Narrative

2. As industrialization changed the way people lived and the printing press changed the way people communicated, the tradition of oral storytelling began to fade. Collecting ballads in the countryside became common from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the Romantic period, resulting in many upmarket print collections. Many of the best-known poets of the Romantic period, such as William Wordsworth and Walter Scott, imitated the traditional ballad form while making formal and thematic innovations.