Few songs of the British nineteenth century have had the staying power of ‘Home, Sweet Home’. With music by Henry Bishop and words by John Howard Payne, it first appeared in Clari; or, the Maid of Milan (1823) at London’s Covent Garden. The song remained in the repertory well into the twentieth century and is still a point of reference in the twenty-first. In the initial dramatic context it was a solo vehicle for the titular heroine, a means of expressing Clari’s longing to return to her ‘humble’ home.
Once the number became a breakout hit, the opera’s narrative details ceded significance to a vaguer international vogue for nostalgic sentiment. Like the much-discussed Swiss maladie du pays or the contemporary craze for the ranz des vaches, Bishop and Payne’s creation piqued the public interest in imagining a home out of reach. As the decades wore on, however, the song’s invocation of home acquired a distinctive national accent. By the mid-Victorian period ‘Home, Sweet Home’ had come to anchor an ideology of British exceptionalism. To perform or attend to this song in 1871 was to partake in a quasi-ritualistic affirmation of the doctrine of the hearth. This was partly bound up with the specious claim that other languages lacked an adequate word for home, but it was also connected to a shift in the geography of belonging.
In lieu of the Romantic yearning for a distant homeland, this new Victorian nostalgia fixated on the heteronormative family home and its promise of shelter from both the trials of urban modernity and the vices of foreign politics. Drawing on a range of musical, visual, and literary sources this talk explores a key passage in the history of British ambivalence to city living via a song that emerged as a powerful amplifier of anti-urban desire.
Jonathan Hicks is lecturer in music at the University of Aberdeen, having previously held research fellowships at Lincoln College Oxford, King’s College London, and Newcastle University. Jo’s work addresses music and theatre in nineteenth-century Britain. He co-edited The Melodramatic Moment: Musical and Theatrical Culture, 1790-1820 with Katherine Hambridge and has published in journals including Nineteenth-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, and Cambridge Opera Journal.
- Speaker
- Dr Jonathan Hicks
- Venue
- MacRobert Building, MR055
- Contact
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Please contact Dr Christina Ballico (christina.ballico@abdn.ac.uk) should you wish to join the event via Teams.