“The snatch of a song that is sung”: Dollie Radford’s Lyrics of Modernity

Dollie Radford is today remembered for her lyrics of the 1890s, when she is remembered at all. However, this paper will show that she remained active in the twentieth century, publishing poems in newspapers and periodicals throughout the 1910s. In these lyrics, Radford addresses immediate issues such as urban crime, suffrage, and the First World War, using the same lyrical forms that she employed in her earlier work. Rather than concluding that Radford simply failed to adapt to modernity, I will propose that Radford’s twentieth-century lyrics reflect her socialist convictions, weaving the personal and political together through the use of shared, song-like rhythms, in the process adapting her lyric aestheticism to the conditions of modernity.