Christmas Carols and Their Stories
Puzzle 10 · Old English Folk Carols · Page 24 in print
God Rest You Merry
Edward Rimbault’s A Little Book of Christmas Carols (1847) printed two tunes for God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen: one “as sung in the streets of London,” the other “as sung in Cornwall.”
Jump to a word
The words
Catnach
London printer of cheap carol sheets named by Sandys.
Counting House
Scrooge’s office, where the singer is chased away.
Dickens
Charles Dickens, whose A Christmas Carol has a boy sing this carol.
Gentlemen
The people greeted in the first line of the carol.
Itinerant
The lone street singer Sandys heard with this carol in London.
Keyhole
The keyhole through which the young singer sings to Scrooge.
Merry
The word of the old greeting that opens the carol.
Minor Key
The key in which the London tune is usually sung.
Penny Carols
Cheap printed carol sheets of 1830s London.
Pitts
Seven Dials printer of halfpenny and penny carols.
Rimbault
Edward Rimbault, who printed London and Cornwall tunes in 1847.
Scrooge
The miser at whose keyhole the carol is sung in Dickens’s story.
Tidings
The news of comfort and joy in the refrain.
Tom Ison
Ely singer from whom Cecil Sharp noted the carol.
Woodcuts
The rough pictures that decorated penny carol sheets.
Sources
- William Sandys, Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (London: Richard Beckley, 1833); Internet Archive scan (University of California)Internet Archive
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol in Prose (preface dated December 1843); Project Gutenberg eBook #46Project Gutenberg
- Gresham College, lecture transcript: Jeremy Summerly, ‘The 19th-century Taming of the Christmas Carol, from St Erth to Truro’ (8 December 2015)gresham.ac.uk
- Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk-Carols (London: Novello; Taunton: Barnicott and Pearce, 1911); Internet Archive scanInternet Archive