Narrative

10. Pitts, alongside other downmarket publishers such as the better-known James Catnach, made literature available to the working classes of London in the first half of the nineteenth century. The street ballads published at Seven Dials in the early-nineteenth century provided a connection to the rural past and enabled a transition to the industrial present, contributing to literacy, social awareness, upward mobility, and modernization.

David Buchanan, University of Alberta, 2013