The Hymnal: A Reading History by Christopher N. Phillips

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 121 The Hymnal: A Reading History Christopher N. Phillips John Hopkins University Press, 2018. 252 pp. $39.95 hardcover. Within a few pages, I realized two things: first, the author is a very fine writer—one who chooses every word with care; second, he has lived with this topic for many years and produced a scholarly work of the first rank. Christopher N. Phillips is Professor of English at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, focusing on eighteenth and nineteenth transatlantic literatures , literary history, and religion and literature. He brings the skills and knowledge implied by these research areas to bear in The Hymnal. Phillips’s research is organized around the use of the hymnal as a physical artifact for reading and reflection in three venues: church, school, and home. He takes a largely inductive approach that draws the reader into specific narratives. For example, three “Interludes” situate the reader in a specific context, almost like a short story. While there is a cumulative effect in reading The Hymnal from beginning to end, one would benefit from reading just one of the three large sections or, for that matter, even selected chapters. It was tempting to read the text for fascinating anecdotes such as the statement by Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Sometimes when I am disinclined to listen to the preacher at church, I turn to the hymn-book, and when one strikes my eye, I cover the name at the bottom, and guess. It is most invariably Watts and Wesley; after those, there are very few that are good for much” (64). As fascinating as such details are, Phillips’s presentation of the topic provides an account that glues the “facts” of well-known hymn writers and collections into a cohesive narrative. As a hymnologist concerned primarily with the act of singing together in worship and the role of congregational song in shaping faith, Phillips has added a careful analysis of how the hymnal spans the world’s public and private reading of the texts as well as their public singing. While scholars have long been aware of the devotional use of hymnals, less careful thought has been given to how the combination of individual reading of texts and congregational singing coalesce to deepen faith. The author’s distinction between hymnbooks—collections of texts only, often for public or private reading—and hymnals, heavier books containing music usually left at church, clarifies the fluid use of collections between the public and private spheres of activity as well as the sung and spoken realms of experience (8). Among the more intriguing themes, perhaps the most prevalent refrain throughout the book was that all roads lead from Isaac Watts. Long called the “Father of English Hymnody,” the author deepens the understanding of Religion & Literature 122 Watts’s influence in American eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultures in the three main provinces of learning and formation: church, school, and home. While the American adaptations such as “Joel Barlow’s Watts” (1785), “Timothy Dwight’s Watts” (1797), and “James Winchell’s Watts” (1818) are often referred to, Phillips expands his reach into the realms of devotional experience as well as into children’s educational formation and pre-literacy (140-41). Such a comprehensive discussion of the relationship between the hymn and the poem is rare. Rather than treating them as distinct genres, it was helpful to see how some editors explored the liminal space between the two, for example, Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson’s A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion (1846). Phillips adds considerable context to this often-neglected area. The chapter, “Did Poets Write Hymns?” will become required reading in my hymnology courses. Two chapters that might stand alone, though they do contribute to the broader narrative, are “Singing as Reading, or, A Tale of Two Sacred Harps” and “Emily Dickinson’s Hymnody of Privacy.” The former chapter compares and contrasts the better known The Sacred Harp (1844) by White and King with the earlier The Sacred Harp, or, Eclectic Harmony (1834) by the Mason brothers, Timothy and Lowell. Among the threads that are woven together are the relative use and importance of Watts in each collection and the Masons...