Welcome to the website for the Romantic National Song Network! This network has been funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh with kind support from The British Library, The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and the Society for Musicology in Ireland. It has been based within The Centre for Robert Burns Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow from spring 2017 until summer 2019. We are most grateful for the help of Brian Aitken, our Digital Humanities Research Officer, for all his help with this website.

On this site you will find information about National songs as performed and published across the four nations of British Isles during the period 1750-1850.

You can find out about our network members and about our meetings and events. In order to bring the sound worlds of these songs to life, we have created a number of ‘biographies’ of popular songs from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as several newly created ‘British’ songs of the time. We would encourage you to work through our dynamic, multi-media ‘song stories’ which lead you through the creation, performance and reception of a selection of popular national songs of the period. We have also invited a number of researchers and performers to tell us more about their current work on British song culture in a series of blog posts. You can watch our concert of British National Songs performed by young singers from across the British Isles and we have provided useful reading lists and links to complimentary online resources.

If you have comments or queries then please don’t hesitate to contact us.