Love in a tub: or The merchant outwitted by a vintner. Shewing, how a vintner in London fell in love with a wine merchants daughter--how they funn'd the old man ...

“Love in a Tub” is another song with a graceful acceptance of defeat. This version includes a prose introduction summarizing the song in a manner similar to that of seventeenth-century ballads, a technique both the early ballad printers and Coverly used, perhaps trying to age the texts for better sales value.[1] The version on another Love in a Tub is the same text without the prose introduction.

Probably originating in Britain, the song appeared in several late eighteenth-century broadsides and garlands (Dicey; Laws N25; Roud #556). It was collected by Frank C. Brown in North Carolina in 1940 with only seventeen verses to the twenty-one in the broadside version. The Brown version offers a useful comparison in changes of archaic words: “vintner” becomes “vendor,” the £3,000 dowry becomes £10,000, but the cooper gets ten guineas in both versions. Verses 5 and 11, and parts of 18 and 19, are missing from the Brown version, and in that latter story, the merchant’s daughter suggests the trick instead of the vintner (Belden and Hudson 234-35).

In a small garland printed by William E. Norman in Hudson, New York, the text appears with an indicated tune, “Gee Ho, Dobbin,” an old song of rather explicit sexual content. For the tune, see The Hobbies.