Meg of Wapping

The cut on this broadside illustrates the fifth line in the third verse, “bold Ben who at danger would smile, / ’till his courage a crockadile stopping, / made his breakfast of Ben on the banks of the Nile.” The empire-style garland over the crocodile is a whimsical foil to the grisly action below.

The story of this song, written by Charles Dibdin for The General Election (1796), recalls that of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath—but here the wife is a tavern operator. Wapping was a section of London on the east side of the Thames, a little below the Tower of London, chiefly inhabited by seafaring men and their landlords, wives, and suppliers. The repetition of the line “pull away, pull away, pull away, I say” suggests that this song is a parody of a seaman’s work song.

This particular broadside is interesting. It is one of the few fully dated broadsides in the Thomas collection and the garland over the title and elaborate woodcut suggest that there was a specific market opportunity to which Coverly was appealing. He ordered and used handsome cuts and decorations when he felt they would help sell his broadsides. Certainly the song itself was not necessarily the attraction, unless it was relevant to something going on in Boston in March and early April 1811.

The song had some currency in English slip ballads and songsters in the first half of the nineteenth century and was printed in two songsters between 1799 and 1800 (Roud; R. Keller, Early American Songsters).