Broadside Ballads (PlanetSlade)

I'm note sure if this counts as folk music or not, but I've just posted a long essay about Victorian London's gallows ballads trade on my website.

These lurid narrative songs were knocked out overnight by the jobbing writers and printers of Seven Dials' notorious slum, and sold for a penny at chaotic public hangings. The songs described the condemned man's crime (usually murder), set out his supposed remorse and warned the (often very drunk) crowd not to follow his example. A highly sensational crime produced an equally popular execution, and in cases like this the associated ballads could shift as many as 2.5m copies. The trade was full of colourful characters like Jemmy Catnach, a printer who went to jail for one ballad claiming a Drury Lane butcher was selling human meat in his sausages, and John Morgan, king of the ballad writers and an archetypal drunken hack.

PlanetSlade has details of all this, plus a selection of the best ballads and the true-crime stories behind them. There's also a gallery of the broadsides themselves (some of which have wonderfully gory art) and a taste of John Morgan's innuendo-laden sex songs. It may give you some pleasure.