Glasgow poet Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) is principally remembered for his stirring patriotic lyrics on contemporary issues, mostly written in the early 1800s. This powerful text, “The Soldier’s Dream,” is one of his best, and was set to music by English composer Thomas Attwood (1765-1838) and also by English emigrés to America, Benjamin Carr (1768-1831) and James Hewitt (1770-1827) (Wolfe, Secular Music #331-32, #9367, 195-99, #1656, #3780). The lyrics were also printed in the New York Spectator on August 21, 1805, and in the Boston Columbian Centinel on June 24, 1812. The text appeared in fifteen songsters between 1807 and 1820 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters). A traditional version was printed by Frank Kidson in 1893 (3:167-68).
The poem is remarkably modern in its expression—the dream device is handled without superstitious overtones and the soldier’s wife and child are introduced with caring sentiment, not maudlin sentimentality. According to J. Logie Robertson, “Campbell sketched the poem in Bavaria in 1800, and afterward (in 1804) elaborated [it] at Sydenham” (198-99).
The juxtaposition of “The Cabinet of Wonders,” a trivial comic text by Charles Dibdin, with Campbell’s powerful antiwar text points up a common trait of broadside compilers.[1] They will fit any text at hand into the available space and seldom worry too much about the relevance of the texts to each other.
From the last line, this text soon became known as “The Hole in the Ballad,” and it was printed on several slip ballads in the nineteenth century, appearing in thirteen songsters between 1807 and 1818 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters). While this text is a satire of the most superficial kind of cabinet, the concept of a collection of curiosities is a reflection of a strong late eighteenth-century interest in science and the natural world. Travelers returned with crates of treasures and those who did not travel ordered exotic items from the Far East, from India, and all points in between. Galleries were crowded with paintings, sculptures, and artifacts, and the public responded with great interest. Capitalizing on this interest, Charles Willson Peale opened a museum of natural history in Philadelphia in the 1780s, filling his rooms with glass cabinets loaded with curious and unusual objects, and was quite successful attracting patrons. Isaiah Thomas also included a cabinet of curiosities in the library of the American Antiquarian Society when it was founded.
