Once in royal David's city

Some hymns achieve greatness. Few would claim that this item from Mrs C F Alexander’s Hymns for Little Children (from 1848, before her marriage) is great poetry, and many have been irritated by its sentimentality. One danger lies in the ‘fairy-tale’ hint of ‘Once upon a time …’; John Bell called the hymn ‘the verbal equivalent of Victorian stained glass’. But it has carved out its own niche among the Christmas hymns which are deemed essential, not least by the force of 4 key words in the opening line. Habits may now be changing, but following Cambridge’s 20th-c lead (from 1918; see 359, note), countless carol services have begun with this, often with a solo for stz 1 in conscious imitation of the King’s College choirboy. Like 204 and 437, this was written by the author, then Miss ‘Fanny’ Humphreys, aged 30, to illustrate the relevant clause of the Apostles’ Creed, in this case the 3rd of 13. (So it was written neither for Christmas nor for adults!) She was not unaware of the demands this kind of writing made; ‘A namby-pamby, childish style is most unpleasing, especially to boys’, she wrote. But like other editors, the Praise! team felt obliged to replace ‘mean’ with ‘meek’ in stz 2, and introduced ‘perfect’ for ‘wondrous’ in 3. This book also adopts HTC’s form of the final couplet instead of ‘Where like stars his children crowned, /all in white shall wait around’; not that the original was inappropriate then, but the effect of these phrases is now different. More radical, though not original here, is an amalgamation of the former stzs 3 and 4. This enables us to drop the ‘lowly maiden … gentle arms …’ (a very one-sided picture of what Mary’s character must have been, and ‘lowly’ already comes twice in lines 2–11) and the problematic ‘Christian children all must be, mild …’ (etc). Those who regularly drop the final stz altogether can hardly complain of such adjustments.

The almost inseparable IRBY arrived the year following its text, as a unison melody with piano accompaniment composed by Henry J Gauntlett, and published in his Christmas Carols: Four Numbers. It was fully harmonised soon afterwards. Although each line ends on the tonic chord, the tune shows clear development without monotony. Three English villages are called Irby; it is probably named after the one near Skegness, Lincs. ‘This tune, equally effective on the intimate or the grand scale, is alone sufficient to place Gauntlett among the immortals’—Companion to Rejoice and Sing.

b Eccles St, Dublin 1818; d Derry (Londonderry), N Ireland 1895. Born C F Humphreys, given 2 family names (the first given in some reference books as ‘Cecilia’, an understandable error) but always known as Fanny, she showed promise as a writer of verse (stories, amusements, devotions) from her early years. These could be sacred, sentimental, or witty; though never musical, she had a keen sense of sound and rhythm combined with a love of nature and the desire to be a good Anglican. In 1825 the family moved to Redcross, Co Wicklow (the date and place sometimes given for her birth), a ‘lost paradise’ and at that time a private riverside full of wildlife, and in 1833 to the more Protestant neighbourhood of Strabane, in Co Tyrone just south of Londonderry. Deaths in the family, and of 3 teenage sisters who were her friends, left a permanent shadow but also deepened her Christian faith and understanding. Pursuing her studies at home, she developed a good memory and became a fluent French speaker and keen reader. Through the sober godliness of her family and the upper-class company they kept, she ‘cherished into maturity an unshakeable faith in the natural goodness of the nobility’—V Wallace. Yet she also witnessed desperate poverty at first hand, while moving confidently among local and visiting clergy, who took her abilities and conversation seriously and without condescension. She remained most at home with small children and animals, notably dogs; and with her younger sister Anne (Annie) began a lifelong concern for deaf children and those with similar difficulties. Many of her royalties helped to support their care and education. Her frequent travels took her to Scotland and England as well as throughout Ireland.

As for her writing, Verses for Holy Seasons was published in 1846, followed by several other collections including Moral Songs (consciously echoing Watts?) and in 1848 Hymns for Little Children which ran to over 100 editions. By this book she was known; thus Walsham How, listing in a letter of 1869 his fellow guests at the home of the Bp of Oxford, includes ‘the Bishop of Derry with Mrs Alexander (“Hymns for Little Children
204, 372, 437, 842, 857.