Songs of Peace and Joy

Songs of Peace and Joy (words by Frances Ridley Havergal, set to music by Charles Henry Purday) was published by James Nisbet & Co., London, 1879. Charles H. Purday, over 80 when this volume of music was completed, was a composer whose music F.R.H.‘s father, William Henry Havergal, had admired. A finely gifted singer, he had sung at the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838 when F.R.H. was a toddler. In the summer of 1878 he for the first time read poems by F.R.H. in The Ministry of Song and Under the Surface, and began setting a number of them to music. He wrote to F.R.H., asking her approval, and later she made notes and suggestions to the manuscript scores, gratefully endorsing her senior colleague’s work. This has 36 poems by her, nearly all the scores composed by Purday, with two scores by her and one by her father. Frances’ Prefatory Note was dated May 13, 1879, three weeks before her unexpected early death at the age or 42. Purday’s Composer’s Preface was signed October 1, 1879. From the new edition of The Complete Works of Frances Ridley Havergal, this is another volume of true music and true worship.