British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood, by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre

Abstract

Reviewed by: British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre Naomi Wood (bio) British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood, by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre; pp. xviii + 306. London and New York: Routledge, 2016, £120.00, £36.99 paper, $175.00, $48.87 paper. Standard histories of children's literature conventionally have omitted or downplayed overtly religious texts on the grounds that work written to instruct does not meet the definition of literature as a pleasurable leisure occupation. This is the case, or example, in widely circulated and reissued books like F. J. Harvey Darton's Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (1932), John Rowe Townsend's Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children's Literature (1965), and Patricia Demers's From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children's Literature to 1850 (1982). Accounts of children's religious [End Page 336] texts may mention the episode featuring a rotting gibbeted corpse in Mary Sherwood's The History of the Fairchild Family (1818–47), or footnote Lewis Carroll's parody of Isaac Watts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). But serious consideration of the aesthetic, intellectual, or cultural work of religion in children's texts has been limited, with some exceptions, such as J. S. Bratton's study of Evangelical writing in The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction (1981). In recent years, however, a growing body of scholars has recognized that children are not simply objects to be shaped by their reading, but may embrace didactic literature as pleasurable and as offering opportunities for agency. Marah Gubar's Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature (2009) and Victoria Ford Smith's Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children's Literature (2017), to take two recent examples, trace the ways in which golden-age children's literature emerges out of collaborative relationships between adults and children. Mark Knight and Emma Mason in Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature (2006) have demonstrated how religion informs Victorian writers of all stripes and that understanding religious positions, tropes, and debates is therefore critical to our understanding of Victorian literature and culture. It is no longer sufficient to focus on the five or so of the century's most subversive or radical writers for children to trace the contours of childhood's culture and history, or to repeat unthinkingly the canard that modernity has so disenchanted the world that religion and faith are impossible and therefore irrelevant. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood contributes to this ongoing conversation with an extensively researched study of children's hymns and hymnody as a combination of textual, musical, and performative practices with shifting meanings. The book studies the evolution of children's hymnody alongside the complex relationship between musical form and textual content, and between adult guides and child performers. Attentive to the distinctions made by Victorian editors and compilers between classes, confessional allegiances, and genders, Clapp-Itnyre examines not only the text but also hymnbooks' hymn selections, production values, and uses. She recounts as well contemporary responses by adults and children to children's private and public performance. Her primary thesis is that "nineteenth-century hymns created an empowered child singer," thus extending our understanding of children's culture and ideology during the period (10). As both a pleasurable leisure occupation and a religious practice, hymns and hymn-singing bring into focus the broad area between Romantic ideals and Puritan-Evangelical notions of childhood. The book's six chapters treat (1) the class-based differences between different hymn-books, and what their hymn selections reveal about the implied child readers; (2) the role of religious poetry and hymns in the history of children's literature; (3) the overlap between adult and children's hymnbooks; (4) the representation of childhood through performance and in illustrations to children's hymnbooks; (5) hymns associated with children's reforming organizations (Missionary, Bands of Hope, and Bands of Mercy); (6) and the depiction of death and deathbeds in children's hymns. Most chapters show...