A FEW MONTHS before Princess Victoria succeeded to the throne, Frances Ridley Havergal, youngest of the six children of Rev. William Henry and Jane Havergal, was born on December 14, 1836 at her father's rectory in the little English village of Astley, in Worcestershire.
In her brief lifetime of forty-two years, Frances Havergal achieved fame and influence unusual for a woman of that era. By the time of her death one of her volumes of poetry had reached its 30th edition, The Ministry of Song was in its 38th edition, and her hymns and lyrics in magazines were beyond even such circulation. Publication of Under His Shadow, containing her last poems, exceeded 90,000—a popularity unprecedented in English hymnody.
Yet Frances Ridley Havergal was an understandable—though exceptionally gifted—product of her time and environment. Her mother had been the "lovely Jane Head," her father was a talented, well-trained musician versed in psalmody, composer of hundreds of chants, tunes, and cathedral services, and an ardent supporter of foreign missions as well as an able preacher. Theirs was a happy home, marked by their prayers and example in searching the Scriptures, their cheery ways and godly activities.
Frances was a child of grace and beauty, fair-complexioned, sunny-haired, vivacious. In spite of her extreme precocity—she could read easy books at three, the Bible at four, and began writing verses at seven—she was full of life and spirit, distinguishing herself no less in wild tree-climbing and wall-scaling than in picking up German from overhearing the lessons given to her older brothers and sisters. She was by no means a model child—she "utterly abominated being 'talked to' “and "would do anything on earth to escape" kindly-meant admonitions. She had a very sensitive nature, especially when young, with frequent fits of unhappiness and penitence, called forth by a bit of nature, a book, or a sermon.
Frances early decided that to be a Christian was the most desirable thing in life, even while taking a "sort of savage joy" in her despondency and feelings of failure. In later years she spoke of her early spiritual experience with frankness, when persuaded it might be helpful to others, but at the time she "could as soon speak Sanscrit" as utter a word about it to any human being. She was often misjudged because of this reserve. Even her sisters did not know of her inner conflicts, her natural buoyancy of temperament enabling her to pass quickly from an agony of weeping in her room to a merry burst of laughter or a sudden lighthearted scamper up and down stairs.
“Many have thought mine a comparatively thornless path," she wrote in later years, "but often, when the path was the smoothest, there were hidden thorns within...." This deep longing for a pure life, disquieted by frequent thoughts of backsliding, schooled her for the consecration evident in her writings and the understanding through which she was enabled to help countless others.
In 1845 the family moved to Worcester, where Mr. Havergal was appointed to the Rectory of St. Nicholas. Frances, scarcely ten years old, began teaching a Sunday School class of still younger children, and organized a favorite playmate and herself into "The Flannel Petticoat Society," described in The Four Happy Days, one of her few published books for children.
Shortly before Frances' twelfth birthday her mother went to be with the Lord. She was quite unprepared for this great sorrow. Yet her mother's words to her before she died: "Fanny dear, pray to God to prepare you for all that He is preparing for you," became a life-prayer later on. For this "preparing" went on all through her life. As one horizon was gained, another stretched on ahead. So each event prepared for the one to follow.
In boarding school in England—"That single half year was perhaps the most important of any in my life"—she began to "have conscious faith and hope in Christ," and soon after her fifteenth birthday she wrote, "I committed my soul to the Savior... and earth and Heaven seemed brighter from that moment.”
A few months later her father married again, and Frances expressed in poetry her loving satisfaction. Going with her parents to Germany, she attended school in Düsseldorf, learning "to think in German," and achieving first place among the 110 pupils, no small feat for an English girl whose earlier education had been so casual and intermittent. Her thirst for knowledge was lifelong. She committed to memory the entire New Testament, Psalms, Isaiah, and the Minor Prophets. She studied, and in most cases mastered, French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. In Wales she learned enough Welsh from her donkey-girl to be able to join intelligently in Sunday services. At the seashore she was eager for nautical information. She taught herself harmonics by reading a treatise. Yet she was content to sit with the smallest children in the vicar's Bible class, and often referred to the pleasure and benefit derived from his teachings.
Her confirmation in Worcester Cathedral, at 18, left deep and sacred memories. When the words, "Defend, O Lord, this Thy child with Thy heavenly grace, that she may continue Thine forever," were solemnly pronounced over her head, "if ever my heart thrilled with earnest longing, not unmixed with joy, it did at the words, 'Thine forever.'”
She was sensitive to Nature. "The quiet everyday beauty of the trees and sunshine was the chief external influence upon my early childhood. Waving boughs and golden light always touched and quieted me and spoke to me and told me about God." She was ecstatic over her first glimpse of the Alps "that majesty of shining eternal snow" reminding her of the Psalms remarking quaintly, "It is very difficult to believe that David never was in Switzerland.”
Frances Havergal had a double talent. Although her poetry was better known, she was highly skilled in music, which she called "the only universal language, a sort of alphabet of the language of Heaven." She was a skilled pianist, proficient in Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Haydn, Schumann, and Schubert. She was a contralto soloist, later putting aside her "pleasure of public applause when singing in the Philharmonic concerts" to use her gifts solely in sacred song. She mastered harmony and counterpoint, wrote tunes for her own hymns, and prepared a volume of her father's Psalmody after his death.
At 21, stirred by the painting of the head of Christ, "Ecce Homo," in the Art Gallery of Dusseldorf, she composed her first real hymn, "I Gave My Life for Thee," for which her father wrote the music. A later hymn, "Take My Life," written in 1874, was virtually her autobiography in poetry, each couplet describing a definite experience in her life. The line, "Take my silver and my gold," referred to her sending "nearly fifty articles" of jewelry to the Church Missionary Society, retaining for daily wear only a brooch that was a memorial of her parents, and a locket with a portrait of her niece.
Always she sought to blend her poems and music with life. When someone described a hymn-sing as "religiously jolly," she wrote: "It is just what I wish, to get people to connect religion with all that is pleasant and joyful. Him serve with mirth.”
In spite of frequent illness, Frances Havergal's spare time was crowded with Bible classes, readings for the YWCA, and extensive correspondence, especially with girls who sought her spiritual counsel and help. Active to the last, she died on June 3, 1879, at Caswell Bay, Swansea, So. Wales, in her forty-third year, and was laid to rest in Astley churchyard, near the old rectory where she was born.
It has been said of her: "Frances Ridley Havergal had none of the ordinary titles to fame. What singled her out was the note of absoluteness in her spiritual experience... In her consecration there was no limit and no reserve. She had learned the secret of abandonment, and she yielded herself utterly to God. By virtue of this, her writings reached and moved a multitude of souls with strange, penetrating power.”