poet Hugh Lupton performs Tam Lin (and other ballads) in a form translated from and a direct descendant of that of travelling storytellers upon whose words villagers would hang as though enthralled by an episode of EastEnders and join in nonsensical chorus lines which everybody knew (like Ma Ba And The Lily Ba) which served to move on the tale and involve everybody.

As for Sharp and poverty, he collected When Fishes Fly (No My Love Not I) from Lucy White in Hambridge in 1904. This gives a very unsentimenatal account of he fate awaiting any young woman who stepped outside of the socially accepted moral code of the day. This is in parallel of musical theatre songs of that era which treated the subject with levity, but dealt with it nonetheless.

Rural poverty in song is expressed in first person narratives such as Thresherman (Coppers/Sussex) and On Christmas Day (RVW/Herefordshire) a dire warning of what will befall the poor farmworker who works when he can't afford not to). I won't bother to start on examples of urban poverty expressed in song. Failing even to scratch the surface and examine what is actually there and relying on stereotypical, stagey-bumpkin ditties leads to nonsensical conclusions.