Come you thankful people come

‘The most popular of all harvest hymns’?—perhaps once, and certainly still useful. Henry Alford’s words, give or take a line or two, are a piece of classic Victorian writing which makes a welcome and (to date) well-known ‘gathering’ item as the service or festival begins. The author was a young London vicar when he published his Psalms and Hymns where it first appeared in 1844. The revisions he made in 1865, by which time he was the middle-aged Dean of Canterbury, differ in more than half the lines from those already introduced, without his approval, by the 1861 A&M; together they prepare us for the long list of editorial amendments which were to follow. Problems begin for some Reformed Canadians at line 1 (whose text in the 1984 Book of Praise starts ‘Thank the LORD and come with praise,/ songs of jubilation raise’) but for others at 1.3; the standard line is retained here although some farmers are reluctant to sing it (eg in August) before this is true. Our ‘wants’ are more truly ‘needs’, and God’s ‘temple’ is now ‘his people’ (1.6–7). 2.1 is A&M (and Matthew 13:38) rather than Alford’s ‘We ourselves’ (the church?); 2.2 was ‘fruit unto …’, 2.3–8 is virtually Alford. Stz 3 brings greater problems; the Jubilate version avoids the difficulties of ‘from his field shall in that day/ all offences purge away’, ‘in his garner’ and other variants. ‘Garner’ is also changed at 4.6, which otherwise is closer to Alford than many hymnals manage to be. One anon 19th-c hymn used the phrase ‘God’s everlasting granary’.

The tune, George J Elvey’s ST GEORGE’S WINDSOR, is hardly in dispute; sometimes called ST GEORGE (but contrast 864 in SM) it has been used with these words since 1861. N0.597 has it in the key of G major.

b Bloomsbury, Middx (C London) 1810, d Canterbury, Kent 1871. The product of a long-standing clerical family, at the age of 6 he produced his own ‘Travels of St Paul’, at 11 a collection of hymns, soon followed by several Latin odes. After attending Ilminster Grammar Sch, Som, and Trinity Coll Cambridge (BA 1832), he became a Fellow of Trinity, and was ordained in 1833. He served as curate at Wingfield, Wilts (to his father), then at Ampton, nr Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk; for 18 years as Vicar of Wymeswold, nr Loughborough, Leics; as Incumbent of the large congregation at Quebec Chapel, Marylebone in C London (1853–57); and finally as Dean of Canterbury from 1857 until his death 14 years later. In 1841 he was the Hulsean Lecturer at Cambridge, and his commentary on the Gk NT which took 20 years to complete remained a standard work, critical but conservative, of the later 19th c. He was also a member of the NT Revision Company for the Revised Version of the Bible. Skilled in painting, music and even organ-building, he was the first editor of the Contemporary Review and cherished a hope of visiting Palestine which was not to be fulfilled. He wrote his own poetry, edited that of Jn Donne, translated Gk texts including Homer’s Odyssey, and composed several original hymns in classic Victorian-Anglican mode, while remaining on better terms with Free Church members than some of his contemporaries felt able to do. He was also a hymnal editor; Hymns for the Sundays and Festivals throughout the Year (an echo of his boyhood efforts) was published in 1836, and Year of Praise in 1867. 7 of his texts have featured in various edns of A&M, though only his celebrated harvest hymn survives in its latest (2000) one, as here. EH has 5 of his hymns, CH has 4 and GH, 3. One remarkable (to us) but then hardly unique item was set for the Sunday after Christmas Day, beginning ‘Set thine house in order…’, from Isaiah 38:1ff. No.913.