(Lawyers — Broadside Ballads) | Two rare eighteenth-century ballads featuring lawyers who experience the joys or perils of love, printed by John and Thomas Fleet

(Lawyers — Broadside Ballads)

The Lawyer’s Promotion. To an excellent new Tune [and] The Perjur’d Female Lover: or, The London Lawyer’s Son. Boston: Sold at the Bible and Heart, in Cornhill, [Thomas Fleet Jr. and John Fleet, between 1780 and 1797]

Two broadside ballads (both 337 x 210 mm, to sight). Type printed in three columns, with woodcut illustration at upper left adjacent to the title, the “Lawyer’s Promotion” broadside with the columns divided by lines of type ornaments; both with old folds, light creasing, short tears and small chips at edges, the “Lawyer’s Promotion” with a small loss in the right column of text, and a few tiny holes at the intersections of the folds, and with one dot of ink in the margin, the “Perjur’d Female Lover” with pale spotting, split along the central vertical fold with small losses at the points where the folds intersect with losses to about a dozen letters, a few wormholes in the margins. Framed, not examined out of frames.

A pair of late eighteenth century broadside ballads published by Thomas Jr. and John Fleet on Cornhill in Boston. They are both prime examples of early America popular printing—oftentimes cheaply printed sheets of street literature featuring amusing tawdry stories, slapdash printing, and woodcut illustrations drawn from the printer’s stock.

Both ballads tell colorful stories about the joys and perils of love. In the Lawyer’s Promotion, a lawyer marries a woman who loves him without ever seeing her face, and is rewarded for his blind faith with her beauty and vast fortune, or, in other words, “Beauty, Honour, Joy and Treasure | a Rich Golden Stream of Pleasure.” In The Perjur’d Female Lover, a lawyer’s son is in love with a woman who breaks her promise to be his bride, jilting him for a richer man. He dies of a broken heart, and his ghost haunts her until, “she fell sick and soon she dy’d | and as she breath’d her last she cry’d…. farewell to all my weeping friends | I’m going to answer for my sins.”

Neither broadside appears in the AAS catalog. The Lawyer’s Promotion is in two institutional collections (Brown and Harvard Law) per WorldCat. This Fleet edition of the Perjur’d Female Lover is apparently unrecorded, however AAS’s catalog lists three other versions of it, one printed in New-London, one printed by Leonard Deming in Boston, and one without an imprint. AAS’s Isiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project lists a third ballad by the Fleets, also featuring a lawyer, titled A Lawyer Outwitted (Boston: Fleet, 1731).