What has Songs to do with Hymns?

Abstract

In September 1794, a reader identified only by the letter ‘E’ contacted The Gentleman’s Magazine with news of a distressing discovery. ‘Two or three years ago,’ E relates, ‘I applied to [Joseph] Johnson in St. Paul’s Churchyard, for a couple of these little books of Divine Songs by Dr. Watts, which we have all learned by heart in our younger years.’¹ But, continues this correspondent, ‘After I had brought them home, a friend, who remembered better than myself the studies of infancy, took them up, and observed, upon reading some of the Hymns, that they were not the same as they used to be.’ The acquisition of ‘another copy in the original dress’ makes clear what has occurred: ‘we found that Johnson’s copy was completely travestied, every scrap of Trinitarianism, every intimation of the eternity of hell-torments, &c. carefully rooted out, and its place supplied by something undoubtedly more liberal and more rational.’ The account cites ‘The Cradle Hymn’ in particular as one of the songs which the new edition has ‘reformed’ (ibid.). What, one wonders, would that correspondent — or Johnson himself — have made of that little book of Songs by the publisher’s sometime author and engraver William Blake with ‘A Cradle Song’ reconfigured seemingly so irrationally as to intimate the mother’s concern lest conjugal ‘sweet moans’ wake her babe?²