A "poem by Dickens" -- not!

A few days ago, I heard a lovely vocal setting of a hymn-like verse and melody, which was brought to my attention since the poem to which the music was set was ascribed to Charles Dickens! I was immediately a bit skeptical of this claim; while Dickens did write a few bit of occasional verse, nothing of it had the particualr qualities of these stanzas. It's a striking text, the epitome (perhaps) of Victorian sentiment, a string of adjectives and sweet epiphanies, evoked even in their loss, as a symbol of all that matters. All of which are then tied together with the hopeful refrain that "these things can never die":

The pure, the bright, the beautiful,

That stirred our hearts in youth;

The impulse to a wordless pray'r

The dreams of love and truth;

The longings after something lost,

The spirit's yearning cry;

The strivings after better hopes;

These things can never die!

It was written in the 1860's, and has apparently been set to music dozens of times since; the choral arrangement I'd heard, composed quite recently by one Lee Dengler, has become a sort of standard. But what was the source of the attribution to Dickens? My hunch was that it might be due to its having appeared in one of his periodicals, and that proved right when I found it in All The Year Round from an issue in 1862. Here, it was given the title "Imperishable," but without an author credit (ATYR, like Dickens's earlier Household Words, never gave any of its authors a byline). But wait, the plot thickened: rival settings of the same song, under the title "The pure! The bright! The beautiful!" turned up at nearly the same time, attributed to the famous songster Stephen Foster, he of "I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair." It's possible that Foster composed a setting for the poem, of course, but the published sheet music mentions no other author.

The Foster attribution is maintained by a number of present-day sites dedicated to his music, although in published books it's never listed as among his works. The association with Dickens, however stuck with the poem, such that quite a few online versions still credit it to him, despite the lack of byline. The full list of contributors to All The Year Round, I knew, had been largely unknown until the fortuitous discovery in 2015 of Dickens's own annotated copy, which included handwritten indications of the authorship of nearly every piece. And so I contacted Jeremy Parrott, the discoverer of this treasure, and from him learned the that the name of poem's true author was neither Dickens nor Foster, but Sarah Doudney!

Sarah Doudney

Doudney (1841-1926) was best known in her day as a novelist, though other poems of hers had become the text of hymns, such as the popular "The Christian's Good-Night." Searching for "Imperishable" with her name, I found that the earliest references to it dated to the early twentieth century, long after the duelling attributions to Dickens and Foster. It seems likely that Doudney, later in her career, must have in some way have re-asserted her authorship, such that newspapers and magazines that reprinted it -- even when they chose only a single stanza -- regularly credited it to her. Despite this, the Dickens attribution has persisted, and it was apparently under the misapprehension that it was his that Lee Dengler composed his setting.

Dengler's arrangement of the song remains an extraordinary one, with a sort of antiphonal structure between lower and higher registers, and a hymnodic resolution to each verse that could bring the hardest unbeliever to believe -- not necessarily in God as such, but in "these things" -- and in these long-misattributed words of Sarah Doudney's, which have long since proven themselves imperishable.