Margaret Hogg née Laidlaw's famous complaint to Scott was, however misplaced. I wrote in my entry on 'Folklore' in The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature (NY 2003): "Her words have been called prophetic, but the resultant decline in living folklore was probably a factor of the same influences that led to the folkloric researches of Scott and others in the first place — awareness that urbanisation and the spread of easily accessible forms of popular entertainment (pleasure gardens, music hall; later radio, cinema, television) were undermining those popular roots on which the uninhibited spread of living folkore depends, and a consequent desire to preserve what could be saved before it vanished entirely. Although the folk forms have turned out tougher than this pessimistic view suggested, it is true that, from the invention of printing onward, every technological and popular artistic development had tended to fix the form. Mrs Hogg, alas, was too late."

~M~