|
|
||
|
|
Hallo again to all. One of the treasures of our library is the 492-page account of a protracted legal battle about the bells of St Mark's Church, Philadelphia—or rather about the wrath those bells caused a number of that fine city's finest citizens in the mid-1870s.*
Can you feel the mid-Victorian pain? The unhappy meeting of nuisance laws and church bell-ringing happens when private citizens begin to expect and demand a choice about what they must hear, feel, see and smell. Private preference becomes privileged through the senses over and against common, civic, or parochial identity. If we follow the fine scholarship of Alain Corbin — whose Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside (1994) ought to be more widely known and enjoyed — the sound of ringing bells throughout the early modern day created a sense of shared time and space through a now-lost but once-pervasive soundscape. Inside and outside the home, the felt vibrations and heard tolls of bells enveloped and united all in ear-shot. There was nothing so sophisticated or contrived as a listening process involved. Bells rang, and everyone knew them. Those who objected to bell-ringing rejected the regular, mandatory acknowledgment that they were part of a wider civic and ecclesiastical world. And so, what were once taken-for-granted sounds became noise, nuisance, and even potential breaches of environmental protection laws. Gone is the world in which Anne Frank heard comfort and a connection with the outside world in the bells of Amsterdam's Westerkerk, or when Dorothy Sayers's Nine Tailors could be a hit for publishers and movie-houses both. Ringing bells are gone from our experience of everyday life, no matter how much we might wish otherwise; they are just beyond what we can remember, caught in the in-between world of a dream from which we have awoken but whose details we cannot quite recall. To ring a new change on an old theme, we wonder if some dimensions of modern Anglican woe have their roots in a long retreat into private residences with private preferences, where we could formerly shut out the bells, realities, and opinions of others we did not care to hear or know. The technological changes of recent decades have brought us into more direct and efficient contact with one another, revealing levels of unlikeness we'd not expected. We can no longer live just our own churchly lives, influenced as they have been over centuries by the policies of specific missionary agencies, the ethos of a given theological college, or the long shadow of a certain bishop. Some effects of the resulting confusion are lost sleep, nervous sick headaches, high levels of irritation, disappointments about real estate — the same things that so troubled people living near the bells of St Mark's some time ago. We live again in a time when we have not much choice about what we'd like to hear and know about our nearest siblings in the church, and so we feel sorry in a way for the suffering campanoclasts of Philadelphia c. 1875. They were undoubtedly tender souls who craved quiet and calm. But we're glad that in the end the campanophiles won, even if it took some time. The bells of St Mark's still ring, publishing good tidings to the meek, and we are happy to hear them as often as we can. We hope that you'll have the chance to hear them for yourselves ere long†. See you next week. * Report of Harrison et al. vs. St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia: A Bill to Restrain the Ringing of Bells so as to Cause a Nuisance to the Occupants of the Dwellings in the Immediate Vicinity of the Church. In the Court of Common Pleas, Philadelphia, February, 1877. |
 This web site is independent. It is not official in any way. Our editorial staff is private and unaffiliated. Please contact editor@anglicansonline.org about information on this page. ©2009 Society of Archbishop Justus. Please address all spam to press@anglicansonline.org |
An even greater treasure is this book's 
