‘Victorian Christmas’ Revives Old-Time Carols

“The First Noel” is among the most familiar Christmas carols, but few singers would know “Cold Was the Day” or “Sleep Holy Babe.”

All three, however, were published more than a century ago in a collection that did much to shape Christmas traditions in the English-speaking world and to make carols acceptable in religious services.

The book was “Christmas Carols New and Old,” edited by H.R. Bramley and John Stainer.

Bramley was the chaplain and Stainer the organist at Magdalen College, Oxford, when their first collection was published in 1871.

Now the choir of their old college has revived that forgotten and hard-to-find book in a new recording, “A Victorian Christmas.”

“I think it’s been a bit neglected,” said Martin Souter, a graduate and former organist of Magdalen College, who produced the recording. Even at Magdalen, Souter said, only three or four copies of the “Christmas Carols New and Old” can be found.

He picked 17 carols for the album, with some to demonstrate Stainer’s responsibility for arrangements of “First Noel” and “Good King Wenceslas” that are still standards, and to point out that John Goss’ popular setting of “See Amid the Winter Snow” made its first appearance in the book.

Other, unfamiliar choices, including “Twas in the Winter Cold” and “Sleep Holy Babe,” are simply songs that he liked.

“I think the piece by (Sir Joseph) Barnby, ‘Twas in the Winter Cold,’ is one of the most beautiful pieces of that style that there is. It’s just absolutely gorgeous,” Souter said.

“Sleep Holy Babe” was particularly disliked by the late Erik Routley, who did much to promote carols in the 20th century.

In his 1958 book, “The English Carol,” he called it the worst of the 70 songs in the collection.

“There is nothing else, I think, in Bramley and Stainer quite so horrifying as that,” Routley wrote.

“This is sort of a fashion statement, really,” Souter said. “Our fashion statement is that we are becoming much more interested and much more sympathetic toward Victorian music-making and Victorian style.”

Christmas celebrations were banned by the Puritans from 1644 to 1660, and well into the 19th century only a few Christmas hymns were generally used in churches.

“It is … mainly to Bramley and Stainer that we owe the restoration of the carol,” Percy Dearmer wrote in “The Oxford Book of Carols.” That book, published in 1928 and still selling, drove Bramley and Stainer out of the market.

Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott, editors of “The New Oxford Book of Carols” published in 1992, said Bramley and Stainer put traditional carols “in a ‘respectable’ form, the melodies regularized, the harmonies ecclesiastical, the texts adapted to all degrees of churchmanship.”

“The carol was thus, at last, fit for inclusion in the services of cathedrals, which had stood out longest against their inclusion,” they wrote.

“Christmas Carols New and Old” is a product of its time, when a reaction against the industrial age fed a renewed interest in the arts of the Middle Ages, Souter said. The Oxford Movement in the Church of England, beginning in the 1830s, revived medieval liturgical styles.

Souter says Christmas recordings can be a year-round project, but that has its benefits for the singers.

“We recorded some at Christmas when they were quite bored with it all,” he said. “But most of this was recorded in June, when they were much fresher.”

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