Over the past fifteen years or so, the study of music in nineteenth-century Britain has burgeoned as a subdiscipline of musicology, buoyed by trends locating culture at its methodological core. Ashgate founded its book series, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bennett Zon, general editor), in 1996 and now has roughly thirty-five books to its name, and Boydell & Brewer, observing Ashgate's success, has begun its own, related book series, Music in Britain, 1600–1900 (Rachel Cowgill and Peter Holman, general editors). These combine to provide an increasingly encyclopedic range of knowledge of Victorian musical culture. Now, thanks to Charles Edward McGuire's Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-Fa Movement, a significant contribution to this repository can be added.

Observed through the lens of moral philanthropy, Victorian musical culture becomes a locus of religious and political activity, and in bringing this to life McGuire does a fine job. Indeed, Music and Victorian Philanthropy is full of wonderfully chosen and beautifully described highways and byways of unknown musical Britain, from Christian missions subsisting in the squalor of Britain's metropolitan dystopias to far-away evangelical ventures in colonial Madagascar. Galvanizing the largely working-class values of religious dissent, these missions not only embodied Victorian Britain's commitment to personal, spiritual, and social improvement but also its determination to improve the musical taste of the nation and its empire. According to musician and moral philanthropist John Curwen (1816–80), founder of the Tonic Sol-Fa Movement, while that taste was formed out of ignorance and otherwise unedifying experiences of music, consuming the masses with moral and spiritual distractions, it was music—properly taught and judiciously chosen—that could help come to the rescue. Thus, the Tonic Sol-Fa Movement was born, “for the elevation of mankind” and the benefit of “worship, temperance, and culture” (John Spencer Curwen, Memorials of John Curwen, 1882, cited in McGuire, 2).

Tonic Sol-Fa began unassumingly as an aid to teaching church psalmody. Sarah Glover (1785–1867), daughter of a Norwich clergyman, created the system in the late 1820s to teach children in her father's parish, and, although successful within its own terms, it remained highly localized in use. John Curwen identified its potential and, being a Congregational minister with a geographically diverse network of contacts, was able to create what McGuire calls “a musical and moral empire” (17). With a network advantageously in place, Curwen indulged his musical and spiritual loves, setting in train one of the most important musical movements of the Victorian period. Through its educational agenda of teaching musical literacy to the masses, music became a foil for moral and ethical development, contributing to the Victorian welter of religious, political, and social change. McGuire structures his book around these three formative types of change, devoting to each a chapter, respectively, on temperance, missionary work, and suffrage. A substantial preface sets out methodology, followed by an introduction to philanthropy and the world of Tonic Sol-Fa and a useful epilogue tracing Tonic Sol-Fa's gradual decline in the twentieth century.

The relationship between music and philanthropy is arguably at its strongest in relation to temperance, where Dissenting invention clearly meets social necessity. Here, Tonic Sol-Fa and temperance speak the same language: “Music and Temperance Go Hand in Hand,” an 1888 Curwen advertisement proclaims (98). But in the thorny bramble of imperial Britain, Victorian philanthropy takes on a rather different and more aggressively political hue. How that colonial agenda maps onto definitions of philanthropy is something McGuire only very partially explores, generally avoiding—perhaps wisely—the distraction of the legion postcolonial literature of Said and other cultural and critical theorists. At the same time, however, this might help explain why, or how, the term “philanthropy” can be used to describe activities deemed to be socially inimical today yet exemplary in Victorian Britain. These definitions matter even more in relation to suffrage, which McGuire himself acknowledges differs from temperance and imperial mission in its proponent's aims, class, and social constitution.

Music and Victorian Philanthropy may not answer these questions, but it does provide an absorbing and beautifully researched overview of the interrelationship between musical culture and some of Victorian Britain's most dominant social movements. Drawing upon a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it is the first book to probe beneath the surface of Victorian philanthropy to reveal some of its musical roots. And as McGuire ably demonstrates, those roots spread widely, working their way into the very fabric of Victorian culture. As Tonic Sol-Fa musicology spread its roots into cultural history, Music and Victorian Philanthropy speaks to cultural history, showing how cultural history can learn from musicology.