Thomas Ford's Ballads

A facsimile reprint of a collection of ballads first published as broadsheets by Thomas Ford of Chesterfield collated with an introduction by Roy Palmer.

This collection of sheets was first published by Thomas Ford of Chesterfield in the 1830's. Ford's collection provides an intriguing, and possibly unique, glimpse into the songs that the people of Chesterfield were buying and singing at that time. Thomas Ford worked in Chesterfield as a printer, bookseller and stationer. Ford's stock book contains a total of 167 sheets, most of them bearing an identifying number. The ballads are particularly valuable because they are near-complete stock of a particular printer, and because few of them seem to have been preserved elsewhere.