Singing with the Angels Innocence, Death, and Boy Choristers in Victorian Popular Literature

Re-approaches writings to provide a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century boyhood, family and emotion.


There were an estimated 150,000 boy choristers in fin-de-siècle Britain, yet the great corpus of literature about them has largely been ignored by scholars. In Singing with the Angels, Lynn Schoch re-approaches neglected stories, poems, newspapers, magazines, parlour songs and memoirs, to generate new insights into Victorian boyhood.

Schoch has spent fifty years exploring Victorian literature and music. Supporting his children touring and making audio recordings in a university choir, he learned that choirs are not limited to Sunday attendance. Victorian choristers played, studied, and often spent holidays together; moreover, as school stories gravitated towards a tough and competitive masculinity, choir stories helped preserve the belief that deep feeling could thrive in a boyish world.

As ever more parishes adopted surplice choirs, choristers in popular literature were perceived as something close to heaven on earth. The choirboy became a symbol of consolation and hope: bereaved parents could imagine their children in a better place, believing in a heaven which amplified the best of what they could see-and hear-on earth.

LYNN ALAN SCHOCH is Adjunct Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington, Indiana, and retired staff of Indiana University. His work has taken him variously to the UK, Poland and Malaysia. His wife is a pianist and he enjoys music (choir, Victorian working-class songs, Scottish ballads and British music hall), popular theatre, gardening and baseball with his children and grandchildren.