Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (review)

For a brief period in the nineteenth century, the music of Dissent—especially through sight-singing methods like Tonic Sol-fa and theologically sonic organizations such as the Salvation Army—could be heard everywhere throughout Great Britain. Within Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales, Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes provide a much-needed context for the growth and explosion of this music through the genre of the hymn. In this volume the editors strive to provide ‘the first full account of dissenting hymns and their impact in England and Wales, from the mid-seventeenth century, when the hymn emerged out of metrical psalms as a distinct literary form, to the early twentieth century, after which the traditional hymn began to decline in importance’ (the description on the back of the dust jacket slightly amplifies the claim made on p. 1 of the Introduction). While this volume of diverse essays is not the advertised ‘full account’, the work is, nonetheless, extremely useful and recommended to any scholar with an interest in devotional text and music from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The authors represented in this collection are nearly as venerable as the hymns they address, and most of the essays are excellent.

The volume’s major flaw is that it has the scholarly equivalent of multiple personalities: the editors provide an introduction that outlines the socio-political origins and development of Dissent from the 1660s to the 1960s, but in extremely broad strokes (pp. 3–12). Little of hymns or tunes appear in these pages, as the editors present a basic political and doctrinal discussion aimed at the reader with little experience or knowledge of Dissent. Some of the essays, like those of Ken R. Manley, Clyde Binfield, and Nicholas Temperley, respond very well to this, and they are obviously written for the general reader: they amplify the themes presented in the introduction and work in engaging ways with the material to present it to the widest possible audience. Other essays, like those of Elizabeth Clarke and Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, while strong, are written with the specialist reader in mind. The rest fall somewhere in the middle. Readers new to Dissent, with little understanding of basic hymn concepts such as metres, the differences between ‘spontaneous singing’ and ‘promiscuous singing’, or even ‘lining out’, will probably find themselves baffled by some of the essays, unless they have access to a good dictionary. There is a great deal of variation in the tone and level of discussion of the poetry of hymns, too, so those who read the volume expecting to find the thorough text-based discussions in the chapters by Clarke or J. R. Watson throughout the rest of the work will be disappointed.

The nine chapters of the book are split, roughly, into two parts: the first seven discuss the chronology of the hymn in England from the seventeenth century through to the late nineteenth. After the first chapter (surveying the seventeenth century), the rest in this group focus on one major writer, compiler, or editor, which leads to often-overlapping discussions on Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, John Rippon, Josiah Conder (with a generous discussion of James Montgomery included), W. Garrett Horder, and James Martineau. The last two chapters discuss the music of hymns throughout the period essayed (Temperley’s ‘The Music of Dissent’) and a longer survey of the Dissenting hymn in Wales from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century (E. Wyn James’s ‘The Evolution of the Welsh Hymn’).

If not reading the book in its entirety, musicians and those interested in the academic study of the hymn and its tunes should begin with Rivers and Wykes’s Introduction, and then proceed directly to the excellently written chapter by Temperley, ‘The Music of Dissent’. Temperley’s discussion uses the development and publication of...