As With Gladness, Men Of Old: A Song History
William Chatterton Dix (1837–1898), a Bristol native who went on to manage a marine insurance firm in Glasgow, wrote hymns as a layman rather than a clergyman.[1] The accounts gathered on Hymnary.org agree that he wrote this Epiphany text while ill, but they date it differently, with the Psalter Hymnal Handbook giving 1858 and Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology “about 1860.”[1] Its first printing is also disputed: the Hymnology Archive places it in Dix’s own small collection Hymns of Love and Joy (Bristol, 1859), five six-line stanzas with no music, while the Psalter Hymnal Handbook names A. H. Ward’s Hymns for Public Worship and Private Devotion (1860) instead.[2][1] The Hymnology Archive also records it in the 1859 trial edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern and in that book’s first official edition of 1861, and Julian adds that the St. Raphael’s Hymnal of Bristol printed it at almost the same moment.[2][1] For the 1875 edition the editors dropped the manger imagery, since Matthew’s account sets the magi’s visit in a house, and the 1909 historical edition of the hymnal reports that Dix endorsed the revision.[2]
Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), The Journey of the Magi, tempera and gold on wood, ca. 1433–35. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The melody is older than the words: Conrad Kocher (1786–1872) printed it in his Stuttgart collection Stimmen aus dem Reiche Gottes (1838) with Christian Heinrich Zeller’s German hymn “Treuer Heiland wir sind hier.”[2] William Henry Monk, music editor of the 1861 Hymns Ancient & Modern, cut one phrase from Kocher’s tune and fitted it to Dix’s stanzas, and in that book it was first called DIX.[2][1] The honour did not please the author; in a letter to Duncan Campbell, quoted in Campbell’s Hymns and Hymn Makers (1898), he said, “I dislike it, but now nothing will displace it.”[2]
By the time Julian compiled his dictionary, the hymn had been taken up almost universally by English-language hymnals since 1861, and Hymnary.org now indexes it in nearly 700 collections.[1] It remains a hymn for the Epiphany season after Christmas, and in the United States the DIX tune is also widely sung with Folliott Pierpoint’s “For the Beauty of the Earth.”[2]
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