Presenter: Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, PhD 

Abstract 

Bands of Mercy were highly popular children’s organizations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stemming from the animal-welfare movement and existing in both England and America, yet very little has been written about them.  My initial work on Bands of Mercy was focused on the hymns and songs of the movement for my 2016 book British Hymns for Children, 1800-1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood (Routledge).  I spent 2019 on four projects extending from this work.  The first was some additional research in Australia (National Archives) which houses one of the Bands of Mercy journals.  Secondly, I wrote an article on that journal, entitled “Advocating for the Least of These: Empowering Children and Animals in The Band of Mercy Advocate” and published in Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier (Routledge, 2019).  Jessica Raposo and I also conducted our third biannual children’s song-camp to record about 15 Bands of Mercy songs, now found on my website at www.soundingchildhood.org and performed some of these live for the annual Children’s Literature Conference I co-hosted in Indianapolis in June.  Finally, I was invited to write a chapter on the Bands’ music for the undergraduate textbook, Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis.  In the process, I also learned that Richmond, Indiana, had several Bands of Mercy organizations in the 1880s-1900s! 

Biographical Statement

Dr. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre teaches Children’s Literature, Young-Adult Literature, and Victorian literature, etc.  She is the author of Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Ohio UP, 2002).  She has published in Victorian Poetry, Victorians Institute Journal, and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, among others. Her second monograph, for Ashgate’s Studies in Childhood Series: 1700-Present series, Claudia Nelson, editor, is titled Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood (Ashgate/Routledge, 2016). Her current research is on children’s diaries of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.