How Victorian women gave the Anglican church its greatest hits. By Valentine Cunningham
'There is a green hill far away,/ Without a city wall,/Where the dear Lord was crucified/Who died to save us all." Easter time in England, and in the English-speaking world, is now inseparable from the words of that hymn, so simply put, so memorably phrased. They are the words of one of Victorian Britain's huge army of hymn-writing women - Cecil Frances Alexander, wife of the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe in Ireland. She made Christmas hers too with Once in Royal David's City. An English Christmas wouldn't be the same without Mrs Alexander. Nor, for that matter, without Christina Rossetti and her In the Bleak Midwinter. And what would our harvest festivals sound like without Jane Montgomery Campbell's translation from German, We Plough the Fields and Scatter?
The classic, canonical English hymn book is packed with the songs of women, especially Victorian ones. English congregations didn't always sing hymns. The practice was brought over from Germany in the 18th century by the Wesleys. Methodism, the religion of the heart, was, as they say, born in congregational song. Charles Wesley supplied thousands of verses for Methodism's great movement of evangelical religious emotionalism. But very quickly women took over the hymn-writing job - after all, the men knew they specialised in sensibility - and not just for Methodists and their low-church Anglican colleagues, but right across the Christian scene. The Victorian church was a field alive with the songs of women. It's a female inflection that continues to this day. Christian hymnology has come to belong greatly, in fact, to the poets who have hymens. (Hymn was first spelled "hymen" in English, and by a wobbly etymology was thought to come from the Greek word hymen. Jacques Derrida still believes it does.)
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