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Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. Jason Whittaker. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2022.

Reviewed by Benjamin Wolf

This is a book about a single poem and a single song: William Blake’s poem, Jerusalem (“And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green”), and Hubert Parry’s famous setting of it. This combination of words and music has been central to British (perhaps it is better to say English) cultural life since Parry’s composition was first performed in 1916. Although originally composed for “Fight for Right,” an organization that supported Britain’s war efforts, it was subsequently adopted by the women’s suffrage movement, the Women’s Institute, and by figures on both the left and right of the political spectrum. Jason Whittaker traces this history, and the possible cultural meanings of both Blake’s poem and Parry’s setting of it, over a two-hundred-year period, ending in the Britain of the 2011 royal wedding, the 2012 Olympic Games and the 2016 Brexit referendum. Where British musical history is concerned, this book takes a valuable place alongside others such as Andrew Blake’s The Land without Music or Hughes and Stradling’s more cynical The English Musical Renaissance 1840 – 1940. [1]