An Englishman’s Idea of Home

We begin in early summer 1871. The citizens of Paris are wiping the blood from their streets as the subjects of London enjoy a first bank holiday.Footnote ⁴ Experiments in Communard autonomy have proved short-lived, and costly. Before long the semaine sanglante will enter into history as yet another episode in the tawdry saga of French revolutionary excess. Meanwhile the British state seems more stable than ever. With no armed conflicts abroad and only gradual reform at home, the coast is clear for exploiting colonial interests and profiting from global trade. On one side of the Channel is political chaos; on the other, economic prosperity. Such comparisons may be trite, but they have the blessing of historical precedent. The nineteenth century abounds with Paris/London parallels, drawn most often by those on the northern side of the divide. Dickens helped, of course: The Tale of Two Cities, first serialized in 1859, was a familiar point of reference for most literate Victorians. But there are many other examples that we might look to, embracing word and image and more. For reasons that will become clear, I want to begin with an example from the weekly press of summer 1871.

The paper in question is the Graphic, first published in London in late 1869 as a direct competitor to the Illustrated London News. As the name suggests, the Graphic traded on the quality of its engravings, many of which were made by familiar and respected artists (Luke Fildes and John Everett Millais both contributed in the early years). At sixpence per issue, it cost a penny more than its rival. In return, it offered an average of ten full pages of illustrations (out of twenty-four pages in total). If we take the issue in question – 1 July 1871 – we find that most of the picture pages are unsigned, yet each of them showcases the detail and care that went into the enterprise. Among the subjects given the graphic treatment are miscellaneous matters of local interest and worldly intelligence: a comic sketch of the Tichborne trialFootnote ⁵ shows a London courtroom at ‘luncheon time’, a portrait of Dom Pedro II flatters the Brazilian emperor, and a panorama of Buenos Aires harbour leaves an impression of orderly commerce.Footnote ⁶ These, however, are the exceptions. Most of the illustrations in this issue fall into two distinct sorts: those that crow of French failure and those that advertise English success.

Recall the date: in the summer of 1871 the Franco-Prussian War was still hot in the reading public’s memories. Judging by appearances the editorial team of the Graphic was bullish about the current state of international affairs. Beneath the masthead on the front cover were billowing flags and a monumental horse: the ‘Unveiling [of] the Statue of King Frederick William III. in the Lust Garten, Berlin’. Both the statue of the old Kaiser and the pageantry in the pleasure garden featured again, towards the back of the paper, on a page with six boxed illustrations, each displaying a different aspect of the celebrations in Berlin.Footnote ⁷ On the following page was a more light-hearted take on the journey to the German capital, with side-by-side illustrations of first- and third-class transport.Footnote ⁸ Without even mentioning the F-word, the Graphic gave its readers multiple souvenirs of French defeat. Clearly Bismarck’s newly unified and triumphant empire was worthy of attention. But the real story lay elsewhere.

We see this ‘elsewhere’ in another illustration from the same issue, in which readers were given a supposedly first-hand account of the aftermath of war. Given the limited range of the Krupps canons stationed by Prussian forces outside Paris, the city centre had suffered relatively little damage by foreign bombardment. It was the civil war in the wake of military defeat that laid waste to large areas of the urban fabric, including the monumental Rue Royale. ‘The British Excursionist in Paris’ was the title of the only cartoon in the Graphic this week, comprising four rows of sketches of a battle-scarred city.Footnote ⁹ Whoever it was that prepared this page, the joke was very much on the residents of the French capital. The topmost sketch has a line of passengers waiting outside the Gare Saint-Lazare: ‘Take my cab, Milord’, says a man in the street to a queuing tourist, ‘the cushions are stuffed with bits of shell’. Lower down the page are more cabs, upright and overturned: ‘Nothing so inconvenient as the last vestiges of a barricade’. Another sketch has travellers outside a hotel (identified by a sign with half the ‘o’ and all the ‘l’ missing): ‘We’ve got another apartment on the third floor, Sir, but the staircase is a little bit troublesome’. And so it continues. The cartoonist shows someone sleeping on bare floorboards with umbrella in hand, the moon and clouds visible through gaping holes in the walls: ‘Desirable furnished apartments to be let, Rue Royale’. A final example sees a smartly dressed character shimmying up a rope in what looks like a building site. ‘What’s that gentleman doing?’ says one observer to another, ‘He’s going home’.

There is a cumulative cruelty to this page that should not go unremarked; a moral flippancy and cartoonish opportunism that seems at odds with the paper’s ethos. In alternative circumstances the Graphic was capable of claiming a mantle of social responsibility as well as a reputation for realist art. The oft-told story of its first issue, for instance, centres on Fildes’s ‘Houseless and Hungry’, an image of London destitution that Millais saw fit to pass to Dickens. (The ailing writer was so enamoured of the haggard and huddled figures that he commissioned Fildes to illustrate The Mystery of Edwin Drood.) In the case of post-Commune Paris, the miseries of houselessness and hunger were evidently handled with less sympathy. Perhaps the Excursionist thought the citizens had brought it on themselves, that they belonged to a new class of the undeserving poor? Such an attitude would help to explain the two images on the page facing the cartoon: the top half shows a convoy of Communards at Versailles; the bottom half shows a chapel at St Thomas’s Hospital.Footnote ¹⁰ As Paris/London parallels go, this could scarcely be more direct: in the grounds of the old royal palace is a wretched prisoner of war camp; opposite the Palace of Westminster is a shrine to medical charity. The pairing invites the reader to wonder: what is it that so separates the English from the French?

Imagining such speculation on the part of Victorian readers is not, I think, entirely idle. It encourages us to consider the normative claims associated with a pair of (obviously inflated and contrived) national types and to elaborate how these types were represented in the English press at a particular historical juncture. In the case of the old Kaiser and his mount, we have already seen the negative image of French military stature. And the comic business with the barricades plays up the idea that Parisians are prone to fighting their battles in the street. On the flipside are the portrayals of English achievement, including one example – a picture of promenading in Hyde Park – that figures accomplishment in fashionable and female forms.Footnote ¹¹ Since French chic remained a model for English society throughout this period, this might be read as a claim of beating cross-Channel cousins at their own game. For the most part, however, we witness the more conventional Victorian veneration of the institutions of formal monarchy and established church. The hospital chapel is typical in this regard; not only was it a newly consecrated site of Anglican communion, but, as another illustration spells out, it was Queen Victoria who opened St Thomas’s, in June 1871, in a ceremony that included the knighting of the hospital treasurer (a certain Mr. Hicks).Footnote ¹² We find a similar confidence in the architecture of state on a page dedicated to a recent choral festival at Peterborough cathedral: two engravings show, respectively, the interior of the cathedral during a full-to-capacity service and the western porch during a grand procession of the choristers.Footnote ¹³ The depiction of such sounding spaces helped to amplify the message of English stability. But there is another sonically loaded image that, I think, offered a yet more compelling account of what supposedly made the kingdom united and unique.

Figure 1 is a reproduction of the Graphic’s impression of the state concert at Buckingham Palace on 21 June 1871; Figure 2 is a detail of the same.Footnote ¹⁴ The first thing to note is the size and placement of the picture: this is the only double-page spread in the paper, and it occupies the centrefold. The ostensible occasion for the concert was the wedding of Princess Louise and John Campbell earlier that year, but events of this kind were by now an established fixture of the social calendar, stretching back at least as far as 1858 when an evening concert at the palace followed the wedding of Princess Victoria to Prince Frederick. As the Graphic illustrates, the concert of 1871 was no small affair; part of its purpose was to include guests who may not have been invited to more ‘private’ state functions. Attendance was naturally a badge of honour and every individual commanded by the queen had their name printed in the Times. The resulting roll-call has all the usual suspects: royals, diplomats, clergy, nobility, lords, MPs, knights, doctors, and military (plus accompanying family).Footnote ¹⁵ Given the existence of this list, it may have been tempting to cross-reference the Graphic and the Times, using the double-page spread in the manner of an annotated sketch with heads de-faced and numbered: here is the Russian grand duke, there is the Bengali nawab, and so on. Yet, it seems equally plausible the illustration was viewed in terms of splendour and scale. For many Victorian readers it would have been the overall effect that mattered: here was a dignified multitude, gathered politely and listening respectfully (if not always attentively) to a performance of solo song. Needless to say, concerts of this kind had no place in Paris at the time, where even the (as-yet-unfinished) Palais Garnier had been pressed into service as a wartime storehouse.Footnote ¹⁶ Besides a vague satisfaction with the green grass of home (periodically contrasted with the bloodied Champs-Élysées), what else might this image suggest about English self-perception in the summer of 1871?

Figure 1. “Her Majesty’s State Concert at Buckingham Palace,” The Graphic, no. 83 (1 July 1871), 12–13.

Figure 2. Detail of “Her Majesty’s State Concert at Buckingham Palace”.

A simple point, easily missed, is that concerts were deemed a suitable vehicle for promoting national identity on a global stage. For all the historiographical fixation on das Land ohne Musik, being English in the nineteenth century absolutely included being musical, not least in the company of foreigners. The crowd at the palace was understood to be heterogeneous, including ambassadors, attachés, and heads of state. This was a celebration via congregation; the Germans might have been flocking to Berlin, but the rest of the world was being entertained in Westminster. The nature of the entertainment is also significant, with singing a key part of the picture. Whether we imagine readers playing spot-the-dignitary or appreciating the totality of the image, there is no doubt which figure stands out from all the rest. What is more, the singing figure holds in her hands a sheet of Christmas card music with a title that any reader could decipher: ‘Home, Sweet Home’. These three words named one of the best-known songs of the Victorian world:

Without wishing to let the facts get in the way of a good splash, ‘Home, Sweet Home’ may not have been sung at Buckingham Palace on 21 June 1871. At any rate, it is nowhere to be found on the state concert programme that was printed, along with the guest list, in the Times. We can see from the programme that there were three female vocal solos on the night, none of which could be mistaken for ‘Home, Sweet Home’.Footnote ¹⁸ This makes the legibility in the Graphic all the more notable. It is possible the programme was inaccurate or incomplete (‘Home, Sweet Home’ may have been an encore, for instance). It is also possible the engraver used artistic licence for pragmatic reasons.Footnote ¹⁹ Still, those three words were not put in the Graphic by accident. And one way to account for their inclusion is to persist with the question of self-perception by way of an 1867 novel by Mrs Edwin James.

Muriel; or, Social Fetters was described by one critic as ‘an extremely foolish book, of the truest young-lady type, with the addition of, just so much knowledge of the world as takes away the charm of innocence from such girlish romance’.Footnote ²⁰ We find an example of this knowledge of the world in chapter four, which begins with an introduction to Lisle Court in Warwickshire. The mention of this stately pile is the cue for the narrator to opine on the natures of national dwellings:

James was evidently using the text of the song in the service of her ‘bold’ claim for British (or perhaps English) exceptionalism. The perception that other nationalities lacked even the requisite vocabulary for an understanding of home was a recurring trope in the Victorian period. The lines from Dickens I have used as an epigraph, which trumpet the strength of the word home, do not explicitly claim the idea for England alone. However, the quotation comes from the point in the plot where the titular Martin Chuzzlewit has returned from a stay in America and, upon reaching native shores, realizes what he has been missing.Footnote ²² One mid-century account of an Englishwoman’s travels in America, to give another example, relays a conversation with a French guest during a night in a boarding house:

As in the Graphic, that which is supposedly most English (home) is cast into sharpest relief when set against that which is supposedly most French (in this case, indifference). Such claims were plainly chauvinistic and essentializing, but it seems they did have some traction internationally. Charles Brook Dupont-White, a socialist critic known for his translations of the works of John Stuart Mill, quipped (in French) in 1864 that ‘If household gods had not existed, the English would have invented them’. As his double-barrelled surname suggests, Dupont-White was the son of a French father and English mother, so he presumably felt some personal investment in this topic. The English, he continued ‘truly invented the religion of home [chez soi], home sweet home, as they call it. Nothing better exemplifies the individualism of this race, the family, the home being, more than property, an appendage and extension of the individual’.Footnote ²⁴

At the same time Dupont-White was proposing an English religion of home, John Ruskin was lecturing on the subject in Manchester: ‘[home] is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love’.Footnote ²⁵ What Dupont-White did not emphasize – perhaps because he did not have to – was that the cult of home was strictly gendered. Ruskin gave two lectures, the first focused on men, the second on women; it was in the latter that he delivered most of his material on the topic of home. Ruskin also included a chapter on ‘home virtues’ in his Ethics of Dust (1866), which was initially published with the now-infamous subtitle: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation.Footnote ²⁶ Unlike the Manchester lectures published as Sesame and Lilies, the ten sections of Ethics of Dust were not a record of actual public speeches. Rather, they were inspired by Ruskin’s time working at a girls’ school in Winnington, Cheshire.

It seems that music played an important part in the life of the school. For one thing, there are numerous mentions of instrumental practice in Ethics of Dust; for another, Ruskin’s letters record the attendance of certain esteemed visitors:

Ruskin’s biographer, Edward Tyas Cook, quotes a letter from Charles Hallé that expresses disappointment at Ruskin’s preference for ‘Home, Sweet Home’ over Beethoven. The former, in Hallé’s view, was ‘sickly and shallow’.Footnote ²⁸ Ruskin responded by writing: ‘I don’t understand Beethoven and I fear I never shall have time to do so’. In Cook’s reckoning, the power of the piano variations went beyond any narrowly aesthetic considerations: ‘It was the scene … that had appealed to Ruskin … The whole place seemed to realize Plato’s ideal of a spot where, in the education of the young, fair sights and sounds should meet the sense like a breeze’.Footnote ²⁹ Yet, if the girls’ school at Winnington was a suitable setting for ‘Home, Sweet Home’, Ruskin took a different view when he encountered the song in grander surroundings.

This extract, from Ruskin’s polemic epistles to the working men of Victorian Britain, expresses more than displeasure with the by-now-familiar illustration – it indicts the state concert for failing to live up to a set of gendered moral codes:

Here, Ruskin identifies markers of luxury in order to decry them as marks of sin; the various hues of the toilettes de Paris are, in his mind’s eye, so many shades of vice. His mind’s ear, meanwhile, is bemoaning last year’s news: Charles Coote conducted the quadrilles at the state concert of 1870, but Mr. W.G. Cusins directed proceedings in 1871 (when there were no quadrilles on the bill). Once again, the facts are not what matters, since the insinuation – that fashionable dance music is incompatible with the virtuous life – comes across loud and clear. What must have been less clear (unless readers had the eighty-third number of the Graphic at hand) was the meaning of Ruskin’s next remarks:

The clue is Ruskin’s ‘page 17’. He is referring to the split page in the Graphic with the captured Communards above and the hospital chapel below. Far from sweet, the scene of the prisoners is shot through with bitterness. Sins and guilt run riot. The races – of France? of the world? – are divided. It was only six years prior to this that Ruskin had uttered his best-known passage on the ‘true nature of home’, in the aforementioned Manchester lecture: ‘it is the place of Peace, the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division … so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it … it ceases to be home’.Footnote ³³ For this aesthetic and social critic, the horror of Paris in 1871 – after the siege was over and the civil war had run its course – was precisely the horror of homelessness. His pairing of ouvrier and pétroleuse was a grotesque parody of man and wife, each fallen hopelessly from domestic grace.

In Ruskin’s ideal world ‘the man is at his own gate, defending it, if need be, against insult and spoil … the woman is to be within her gates, as the centre of order, the balm of distress, and the mirror of beauty’.Footnote ³⁴ In the image of the Paris Commune he saw the disintegration of these roles as well as the society they ought to shelter. It was not the territorial sense of home-as-homeland that concerned him here (i.e., the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the German Empire) but the moral sense of home-as-housekeeping. He understood that the problem with the Communards, quite apart from their ungodly ambitions, was their willingness to bear arms at home: war at a distance is one thing; war on the doorstep, quite another. In the image of the concert Ruskin saw no less of a calamity: here was a vision of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ that served to dignify fashion and desecrate the temple off the hearth; the white-throated warbling was nothing more and nothing less than a performance of gesture politics.

While it is hardly a daring move to draw attention to the Victorians’ obsession with domestic ideology, it is worth underscoring how the passions attendant on the idea of home helped to ensure the popularity and legibility of ‘Home, Sweet Home’. This song travelled not only as an item of entertainment but also as a calling card and a crib sheet for a way of being in the world – one that many at the time considered uniquely English. Yet this placed a curious burden on the song. As Ruskin’s complaint suggests, any performance that appeared too ostentatious or too immodest risked accusations of deceit. The virtues of home, when voiced in performance, could all too easily take on the vices of virtuosity.Footnote ³⁵ What ought to enact a sense of family could instead become a scene of frivolity. Indeed, Ruskin’s hermeneutics of Victorian song now seem profoundly suspicious, which serves as a reminder of the ideological stakes in this debate. Ruskin also reminds us – with his anecdote from Winnington and his anger at the Graphic – that the meaning of a song is, in no small part, dependent on the circumstances of its performance. Given that ‘Home, Sweet Home’ had been in circulation for nearly 50 years by 1871, it is worth now turning our attention to some of the formative performances in its reception and circulation. Not only does this help to explain why the song was so readily available for political posturing in the mid-Victorian period, but it also throws into relief some of the changes in the affective geography of longing and belonging across the nineteenth century.

The country and the city and beyond

‘Home, Sweet Home’ was not a common phrase prior to 1823. It was only after Payne’s verses caught the public attention that these words settled into their stable, symmetrical form. Naturally, the words ‘home’ and ‘sweet’ had previously been found together in all manner of contexts, not least in poetry concerned with cosiness and country life. And some English songs on such themes from the early nineteenth century have obvious similarities with Payne’s work. For instance, there was an anonymous poem entitled ‘Home, Sweet Home’ published in the Cambridge Chronicle in July 1819, then again in the Westmorland Gazette the following July, which had three stanzas with the same refrain: ‘For home sweet home is all to me!’ A slightly earlier ballad attributed simply to ‘Parry’, was published in the Chester Chronicle in 1812 as ‘Sweet Home!’ At some point in the decade that followed, Parry’s ballad must have been set to music, since it was sung in the Royal Gardens, Vauxhall, by Mr. Collyee in 1822. Some lines from the first verse – ‘When wand’ring far on distant soil,/Where Fortune bade me roam;/’Mid splendid scenes, or joy or toil,/I ne’er forgot my Home Sweet Home!’ – suggest Payne may have got wind of this text, even if he was in Paris when he wrote his own verses and refrain.

The oldest precursor I have identified is not in English but Latin, and it takes us much further away from the bosom of the Victorian family: ‘My youngster’s [sic] are very desirous to know the words of an old breaking up song, which is usually called “Dulce Domum”’, wrote a correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1796, ‘I once knew it, but cannot now recollect a single stanza of it’.Footnote ³⁶ The correspondent, signed Marcus, was doubtless pleased when he received the next issue of the magazine, which included not one but five responses. One of these responses included information on the history of the song: ‘The “Dulce Domum” was written, about 200 years since by a Winchester scholar, detained at the usual time of breaking-up, and chained to a tree or pillar, for his offence to the master, when the other scholars had liberty to visit their respective homes’.Footnote ³⁷ Another gave directions to a shop in central London that stocked the sheet music.Footnote ³⁸ Another still gave two versions of the full text with translation. Here is the first verse and chorus of one of those:

As if to prove the endurance of English conservatism, an almost identical correspondence can be traced 15 years later in the same magazine. This time it was Viator from Tunbridge who kicked off the discussion with a translation in which the chorus began ‘Home, dear Home!’Footnote ⁴¹ The following number included two further letters on the subject and a slightly different translation, in which the chorus began ‘Home, home, sweet home’.Footnote ⁴²

To the best of my knowledge neither Payne nor Bishop had any ties to Winchester. What is significant about the ‘Dulce Domum’ connection is that it provides an English example of singing about home from a distance. Much of the literature on desiring home from afar begins with Johannes Hofer’s coining of ‘nostalgia’ in the late seventeenth-century.Footnote ⁴³ This Greek-derived word, usually translated as ‘longing for home’, famously inaugurated a medical discourse centred on notions of sickness, as in mal du pays or mal du Suisse. In Hofer’s terms nostalgia was a disease, like scurvy or smallpox; it had causes, symptoms, and – if the patient was in good hands – remedies. This pathological neologism was certainly influential, but it did not necessarily diagnose a universal condition. Until later in the nineteenth century, nostalgia was a predominantly Francophone phenomenon. It made sense to Rousseau and to Rossini (who included a ranz des vaches as a sonic marker of homesickness in Guillaume Tell), but we cannot be sure that Marcus and his youngster’s [sic] would have shared the same frames of reference. In ‘Dulce Domum’ we have a song supposedly written by a boy kept at boarding school while his friends left for the break. However, we also have a song that is sung en masse at a feast day or to mark the end of the academic year. This collective act, however compulsory, serves to complicate the meaning of the text: this is a song about longing but also about belonging; it is bitter and it is sweet. Home in this context is not the forever fading (and perhaps invented) memory of youth that haunts so much of the nostalgia literature, it is a real place – or, rather, two places. The conceit of ‘Dulce Domum’ is that the boy singers have both a familial and a scholarly home; there would be no point to the song otherwise. Of course, this is not what Payne and Bishop were aiming at. For their operatic purposes there was only one true home, and it was defined by the family of birth and the countryside of pastoral imagination. Nevertheless, the breaking-up precedent suggests we might pay closer attention to the interplay of individual and collective expression in the dramatic text.

Clari is first associated with ‘Home, Sweet Home’ in the opening act when she sings it after appearing (according to the stage instructions) ‘fatigued and melancholy’.Footnote ⁴⁴ She also communicates the ‘agony! agony! agony!’ of recognition upon hearing the same song performed by a character in a play-within-the-play later in the same act. Despite having somewhere perfectly comfortable to live she is painfully aware that she is beyond the bounds of home proper (at least as far as the domestic ideology of the opera is concerned). By the time the melody returns, in the third act of Payne’s dramatic scheme, Clari has found her way back to her native village, anxious to return to her family’s embraces but conscious that she may not be welcomed on account of her having previously abandoned them for love in the city. No sooner has Clari persuaded an old friend, Ninetta, to arrange a meeting with her estranged mother then ‘a flute is heard playing the air of Clari’s first song’. Ninetta spells out the significance: ‘Hear you that, Clari? Some wandering mountaineer, who – oh, Clari! does it seem as if a spirit in the air had breathed the melody so sacred to our home, as a good omen to the returning wanderer?’ After her friend’s exit Clari pauses to soliloquize in virtue – ‘And heaven will help the heart determined to retrace the paths of rectitude and honour’ – before launching into a song about the follies of placing the pursuit of pleasure over one’s duty to home. As the stage instructions make clear the flute continues to be heard and ‘the concluding couplets of each verse … [correspond to] the concluding couplets of Clari’s first song’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The offstage flute is soon after brought back into service, at precisely the moment Clari approaches her childhood home:

At this point a chorus of villagers takes up the tune as if Clari were being re-enveloped in a community centred on her dear family home.

It is hard to imagine a clearer articulation of the country in opposition to the city. Yet, as I intimated in the introduction, the anti-urban sentiment of this popular nostalgic opera was itself a product of cosmopolitan exchange. Bishop’s song was a breakout hit, which meant it was frequently performed in the city and this gives us another set of performances to consider. Indeed, one unsigned article of 1831 beginning ‘Grant me patience, Heaven!’ goes on to cite ‘Home, Sweet Home’ alongside ‘Cherry Ripe’ and the Huntsman’s chorus from ‘Der Freyschutz [sic]’ as examples of street songs so inescapable they could drive a man to murder.Footnote ⁴⁷ To this example from a London periodical we might add an article on ‘The Horrors of Harmony’ published in Dublin in 1834, which identified ‘Home, Sweet Home’ as among the principle sources of the anonymous author’s suffering.Footnote ⁴⁸ Another article from the early 1830s (this one published in London), lists Bishop’s song among the popular tunes that contribute to ‘the sorrows of a musical monkey’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Here the semi-simian narrator is compelled to grind out tunes on street-organs day in day out, which for them – as well as those nearby – is an ongoing source of misery. All of this helps us to place ‘Home, Sweet Home’ in the category of late-Georgian urban crazes widely remarked upon at the time. In one piece from a London periodical of 1828, for instance, we read how the theatre manager and comic actor Charles Mathews – best known for his one-man ‘At Home’ performances – observed that ‘every footman whistles Freischutz’. This quip prompts the article’s author to nominate similar cases: ‘A few months since every bachelor hummed or whistled ‘C’est l’amour’, and the French, to return the compliment, have made our ‘Robin Adair’, one of the claptraps of the music of their La Dame Blanche’. Similarly, we read, ‘All the baker’s and butcher’s boys in London can go through “Di tanti pal” – where they leave off, answer a question, and take up the “piti”, with the skill of a musician’. It is in this context that the author wonders when ‘Mr. Bishop’s Home, sweet home [will] be forgotten’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Where the operatic presentation of the song emphasized the way it emanated from a timeless, sentimental landscape – played by an invisible sylvan instrument, chorused by a sympathetic peasantry – the immediate urban afterlives of the number spoke to more contemporary rhythms of fashion and exhaustion. The following is taken from an article entitled ‘London Noises’, published in 1828: ‘Folks may talk as they will of the fogs of London, and of its canopy of smoke; but what are these to the vile congregation of acoustic abominations that prevails “from night to morn, from morn till dewy eve”, in the great city?’ Alongside familiar complaints about itinerant traders – menders of kettles, grinders of knives, sweepers of chimneys, et al. – is a particular objection to ‘the big drum, that eternal rattler of windows and shaker of houses’.Footnote ⁵¹ This auditory threat to domestic stability is bound up, at least according to this account, with both the history and memorability of Bishop’s song:

Once again, the sensations of these urban performances are a long way from the quietude of Clari’s family cottage, but they nevertheless suggest – as so many Georgian stage works did – a powerful connection between melody and memory: ‘Popular music and songs become in regular succession worn-out ideas’, opined one piece for Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in 1834. ‘The more that a musical composition is liked at first, the more sure is it in time to become hackneyed and worn out’.Footnote ⁵³ The first example given is the Copenhagen Waltz and then comes the ever-so-familiar tune:

What is striking in this account is not only the dispersal of an operatic air into the streets of London (and beyond) but the way that a new form of nostalgia emerges from the sonic wreckage:

Clearly we can find more than one mode of urban nostalgia at work in accounts of nineteenth-century song. In the case of ‘Home, Sweet Home’, its crepuscular existence allowed not only for allusions to a vague pastoral idyll or a precise date in the life of the city but also to association with the experience of exile.Footnote ⁵⁶ There were many versions of an ideal, unreachable home to which this song offered performative access. It was promptly adapted for Christian hymnody, for instance. And here the earthly home of Payne’s lyrics ceded prominence to the anticipation of Heaven. Later in the century, the song became increasingly entangled with the otherworldly as it was used as a device in Spiritualist settings.

In a chapter on ‘the evidence of some American witnesses’ the widow of renowned Scottish medium John Dunglas Home reports the testimony of a man, identified only as ‘D’., who had attended a séance with Home in Hartford, Connecticut, in the mid-1850s. In common with many similar reports D. is introduced as a sceptical, and thus trustworthy, witness. His account of the ‘manifestations’ of the spirits is well-ordered and detailed. First: the table shakes. Second: impromptu knocks are heard. Third: the unexplained knocks repeat the knocking patterns of those gathered around the table. Fourth: the mobile sound of bells arise, ‘like fifty fairy tambourines in full and joyful play’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Fifth: Home, with one hand on an accordion beneath the table, invited the ladies present to make a musical request. ‘“Home, Sweet Home” and “The Last Rose of Summer” were both called for, and they were both beautifully executed in notes so strong and rich and various, that an accomplished musician at the table said “that four hands must have been employed;” the tunes seemed to be played with a double octave’. Footnote ⁵⁸ These seem to have been favourite songs of the spirits. In another account dated to the mid-1850s, they were heard at a séance in west London, though on this occasion the under-the-table accordion also gave forth ‘God save the Queen’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Again in 1870, at a seance with Home in Edinburgh, ‘Home, Sweet Home’ was among the tunes played on the accordion.Footnote ⁶⁰ And once more, in the same year, in London.Footnote ⁶¹

Home was not the only medium to make use of Bishop’s song. Take the case of the Georgiana Houghton, who wrote about ‘a séance to commemorate dear Papa’s birthday’.

Houghton reports that, while singing, ‘we heard the tender accompaniment of a most delicate harp’, but it was too quiet for her mother to hear.

Decades later, in the 1930s, the same song would be reported at séances in Toronto, which were apparently occasions for hearing nineteenth-century opera stars: ‘It was announced’, at one such séance, ‘that Emma Abbott would sing to the accompaniment of a violinist who formed one of the circle. “When the Swallows Homeward Fly” and “Home Sweet Home” were given, a powerful voice rendering the air through the trumpet’.Footnote ⁶⁴