ALH Online Review, Series XIX 1 Christopher N. Phillips, the Hymnal

ALH Online Review, Series XIX 1

Christopher N. Phillips, The Hymnal: A Reading History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 252 pp.

Reviewed by Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University

For anyone familiar with the original novel, watching Michael Mann’s popular 1992 motion picture adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans starring Daniel Day-Lewis becomes an exercise in absence, for Mann deletes from his movie the sometimes comic, sometimes heroic figure of the psalm-singing David Gamut. Thinking of David Gamut in relation to Christopher Phillips’s new book, The Hymnal: A Reading History, is instructive for two reasons. It underscores Phillips’s point that the singing of psalms and hymns was ubiquitous in early American culture, and it also points to the fact that attention to the importance and ubiquity of such singing (and printing) has been as absent from scholarly discussions of the era as the figure of David Gamut is in Mann’s film.

Phillips has done a great service to those interested in the areas of American poetry, book history, and lived religion in his meticulously researched, broad-reaching study. Following in the footsteps of book historians like Michael Cohen and Anthony Grafton, Phillips is interested in the “social lives” of hymnbooks. He studies them not only as carrier of texts and traditions but as an important “part of the everyday social practices of hundreds of thousands of English-speakers across two centuries” (ix). More importantly, through a systematic study of the use, first, of psalms and then the more elastically biblical poetic musical form of Scripture and scriptural truths commonly known as hymns, Phillips goes a great distance in showing just how pervasive and important hymns, and their books, were in the development of early American print culture more generally.

One of Phillips’s chief contributions comes in how he shows through the development of the printed hymnbook the key role such printed material played in the growth and character of “child literacy, slave literacy, Native literacy, and poor adult literacy” (212). Thousands of Americans learned to read through the practice of memorizing, singing, and eventually reading psalms and hymns in the pages of the dozens of hymnbooks that competed for public attention. By the early nineteenth century, hymnbooks had become a necessary part of the life of countless religious traditions and denominations as they sought to define their theologies and attract and cohere followers. New religious movements like the Mormons thought a unique hymnbook so important that the tradition’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr., commissioned his wife to compile such a collection as early as 1830, the year he founded his new church. The leaders of groups as varied as African Methodists, Old and New School Presbyterians, Unitarians, and Reform Jews

also set forth as absolutely essential the collection and production of appropriate hymnbooks.

Scholars of American religion will see with new eyes the depth of importance that hymnbooks held for congregational formation. One particularly illuminating moment in Phillips’s discussion of congregational singing comes in his analysis of the famous— sometimes infamous—Brooklyn pastor Henry Ward Beecher. Dedicating himself to compiling and distributing a special hymnbook that could get the music into the hands of his congregants, Beecher believed that the common devotional practice of reading hymns privately would be transformed into the powerfully cohesive practice of congregational singing in his church’s worship services.

A great through-line in Phillips’s study is the presence and importance of the English hymn writer, Isaac Watts (1674-1748). Watts first produced a hymnbook in 1707 with the idea that he could use biblical texts to be put to music for spiritual profit in both public and private worship settings. He paraphrased the Psalms in such a way as to depart from old metrically awkward renditions of the Psalms and thus produced a series of Psalmic renditions that appealed to English congregations on both sides of the Atlantic during George Whitefield’s international Great Awakening movement of the 1730s and 1740s. A century later, Watts’s hymns, once considered edgy, were accepted by a broad range of congregations and showed up in hymnbooks as well as the common readers and spellers used to teach literacy. Watts’s hymns also became standard fare in the myriad gift-books circulating both before and after the Civil War. Simply put, Watts’s hymns were found everywhere in American print culture. Their prevalence made them one of the most influential literary forms in nineteenth-century America.

The ubiquity of Watts’s hymns, as well as those that followed, proved to have far- reaching effects. It should be recalled that the earliest hymnbooks did not contain musical scores, just words with a notation about the tune to be used. Thus, hymnbooks looked much more like standard poetry volumes than what we call to mind today when we think of hymnals. Indeed, such hymns can be seen as a key influence in the development of the literary writing of a wide range of American poets and writers. Phillips traces the influence of Watts’s hymn, along with those of the Wesleys among others, in the poetic and literary development of such figures as William Cullen Bryant, Lucy Larcom, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden.

Particularly thought-provoking is Phillips’s treatment of Dickinson’s poetry and its debt to hymnody. Dickinson’s debt to hymns in general and to Watts in particular has become something of a commonplace. Phillips, however, reveals a deft hand in deepening such

arguments by showing Dickinson’s commitment to the aural reception of her poems as hymnlike. He also does a wonderful job of bibliographically tracing the development of scholarship on Dickinson and of demonstrating how this scholarship itself reflects how hymns were compiled, organized, and indexed as compared to how Dickinson’s poems have been gathered and presented to various public audiences over the past century.

There are moments in Phillips’s study where one wishes he had pushed a bit further in his investigations. For example, he links Moby-Dick to hymns, but he fails to pay attention to the more obvious debt Melville had to such hymnody in Clarel, his mammoth Holy Land epic poem. Considered by many to be the longest poem written by an American, Clarel has often been compared to such epics as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey. One wonders what Phillips might have done with Watts’s influence upon Melville’s account of Clarel’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem in search of greater theological definition, solace, and certainty.

In the end, Phillips has not only offered one of the first systematic treatments of the development of the hymnbook in America (and its roots in Britain), but he has also provided a model for how book history might be done. His painstaking research allows him to link hymnbooks to a range of printed material that make The Hymnal a must-read for those interested in both early American religion and print culture. It is also a book that reminds us that the silent practice of reading we so associate with books and written documents today was not always the norm. Even when it comes to the hymnals we use today, orality and aurality are critical components to any understanding we might have of past and contemporary cultures of print.