Claribel-ware: Ballads, Royalties, and the Birth of the Music Industry in 1860s Britain

By Whitney Thompson, Linktree

“It would be a curious though a humiliating study,” begins a January 1867 article in the music periodical The Orchestra, “to speculate to what extent the future historian of art in Great Britain (…) will ascribe the decline of song music to the influence of the Royalty system.” Although the “royalty system” referred to here was different from today’s complex system of music royalties, it still fundamentally involved paying musicians for their creative labors. This incursion of business into the world of art was horrifying for many Victorian music critics, who railed against corrupting influences on the supposed “purity” of art. Blame for this corruption was pinned on a select few. Case in point, the title of that Orchestra article:

 “ROYALTIES AND ‘CLARIBEL.’”¹

“Claribel” was the pseudonym of Charlotte Alington Barnard, a Lincolnshire native. She published her first crop of songs under her Tennyson-inspired alter ego in spring 1859, including her first major hit “Janet’s Choice.” By 1867, she had about 75 published songs to her name, many of which had seen multiple print runs.² She was far from the only female songwriter active in the 1860s – Virginia Gabriel, Dolores (real name Ellen Dickson), Maria Lindsay, and Elizabeth Philp were common sights alongside Claribel in publishers’ advertisements –  but she was a unique vanguard of many massive changes in the music industry in 1860s England, changes that prefigured the music industry as we know it today.

Photograph of Claribel, undated, Westmorland Album at the Getty Institute

The music industry was already undergoing major shifts by the time Claribel came on the scene, all of which set her up for commercial success:

Exclusive contracts. In the mid-1800s, it was common for composers to publish their songs with multiple firms. However, some music publishers took chances on time-bound exclusive contracts with songwriters – and in the late 1850s, Maria Lindsay became the first female songwriter to have an exclusive contract, with Robert Cocks and Co.³

Royalties. As mentioned previously, the royalty system in mid-Victorian England was different from anything seen today. When it first appeared in the 1850s, it looked more like commissions, because it involved paying singers instead of composers or lyricists.⁴ A prominent singer would agree to “introduce” a new song, in exchange for some form of payment. Sometimes this was a lump sum,⁵ but other times, a singer’s initials (their “royalty signature”) would appear on a sheet music cover, meaning they would receive some small percentage of the gross sales of that particular song. Composers, meanwhile, usually had to outright sell their copyrights to publishers, so they wouldn’t see a penny if their song became a hit.

Publisher-produced concerts. Chappell & Co. became the first music publisher to venture into the business of organizing public concerts in 1859, shortly after the opening of St. James’s Hall in Piccadilly, in which they had part ownership. Their Monday Popular Concerts aimed to bring middle-class London audiences classical music that they would never have heard before.⁶

Claribel’s career involved all these business innovations, often taken to new levels. The majority of her songs were published by Boosey and Sons, later Boosey and Co. Even before John Boosey (head of the firm) offered her an exclusive £300-a-year contract as of 1863,⁷ he had bought the copyrights to songs Claribel had previously published with other firms and republished them himself. Boosey was also likely the first music publisher in England to extend royalties to composers as well as to singers,⁸ and Claribel was the first composer on his roster to receive royalties.⁹ Boosey also seems to have been the second music publisher to organize public concerts under his business’s auspices. He and Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, a famed contralto and Claribel’s other great champion, jointly dreamed up what would eventually be called the London Ballad Concerts.¹⁰ The series formally began in 1867 at St. James’s Hall, and the last confirmed ballad concert took place in 1933.¹¹

As beloved as Claribel’s songs generally were by the public, though, they had some vicious detractors in the musical press. This was in part because of the business strategies surrounding them, but also because they were mostly “sentimental” or “drawing-room” ballads, not originally intended for public entertainment. Henry Fothergill Chorley, longtime music critic for The Athenaeum, referred to the whole sentimental-ballad genre as “Claribel-ware,”¹² an epithet subsequently taken up con brio by outlets like The Orchestra. The detractors ultimately won, in a way. When Claribel died of typhoid fever in January 1869, her legacy was fiercely debated in the musical press, and even the most balanced assessment of her career could only damn her with faint praise.¹³

Today, a scant few of Claribel’s hundred-plus songs have any cultural presence, and the most recognizable of them – the faux-Irish ballad “Come Back to Erin” –is maybe best known for being one of Michigan J. Frog’s songs from the Looney Tunes short One Froggy Evening. But contrary to what that unknown Orchestra writer moaned about back in 1867, music royalties and the creative labor they symbolized were meant to stay. Claribel deserves a similar level of recognition and credit.

1. “Royalties and ‘Claribel’,” The Orchestra, January 12, 1867.
2. Joyce Andrews notes that Claribel’s first major hit, “Janet’s Choice,” was published in early 1859 and by 1865 had reached its 20th edition. See “A Tale of Two Charlottes: Historical British Women Song Composers,” IAWM Journal: International Alliance for Women in Music 18, no. 2 (2012): 6
3. Derek B. Scott, The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2001), “Chapter 3: The Rise of the Woman Ballad Composer.” Viewable here: https://victorianweb.org/mt/dbscott/3.html 
4. Andrews, “A Tale of Two Charlottes,” 7.
5. A letter from Charlotte Sainton-Dolby to an unknown recipient states that “[my] terms will be ten guineas, and I shall be very happy to introduce Miss Gabriel’s songs.” Information via Richard Ford Manuscripts, listing here: http://www.richardfordmanuscripts.co.uk/catalogue/20128 
6. The Monday Popular Concerts,” entry by William Chappell in A Dictionary of Music and Musicians ed. George Grove, 1900.
7.  Andrews, “A Tale of Two Charlottes,” 7.
8. Both Carlene Mair in The Chappell Story and John Boosey’s nephew/adopted son William in Fifty Years of Music relate this bit of information, although I hope to find even more concrete proof.
9. Derek B. Scott, “Barnard [Née Pye], Charlotte Alington,” Oxford Music Online, January 20, 2001, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.02083. 
10. William Boosey, Fifty Years of Music, 15; “The First Ballad Concert,” The Musical World, November 11, 1866.
11. According to the Royal College of Music, which has a vast collection of concert programmes from the London Ballad Concerts: https://www.concertprogrammes.org.uk/html/search/verb/GetRecord/2790/
12. “Concert-Talk,” The Athenaeum, May 19, 1866.
13. “‘Claribel’,” The Musical World, March 13, 1869.