“Lift Up a Living Nation”: Community and Nation, Socialism and Religion in The English Hymnal, 1906

This article uses the editorial work of Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams on The English Hymnal (1906) to argue that at the turn of the twentieth century, evocations of the past, of national and of folk culture were not necessarily nostalgic or conservative, but were often used by those on the left to make strongly political statements about the …