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Fanny Crosby

CROSBY, Frances Jane (later van Alstyne). b. Putnam County, New York, 24 March 1820; d. Bridgeport, Connecticut, 12 February 1915. ‘Fanny’ Crosby was born to a distinguished Puritan family. She was blinded, probably through bad treatment for an eye infection from a man passing himself off as a doctor, when she was six weeks old. Her father died the same year. She was raised as a Presbyterian by her mother and grandmother, and later by a Mrs Hawley. She attended the New York City School for the Blind where she excelled as a singer, pianist, guitarist, organist and harpist, and showed that she possessed a remarkable memory and intelligence, and where she later became a teacher. She married another blind teacher and musician at the school, Alexander van Alstyne. While she gave away money and preferred a simple life, he sought the company of the affluent, and they drifted apart. She began writing poetry when she was eight and published several volumes, such as The Blind Girl and Other Poems (1844), Monterey, and Other Poems (1851), A Wreath of Columbia’s Flowers (1858), and There’s a Sound among the Forest Trees (1861). Much later she wrote Bells at Evening and Other Voices (1897).

Following a decade with no distinct denominational ties, Crosby underwent a conversion experience in 1850 at the Chelsea Methodist Episcopal Church, New York City, and thereafter identified with Methodist and other churches’ revivalist rallies and their outreach to the poor and disadvantaged. She began writing hymns, probably around 1863-64, encouraged by the educator and publisher William Batchelder Bradbury*, who suggested that she should write religious instead of secular verse. Probably the most prolific hymnist in history, she published well over eight thousand hymns. In 1972 a further 1,000 unpublished hymns were found in manuscript (Young, 1993, p. 736). She also used numerous pseudonyms in addition to her own name (for a list, cautiously described as ‘a partial list’, see Blumhofer, 2005, pp. 358-60). An estimated 50 of her hymns are in common use, including those exported by missionaries and translated into more than 100 languages.

At times she was under contract to her publisher to write three hymns a week; she entered into an agreement with Bradbury in 1863 or 1864, shortly before he published The Golden Censer (1864). After Bradbury’s death in 1868 her hymns were distributed widely by the New York publisher Biglow and Main, and popularized at evangelistic services in both the USA and Great Britain, in part by the Moody* and Sankey* campaigns. She often wrote six or seven hymns in a day, sometimes thinking of them at night and writing them down in the morning. Crosby's texts were set to music by prominent gospel song composers such as William Batchelder Bradbury, William Howard Doane*, Robert Lowry*, Ira D. Sankey*, and William J. Kirkpatrick*.

Crosby’s most noted hymn texts are the following:

Crosby was one of the most respected women of her era and the friend of many prominent persons, including Presidents of the United States. She was generous to the poor, and worked among them as a visitor and helper. She was uncomplaining about her blindness, seeing it as a gift from God that enabled her to do things that she might not have been able to do with full sight. She had many friends among the musicians, publishers and hymn writers of New York City, before retiring to live in Bridgeport. Her position as a hymn writer is aptly summed up by Blumhofer (2005, p. 345):

More than most, Crosby encapsulated and popularized a nineteenth-century white northern evangelical ethos. Her evangelicalism, formed among people proud of their Puritan heritage, came alive in Methodism, thrived under gospel preachers of many denominations, and expanded in the world of Manhattan evangelical do-gooders.

She is known as ‘Fanny Crosby’ in books published in the USA. Many British books, and the Australian WOV, ‘inexplicably’ (Young, Companion to UMH, 1993, p. 736) use her married name, Frances Jane van Alstyne. In JJ, where she is given an uncomplimentary notice, she is found under ‘Van Alstyne’ (pp. 1203-5).

Bert Polman/JRW/CY

Further Reading

Crosby’s autobiographical recollections were edited and published by her friend Will Carleton, the poet and ballad writer, in Fanny Crosby’s Life-Story, by Herself (New York: Every Where Publishing Co., 1903), and later as Memories of Eighty Years (Boston, Massachusetts, 1906). From the one thousand unpublished hymns discovered in 1902, Donald P. Hustad* selected 120 for publication in Fanny Crosby Speaks Again (Carol Stream, Illinois: Hope Publishing Company*, 1977). Blessed Assurance: Hymns of Fanny J. Crosby, edited by S T Kimbrough Jr*, and Carlton R. Young* (Singapore, Global Music & Media, 2008) includes 13 new tunes for Crosby’s unpublished texts.

Her hymn, ‘Lead me to Jesus, lead me to Jesus', first published in Pure Gold for the Sunday School (New York and Chicago, 1871), appeared in a few books for children between 1871 and 1925. It is discussed in an interesting article by Brian West in the British Hymn Society Bulletin 307, Volume 23 no. 2 (Spring 2021). See also:  

  1. Edith L. Blumhofer, Her Heart Can See. The Life and Hymns of Fanny J. Crosby (Grand Rapids, Michigan; Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005) (includes a full survey of the literature about Crosby).
  2. Mel R. Wilhoit, ‘Crosby, Fanny’, American National Biography Online.
  3. Website with photographs, and text of ‘Memories of Eighty Years’ <http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/catcard.html/id=1653>
  4. C. Michael Hawn and June Hadden Hobbs, ‘‘Thy Love ... Hath Broken Every Barrier Down’: The Rhetoric of Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century British and American Women's Hymns’ in Martin V. Clarke, ed., Music and Theology in Nineteenth-century Britain (Farnham, 2012).
Cite this article

Fanny Crosby. Source: Wikimedia Commons ↩

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