Daw Chorus
Composer Ethel Smyth starts telling the Archbishop of Canterbury a joke, and then wishes she hadn’t...
late 1880s
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Composer Ethel Smyth starts telling the Archbishop of Canterbury a joke, and then wishes she hadn’t...
late 1880s
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
In the late 1880s, rising composer Ethel Smyth became friendly with Nelly Benson, daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and often shared in the family’s meals. Archbishop Benson’s massive dignity never failed to disconcert Ethel, and on one occasion she started nervously babbling an anecdote about a misprint in a newspaper.
abridged
THE conversation had turned to printers’ errors, and I had got as far as saying I had recently read about a printer’s error, merely the omission of a final ‘d’... and here I stopped, overcome with misgiving. But there was no disobeying His Grace’s acid-affable: “Pray let us hear the case in question,”* and with death in my soul I told them how a local newspaper had stated in connection with a recent visit from General Booth,* that after his train had left the station a large crow remained on the platform for half an hour singing ‘Rock of Ages.’*
What happened then was, first silence all round, then someone tried to laugh, then Mrs Benson said cheerfully: “A fine athletic performance anyhow!” and instantly asked the Archbishop whether the Dean of Rochester had spoken well at the Meeting that morning? ... “But it really was a funny story” I afterwards pleaded to Nelly who had not been present. “Funny!” she replied gloomily, “of course it was funny, but what on earth has that to do with it?”
abridged
William Booth (1829-1912) was not a military man but a Methodist preacher, who founded the Salvation Army in 1865, and served as its first General from 1878. Though no one could fault the Army’s charitable work, some members of the Church of England were dismayed that Booth joined it to his own idiosyncratic Christian creed, and the elevation of women to leadership roles ruffled a few feathers too.
Edward White Benson (1829-1896) was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883 until his unexpected death in 1896, aged 67. A former Headmaster of Wellington College, Berkshire, he was a writer himself, but two of his most lasting contributions to culture were the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Christmas, which he introduced during his time as Bishop of Truro, and planting the seed of Henry James’s ghost story “The Turn of the Screw”.
The error was, of course, to print ‘crow’ instead of ‘crowd’. ‘Rock of Ages’ was written in 1763 by the Reverend Augustus Toplady (1740-1778).
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate her ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.