Lot 50: DIBDIN, CHARLES.

COLLECTION OF PRINTED SONGS, OVER A DOZEN SIGNED BY THE COMPOSER ("CDIBDIN"), INCLUDING AN APPARENTLY UNIQUE SOURCE FOR THE SONG 'HOW GOOD AND HOW KIND OF HIS DEAR MAJESTY' FROM "THE OLD WOMAN OF EIGHTY"

COLLECTION OF PRINTED SONGS, OVER A DOZEN SIGNED BY THE COMPOSER ("CDIBDIN"), INCLUDING AN APPARENTLY UNIQUE SOURCE FOR THE SONG 'HOW GOOD AND HOW KIND OF HIS DEAR MAJESTY' FROM "THE OLD WOMAN OF EIGHTY"

The celebrated Comic Song Sung by M.^r Munden...at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden in the Character of An Old Woman of Eighty, 2 pages, folio, London: Longman and Broderip, [1782 or later]

together with songs from The Cake House, A Frisk, The Masque in Amphytrion, The Padlock, The Chelsea Pensioner, The Oddities, Britons Strike Home, The New Years Gift, The Fortune Hunters, Liberty Hall, The Waterman, The Quaker, The Deserter, Poor Vulcan, Yo Yea, or The Friendly Tars, Pandora, The Saloon, The Wives Revenged, Clump and Cudden, The Islanders, The Seraglio

over 80 songs in all, various sizes, engraved music, a few songs laid down, some contemporary manuscript annotations, disbound, second half of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, some browning and staining, An Old Woman of Eighty cropped and splitting along folds

LITERATURE

Humphries & Smith, p.216

NOTE

A collection of songs by the prolific and colourful English composer Charles Dibdin (1745-1814). According to TNG, no music is known from Dibdin's Sadler's Wells dialogue The Old Woman of Eighty (1777). Although Dibdin is not named as author on the title of the song from this work, we have traced no other musical play with the same title. The text of the song differs in a number of points from that transmitted in George Hogarth's The Songs of Charles Dibdin (London, 1848). The effectiveness of the song's humorous lyrics, which brilliantly capture, as Hogarth (p.86) observed, 'the tremulous chirrup of doting senility', is infinitely enhanced by the mock-antique, minor-key musical setting.