Religion in the Home—The Sacred Songs of the Drawing Room

Abstract

The Victorian bourgeois ballad is a distinctive genre that demonstrates the spirituality of religion transferred to the drawing room. This paper will examine in detail four examples of the genre—The Lost Chord, The Holy City, Arise O Sun and The Volunteer Organist to examine the spirituality of the genre in terms of the materials used, the musical construction, the value system underpinning it and the expressive character. It will interrogate their relationship to the spirituality of Victorian Anglicanism and the place of this spirituality in the lives of the people with whom they were popular and its role in their social life, drawing on the author’s own experience. It was also a genre in which women excelled and this and the notion of spirituality will be examined culturally, drawing on Foucault’s notion of subjugated knowing.