‘Innovation and Irregularity’: Religion, Poetry and Song in the 1820s

The 1820s was simultaneously an ‘age of doubt’ (as David Stewart has recently argued) and a period of fervent faith, a tension expressed in the relationship between poetry and song. In histories of music and religion in Britain, 1820 has been seen to mark the final acceptance of congregational hymn-singing by the Church of England, after a court case brought against Thomas Cotterill, a Sheffield curate, who had published a ‘Selection of Psalms and Hymns’ with the poet James Montgomery. The same year, another provincial clergyman, Reginald Heber, wrote to the bishop of London from his Shropshire parish, seeking approval for his own collection of hymns, which would eventually be published after Heber’s appointment as Bishop of Calcutta and death in India in 1826. I situate these collections of religious song alongside both the keepsakes and annuals of the 1820s and the new popularity of devotional poetry evident in the success of John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827). The chapter concludes with a reading of Wordsworth’s late ode ‘On the Power of Sound’ (1828-9) as a response to the elevated status of religious song in the 1820s.