Fantasing About Being a Victorian Hymn-Writer
I must start with a plug about the ACW Today's Good Samaritans competition, run in association with Street Pastors ? Deadline is Sunday, 31 July. More details in Christian Writer, page four, and on ACW website . Good. Plug over. Our next (not yet launched) will be a poetry competition. Watch out for autumn edition of CW. Many of our well-known hymns started their lives as poems, the tunes being added later. When I’m in church, supposedly singing the hymns, I picture in my mind a comfortable Trollopian cleric in a frock coat, and his wife wearing a capacious black dress and a white lace cap, both of them writing beside a blazing, crackling fire, in a high-ceilinged vicarage, with the rain lashing the window panes outside. The maid brings tea on a tray, the teapot inside a tea-cosy, minute flowery china cups and a hot water jug. “Thank you, Violet. That will be all,” says Mrs Vicar, as The Rev writes...