victorian song

On comparing songs written during the Victorian era: one by Bantock called "The organ-grinder and his monkey," and a song by Stanford called "The monkey's carol," Stephen Banfield writes:
“On the subject of organ-grinders [Stanford’s ballad] shows an attitude of indifference where Bantock’s social conscience produces artistically disastrous sentimentality.”

Banfield continues:

"The ballad twilight-land is in truth enormous; the style is sensed in some of the songs of Elgar and Somervell (e.g. 'Sweet and low'), Gurney juvenilia ('I would my songs were roses', 'Dearest, when I am dead'), Holst's self-styled 'early horrors' (the worst of the published ones being 'Dewy roses'), the whole of Graham Peel's song output....Cyril Scott, who stigmatised the ballad concert as 'an institution, the unmentionable tastelessness of which no country in the world but England would tolerate...." (Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century, Vol. 1-2. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985.)