“The Children in the Wood” is among the most stable and tenacious of its kind. It was first licensed in 1595 and was printed widely in broadsides, chapbooks, and slip songs, occasionally titled “Babes in the Wood(s)” (Simpson 103-5). It was parodied in The Beggar’s Opera (1728) when Polly used the tune and opening words of the song to gain immediate sympathy from the audience as the victim of abusive relatives. The tune generally known as “Now Ponder Well,” from the opening line of the old ballad, is sometimes confused with “Chevy Chase.” The two tunes scan the same, and texts will fit either.
Perhaps spurred by the beginning of the romantic era, the ballad saw a surge of popularity in print at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first decades of the following century. Not only was the ballad itself printed in a number of forms, but adaptations as “instructive tales” by Richard Johnson and Clara English were also widely printed well into the nineteenth century (Hermit; Porter and Graziano 77-95). The text appeared in two songsters between 1803 and 1805 (R. Keller).
Samuel Arnold’s opera The Children in the Wood (1793), which is based on the ballad, was particularly popular in the early nineteenth century. Its first performance in America came less than a year after its debut in London, and from 1801 to 1815 it enjoyed seventeen recorded performances in Boston alone, and undoubtedly many more for which the bills and announcements have not survived. A high point of the show comes in the final scene. Josephine says “I’ll sing you what I bought of the old blind pedlar who passed by this morning—It’s intitled and called, the Norfolk Tragedy, shewing how a ghost of a murdered babe. . . .” Josephine’s singing brings Walter into a panic, raising the suspense of the finale.
In London the ballad was given only a bass line, following William Shield’s insistence that a simple natural melody should not be accompanied with an artful harmony. In the United States, theatrical performers sang the ballad without accompaniment (Porter, With an Air 70).
