Early American Literature

In today's world, a hymnal is generally thought of as a collection of songs for use in public worship, and, indeed, that has largely become its primary application. Christopher N. Phillips's The Hymnal: A Reading History shows that this usage has not always been the sole or even the primary [End Page 576] function of hymn collections. Instead, he focuses on these books as "artifact, evidence, and clue" (10) to observe that English-language hymns and hymnals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often served in a variety of roles that were sometimes unrelated to their use as church service books. In doing so, he distinguishes between what he calls "hymnbooks" (volumes containing only the texts of hymns) and "hymnals" (collections that include music along with the texts) (8). He points out that published volumes of hymns were almost invariably of the "hymnbook" sort until about the middle of the nineteenth century, when attempts to improve the singing of the churches led to the proliferation of "hymnals." While the hymnal indeed led to better participation in congregational singing at church, it also contributed to the loss of the hymnbook, which brought with it a corresponding loss of some of the other functions of these volumes.

Though not mentioned in the title, the main thrust of this volume is English-language hymnody and hymnbooks (with a brief section devoted to issues of Native American hymnody), and chiefly of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While there is description and discussion of British hymnbooks, hymnists, and hymns, the greater part of the volume is devoted to hymnic activities in the United States. The author follows an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of this material, including literary studies, hymnology, religious and denominational backgrounds, the history of education, bookmaking, and sociology, among others.

Phillips divides the book into three parts, one for each of the principal "sacred spaces" (2) in which the hymnbook found use: the church, the school, and the home. In the first part, he observes that hymnbooks helped (and hymnals still do) provide an identity for a church or denomination; one evidence for this is that as new denominations developed during the nineteenth century, one of the first things they did was to publish a hymnbook. Parishioners were expected to bring their own hymnbooks to worship (they were not provided by the church) so they could join in the singing. However, as Phillips observes, hymnbooks had many other uses in church besides the singing function: they could be used to hold notes written by the congregants if the notes were not written in the hymnbook itself, they could be used as reading material during boring sermons, or they could be read aloud in the service.

The second part identifies the important role that hymns and hymnbooks [End Page 577] played in education. These volumes and their contents were often used in teaching literacy to children, and, indeed, hymns were frequently anthologized in nineteenth-century "secular" schoolbooks, including the famed McGuffey Readers. Hymns were also used as memorization and recitation material in the classroom, and the hymnals from which children learned to read were often given to them as gifts.

Part 3 emphasizes the role of the hymnbook as a collection of poetry for use in the home and deals with the oft-discussed question of the relationship between hymns and "literary poems." Phillips's argument is that the hymn played an important role in literary history far beyond what is usually acknowledged by helping to form "literary taste" (161). Hymns found their way into poetic anthologies, albeit often without the editors quite knowing what to do with them (see, for example, Phillips's discussion of anthologies of poetry by William Cowper, 165–67). The reverse was also true: sacred poetry that was originally nonhymnic in design entered volumes of hymns. As if by way of compensation for the "hymnal" crowding out the "hymnbook" for church services, a new generation of "private" (words-only) literary collections such as Samuel...