Hymnals and the History of Daily Life

As a graduate student in early American literature, I came across a mystery on the title pages of several hymnals from the US’s first decades. Many of these books shared a similar idea in their subtitles, variants of “for the use of religious assemblies and private Christians.” How did that work, I wondered? How could books be designed for public and private use? Those questions stayed with me, and they eventually led me on an archival adventure through dozens of libraries, forming the basis of The Hymnal: A Reading History. The public singing of hymns has caught the attention of musicologists and church historians, but what turned out to be a massive culture of public and private reading has been nearly invisible since its demise in the late nineteenth century.

That invisibility came, in large part, from a fundamental change in the design of hymnals. From about 1860 to 1890, a new kind of book gradually took over churches and publishing markets: heavy, expensive, amassing hundreds of hymn texts between staves of printed music. These books stayed in the churches that bought them for the use of their congregants, associating their use with singing in formal worship. They were Sunday books. This style of book, what we think of simply as hymnals, in fact replaced another form that had been one of the most-produced of all print genres for nearly two centuries. These earlier hymnals, usually called “hymnbooks,” were generally small and cheap, and had only words in them.  They stayed with their owners—at least one per family but often one per reader—moving from church to home and other places besides, living a much more active life than their successors.

A hymnbook was often a child’s first owned book. Hymnbooks formed the core of early literacy education throughout much of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, both at home and in the Sunday and public schools as they emerged. These books also fueled their users’ devotional lives as they enabled early literacy. In her memoir, American poet Lucy Larcom described following her mother around the house as a four-year-old, proudly reading hymns to her out of the book her pious mother was too busy with housework to enjoy herself (something like a nineteenth-century Audible service).

Larcom credited hymns with providing the foundation for her poetic accomplishments, and in this she followed a broad cultural trend. A key reason why so much poetry written between 1700 and 1900—from Blake to Longfellow, Dickinson to Tennyson—was in regular stanzas and took up moral and relational subjects was that early reading encounters with hymns shaped public norms about what poetry should sound like, as well as what it should do. By the time the “art for art’s sake” motto of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde became prominent, the modern hymnal had nearly gained primacy in churches, as clergy believed the private use of hymnody could be sacrificed for improved congregational singing, which the new books facilitated. It had in fact taken clergy a generation to win this argument; many people, including Emily Dickinson’s musical family, resented the way staff music disrupted their reading of hymns, and they long insisted that words-only editions of the new books be made available. Only once this late-century shift occurred would popular notions of poetry begin to move away from the influence of hymns.

Yet that influence has been profound and long-lasting. From the 1710s, when Isaac Watts, the “father of English hymnody,” encouraged parents to have their children memorize hymns he had written especially for them, hymns were memorized and recited out of books like Watts’s, but also out of school texts like the McGuffey Readers and hymn collections designed for home use with titles such as Family Hymns and Hymns for Mothers and Children. These books ranged from the cheapest of print to high-end gift books, rivaling almanacs for sheer production numbers. Hymnbooks, in other words, were everywhere in the English-reading world.

The ubiquity and portability of hymnbooks meant they were not merely text sources but companions to their users. People wrote shopping lists, inspirational quotations, and gossipy notes in their books. They used books to record dates in family and church histories. They stored letters, clippings, tickets, ribbons, flowers, and cards in them. Slaves kept them as clandestine heirlooms. Reform Jews made and circulated them to demonstrate their American piety and spread their ideas to other synagogues. Hymnbooks were the medium for the daily practice of religion and of poetry for millions of readers, and we have only begun to come to terms with this rich, nearly forgotten history.

Christopher N. Phillips is an associate professor of English at Lafayette College. He is the author of The Hymnal: A Reading History and Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction, and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance.