Well said Jim at 0939.

The 'facile bourgeois bashing' (I'll take Pseudonymous's word that the quote is accurate) referred to by Roud concerns - I suspect - Harker's overriding argument that the very act of song collecting is in itself theft of workers' culture.

It is true that Harker has carried out good research on NE broadsides, and at least arguable that 'Fakesong' was a useful corrective to what had up to that point been a more or less unquestioning acceptance of everything that Sharp wrote. Unfortunately it is flawed in its scholarship (see Chris Bearman's counter-arguments as well as my own opinion) and too agenda-driven to be taken seriously as impartial academic research.