Reviewed by: British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-tuning the History of Childhood by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre Hugh Morrison British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-tuning the History of Childhood. By Alisa Clapp-Itnyre. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. xviii + 306 pp. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's British Hymn Books for Children is a standout product of the long-running Routledge (formerly Ashgate) "Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present" series. It is a self-confessed "labor of love" (xv). Clapp-Itnyre clearly brings to her scholarship musical expertise along with a deep affinity for the subject matter. As a result, readers interested in the history of music will certainly be drawn to this book and gain much from it. Just as importantly, however, it is also a significant scholarly contribution that offers new interdisciplinary insights and avenues of enquiry. It sits squarely within childhood studies, but with the added conviction that "our traditional marginalization of children's hymnody outside the fields of literature, musicology, art history, even history, makes those fields of study incomplete" (11). Culturally and geographically situated in nineteenth-century British (mainly English) Protestant hymn production, the book makes three major claims: that children's hymns constituted a "genre" that was "integral to the fabric of Victorian childhood experience"; that their "hymn singing was a context for immense empowerment of Victorian children"; and that "children's hymn-book production intersected with major aesthetic movements of the period . . . [thus deepening] our understanding of the aesthetic network for children and adults" (6). From all of this, she argues, "an empowered [albeit complex and historicized] singer emerges" (6). To advance this broad argument, the book is divided into clearly focused chapters that are each effectively organized around selected emphases or transitions. Chapters move from thinking about classed or gendered juvenile communities shaped by the act of singing; to the relationship between hymns and literature for children; to the ambiguities between designations of "adult" [End Page 311] or "child" thrown up by hymn collections; to visual representations of children in hymn books; to children as both subjects and agents of reform through various singing traditions; and finally to the ambiguities apparent in hymns that invoked images of childhood death, dying and children of life. Each chapter provides a mixture of critical and careful analysis (across and between a broad spectrum of published hymn books) and close reading (of selected hymns or groupings of hymns as case studies), augmented by such other primary sources as diaries, contemporary fiction and children's epigraphic traces. At each point, Clapp-Itnyre necessarily brings those sources into conversation with wide-ranging secondary scholarship, discerning larger historical or historiographical questions and issues thrown up by the source material. Where appropriate, readers are given helpful nineteenth-century context—for example, English educational developments and reforms (chapter 1), key missionary and philanthropic/social reforming movements (chapter 5), and adult attitudes towards children and death (chapter 6)—because in each case trends in children's hymn writing or singing either point to or are explained by larger historical processes. In her analysis she is also keen to elucidate nuances or to explicate how hymns as literature might disrupt previously accepted notions of childhood or periodization. Three examples will suffice. Hymn singing could be both divisive, socially or gender-wise (chapter 1), but at the same time it at least brought different groups together mentally: "they all sang many of the same hymns" (51) and children's hymns moved "fluidly between class contexts" (52). Similarly, hymn content points to "cracks in the continuum" (58) of nineteenth-century juvenile representations, from the supposed negation to later reification of the child in fictional literature (chapter 2). And the presence of cross-over hymns in adult or child collections (chapter 3) potentially complicates how we understand Victorian concepts of age as a category. At the same time, they suggest that "Victorians truly treasured their children, bestowing upon them the richness of their own 'adult' hymn tradition. . . . To treasure their children was, in more cases than not, to lift the child up to the adult in theology, music, and poetics" (136–37). While well-constructed, this book is not always easy...
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Apr 18, 2024
Lawrence Morris 
Open Access