A handful of truly nasty songs appear in _Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period_, all of which appeared between about 1835 and 1840.

Most, however, involve exuberant, humorously erotic adventures and predicaments - certainly "unprintable" in quantity until recent years but practically quaint by today's publishing standards.

As the price of the songsters was quite high, one assumes that their principal readership (and the principal patrons of the "coal-hole" drinking clubs where the songs were evidently popularized), was made up of well-to-do young rakes rather than the average thrill-seeking youths of the period.

I doubt that more than a half dozen of the hundreds of songs have been collected since their appearance in the 1830s. Their style is more broadside/music-hall than it is "folk."