In The Bleak Midwinter: A Song History

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Christina Rossetti’s poem first reached print not in Britain but in New York: it appeared as “A Christmas Carol” in the January 1872 issue of Scribner’s Monthly, illustrated with a nativity scene.[1][2] She had offered it to Macmillan’s Magazine in 1868 without success, and in December 1873 she placed it in The People’s Magazine; in a later letter she said she did not know how the American printing had come about.[1] The poem gathered readers through anthologies of the 1880s[1] and was later included in her posthumous collected poems of 1904.[2]

Hand-colored lithograph of a snowy New England farmstead with a barn, haystacks and an ox cart

George Henry Durrie, The Farmer’s Home — Winter, hand-colored lithograph, 1863. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

As a hymn, it first appeared in The English Hymnal of 1906 with a tune Gustav Holst composed for it.[2][3] He called the tune CRANHAM, after a Gloucestershire village he knew from his younger years.[2][4] According to Hymnary.org, when all of the stanzas are sung, it is to Holst’s melody.[3]

A second famous setting came from Harold Darke, whose autograph score is dated December 1909; it was published in 1911.[2] Darke’s anthem entered the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1945, and the carol has been heard there in most years since.[4] In 2008 BBC Music Magazine asked 51 directors of music in Britain and the United States to choose the greatest carol, and Darke’s setting came out on top.[2]

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Sources

  1. The Conversation: "How an American magazine helped launch one of Britain’s favorite Christmas carols".
  2. BBC Music Magazine (classical-music.com): "In the Bleak Midwinter – our favourite Christmas carol".
  3. Hymnary.org: "In the Bleak Midwinter".
  4. Christina Rossetti in Music (University of Ottawa): "The Beginnings of a Musical Legacy: Holst and Darke".