Christopher Howse celebrates the anniversary of an unlikely bestseller
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Christopher Howse states:
A railway carriage saw the conception of Hymns Ancient and Modern, the 150th birthday of which we now celebrate. Railway carriages in the Victorian era provided a half-public, half-private place that promoted intercourse between active minds.
On that summer day in 1858, William Denton, the vicar of St Bartholomew, Cripplegate, in London, met Francis Murray, the Rector of Chislehurst. Each had published hymn-books, the Church Hymnal and the Hymnal for Use in the English Church. These were not men cut off from the practical worries of the world. Denton was campaigning on behalf of the poor whose homes were demolished to make way for railways like the one they were now using.
Denton and Murray discussed amalgamating their hymn books. Dozens of different collections were then in use in parish churches, and the two men’s resolution recruited support from editors of other hymn-books to compile a collection that would supersede them.
As it turned out, Denton thought better of suppressing the well-established Church Hymnal, but before the end of the year the initiative had attracted the energies of the remarkable Rev Sir Henry Baker Bt, who came to dominate the project and bring it to the astonishing success that it soon became.
Baker’s father, from whom he inherited the baronetcy, was an admiral, and he was the elder son. But he went into the Church, was deeply motivated by the Tractarian reforms of Newman and Pusey, and settled in rural Herefordshire, as Vicar of Monkland (served, from the 1850s, by the Shrewsbury and Hereford railway). He was still in this thirties when he took command of the nascent Hymns Ancient and Modern.
When it came out in 1861, the book contained 273 hymns, almost half of them translations, 110 from Latin. These were the days of learned popularisers such as John Mason Neale, who spun hymns from dead languages into English, and magnanimously declared that he minded “not in the least” if his work was altered by the editors of the new hymnal.
More at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/8391166/AandM-the-C-of-E-in-words-and-music.html