English Hymns of the Nineteenth Century brings together for the first time the most popular and widely used English hymns from that period, continuing the work of its foregoing volume, English Hymns of the Eighteenth Century, the genre's formative period. This annotated and edited collection of nearly 200 hymns (with author introductions and a general historical introduction) will be of inestimable value to scholars, students, and laypersons from several disciplines and interests: from hymnology to church and social history and theology, from political science to literature to popular culture. Hymns were the most widely read and memorized verbal structures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - and in the nineteenth century the hymn became not only the property of dissenters, but also of representatives from the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. This anthology, therefore, provides unique and highly significant insights into the culture, beliefs, and habits of thought of a people and their spiritual leaders.

English Hymns of the Nineteenth Century brings together for the first time the most popular and widely used English hymns from that period, continuing the work of its foregoing volume, English Hymns of the Eighteenth Century, the genre's formative period. This annotated and edited collection of nearly 200 hymns (with author introductions and a general historical introduction) will be of inestimable value to scholars, students, and laypersons from several disciplines and interests: from hymnology to church and social history and theology, from political science to literature to popular culture. Hymns were the most widely read and memorized verbal structures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - and in the nineteenth century the hymn became not only the property of dissenters, but also of representatives from the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. This anthology, therefore, provides unique and highly significant insights into the culture, beliefs, and habits of thought of a people and their spiritual leaders.

Examining nineteenth-century British hymns for children, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre argues that the unique qualities of children's hymnody created a space for children's empowerment. Unlike other literature of the era, hymn books were often compilations of many writers' hymns, presenting the discerning child with a multitude of perspectives on religion and childhood. In addition, the agency afforded children as singers meant that they were actively engaged with the text, music, and pictures of their hymnals. Clapp-Itnyre charts the history of children’s hymn-book publications from early to late nineteenth century, considering major denominational movements, the importance of musical tonality as it affected the popularity of hymns to both adults and children, and children’s reformation of adult society provided by such genres as missionary and temperance hymns. While hymn books appear to distinguish 'the child' from 'the adult', intricate issues of theology and poetry - typically kept within the domain of adulthood - were purposely conveyed to those of younger years and comprehension. Ultimately, Clapp-Itnyre shows how children's hymns complicate our understanding of the child-adult binary traditionally seen to be a hallmark of Victorian society. Intersecting with major aesthetic movements of the period, from the peaking of Victorian hymnody to the Golden Age of Illustration, children’s hymn books require scholarly attention to deepen our understanding of the complex aesthetic network for children and adults. Informed by extensive archival research, British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900 brings this understudied genre of Victorian culture to critical light.

Today's businessman stretches his lunch hour with a third martini or a fast game of handball. His nineteenth-century counterpart might well have stretched his to take in a religious revival. Across America, especially in 1857-58 and 1875-77, two men, Ira D. Sankey and Dwight L. Moody, were holding immensely popular meetings that would lay the foundation for the tradition of hymnody and revivalism that extends through Billy Sunday to Billy Graham. They added major new developments to an already existing revival tradition; mass meetings in large auditoriums, careful organization of local "Christian workers," and a completely interdenominational approach. But the most remarkable feature of the Moody/Sankey act was Sankey himself: he sang the gospel. He also had his own book of songs to sell. Sankey's Gospel Hymns was by far the most successful of American hymnals and deserves some special attention, some attempt to account for its impact. Why did gospel hymns have such appeal? In this unique study, Sandra Sizer addresses that question by discussing the emergence of Moody-Sandy revivalism and popular religion in the white urban North. One cannot account for the popularity of revivalism by generalizations about industrialization or urbanization. This book offers a new perspective by looking at the rhetoric of the hymns themselves. It also examines what sorts of events and developments in American society made hymn-singing and revivals so attractive to so many people. The author's method is a sociology of religious language, which employs the insights and methods of several disciplines, especially anthropology and literary criticism, emphasizing cultural phenomena as linguistic phenomena intimately related to particular social settings. The approach is historical, but not chronological. The task the author has set herself is an interpreta-tion of the kind of hymn found in Gospel Hymns, illuminating in the process the way in which the hymns, and the revivals, helped to create a "social religion," a community based in likeness of feeling. The community was sacred and promoted moral behavior; people gave up alcohol, were honest and gentle, in accord with the feminine ideal on which the communal feeling was based. The hymns became vehicles for articulating a widespread community defined purely in terms of feeling: they became symbols of unity against later "evils" such as Communists, Catholics, and homosexuals. The analysis in this book allows for a critical perspective on the ideas and forms of revivalism which have shaped much of American culture and rhetoric--the idea of the individual's inner states as the key to his character, the "social" as a realm which creates uniformity through bonds of emotion, the segregation of home and woman from the real world, and the potential political uses of apolitical rhetoric. This book, in short, goes far beyond the discussion of gospel hymns; it raises issues which go to the heart of white, protestant, urban America and suggests that the assumptions lodged there demand argument, not acceptance [Publisher description]

Discusses the theory and function of hymnody, Anglican hymnody, compilation, printing, and circulation, with an eye to proving that each hymn within a collection had its own purpose and its own intended use.

Examining nineteenth-century British hymns for children, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre argues that the unique qualities of children's hymnody created a space for children's empowerment. Unlike other literature of the era, hymn books were often compilations of many writers' hymns, presenting the discerning child with a multitude of perspectives on religion and childhood. In addition, the agency afforded children as singers meant that they were actively engaged with the text, music, and pictures of their hymnals. Clapp-Itnyre charts the history of children’s hymn-book publications from early to late nineteenth century, considering major denominational movements, the importance of musical tonality as it affected the popularity of hymns to both adults and children, and children’s reformation of adult society provided by such genres as missionary and temperance hymns. While hymn books appear to distinguish 'the child' from 'the adult', intricate issues of theology and poetry - typically kept within the domain of adulthood - were purposely conveyed to those of younger years and comprehension. Ultimately, Clapp-Itnyre shows how children's hymns complicate our understanding of the child-adult binary traditionally seen to be a hallmark of Victorian society. Intersecting with major aesthetic movements of the period, from the peaking of Victorian hymnody to the Golden Age of Illustration, children’s hymn books require scholarly attention to deepen our understanding of the complex aesthetic network for children and adults. Informed by extensive archival research, British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900 brings this understudied genre of Victorian culture to critical light.

The interrelationship of music and theology is a burgeoning area of scholarship in which conceptual issues have been explored by musicologists and theologians including Jeremy Begbie, Quentin Faulkner and Jon Michael Spencer. Their important work has opened up opportunities for focussed, critical studies of the ways in which music and theology can be seen to interact in specific repertoires, genres, and institutions as well as the work of particular composers, religious leaders and scholars. This collection of essays explores such areas in relation to the religious, musical and social history of nineteenth-century Britain. The book does not simply present a history of sacred music of the period, but examines the role of music in the diverse religious life of a century that encompassed the Oxford Movement, Catholic Emancipation, religious revivals involving many different denominations, the production of several landmark hymnals and greater legal recognition for religions other than Christianity. The book therefore provides a valuable guide to the music of this complex historical period.

Understanding the culture of living with hymnbooks offers new insight into the histories of poetry, literacy, and religious devotion. It stands barely three inches high, a small brick of a book. The pages are skewed a bit, and evidence of a small handprint remains on the worn, cheap leather covers that don’t quite close. The book bears the marks of considerable use. But why—and for whom—was it made? Christopher N. Phillips’s The Hymnal is the first study to reconstruct the practices of reading and using hymnals, which were virtually everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isaac Watts invented a small, words-only hymnal at the dawn of the eighteenth century. For the next two hundred years, such hymnals were their owners’ constant companions at home, school, church, and in between. They were children's first books, slaves’ treasured heirlooms, and sources of devotional reading for much of the English-speaking world. Hymnals helped many people learn to memorize poetry and to read; they provided space to record family memories, pass notes in church, and carry everything from railroad tickets to holy cards to business letters. In communities as diverse as African Methodists, Reform Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and Unitarians, hymnals were integral to religious and literate life. An extended historical treatment of the hymn as a read text and media form, rather than a source used solely for singing, this book traces the lives people lived with hymnals, from obscure schoolchildren to Emily Dickinson. Readers will discover a wealth of connections between reading, education, poetry, and religion in Phillips’s lively accounts of hymnals and their readers.

Originally published in 2003 and selected from papers given at the third biennial conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, this volume, in common with its two predecessors, reflects the interdisciplinary character of the topic. The introductory essay by Julian Rushton considers some of the questions that are key to this area of study: what is the nineteenth century, what is British music, and did London influence the continent? The essays that follow are divided into broad thematic groups covering aspects of gender, church music, national identity, and local and national institutions. This collection illustrates that while nineteenth-century British music studies is still in its infancy as a field of research, it is one that is burgeoning and contributing to our understanding of British social and cultural life of the period.