In Sunday under Three Heads we have a vivid picture of the state of things at a fashionable church. Carriages roll up, richly dressed people take their places and inspect each other through their glasses.
The organ peals forth, the hired singers commence a short hymn, and the congregation condescendingly rise, stare about them and converse in whispers.
Dickens passes from church to chapel. Here, he says,
the hymn is sung—not by paid singers, but by the whole assembly at the loudest pitch of their voices, unaccompanied by any musical instrument, the words being given out, two lines at a time, by the clerk.
It cannot be said that, as far as the music is concerned, either of these descriptions is exaggerated when we remember the time at which they were written (1838). Very few chapels in London had organs, or indeed instruments of any kind, and there is no doubt that the congregations, as a rule, did sing at the tops of their voices, a proceeding known under the more euphonious title of ‘hearty congregational singing.’
He gives a far more favourable account of the music in the village church. In the essay just referred to he mentions the fact that he attended a service in a West of England church where the service ‘was spoken—not merely read—by a grey-headed minister.’
The psalms were accompanied by a few instrumental performers, who were stationed in a small gallery extending across the church at the lower end; and the voices were led by the clerk, who, it was evident, derived no slight pride and gratification from this portion of the service.
But if the church music in England was not of a very high quality when Dickens wrote the above, it was, according to his own account, far superior to what he heard in certain churches in Italy. When in Rome he visited St. Peter's, where he was quite unimpressed by the music.
I have been infinitely more affected in many English cathedrals when the organ has been playing, and in many English country churches when the congregation have been singing.
On another occasion he attended church at Genoa on a feast day, and he writes thus about the music: