Augusta Browne’s music has long been confused with the work of another composer, sometimes identified as “Miss Browne,” but more often as the sister of Mrs. Hemans. Even during Browne’s lifetime, people muddled the two composers. Who was who, and how can one determine which is the composer when the sheet music asserts “Miss Browne”? The simple answer is that Augusta Browne consistently used her given name, “Miss Augusta Browne” or “Miss A. Browne.” Thus we can identify her works with certainty. By contrast, publishers of songs by “Miss Browne” usually cited her celebrated sister—poet Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans—in a prominent place on the cover or title page of sheet music imprints.
Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) was renowned as an English poet during her lifetime. As we see in the case of the “Ave Sanctissima” (“Evening Song to the Virgin”), attributions to Mrs. Hemans and “Her Sister” appeared on many sheet music publications.
William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott were close friends of Mrs. Hemans. She was called the “female Wordsworth” for the pastoral lyricism of her Romantic poetry. Her verse embodied the height of Victorian sentiment, sentimentality, and melancholy. Poems by Mrs. Hemans were ubiquitous in English-language newspapers and magazines during the first half of the nineteenth century. Many composers, including Augusta Browne, set songs to poetry by the popular Mrs. Hemans. But, if the title page mentions “Mrs. Hemans” and “sister,” the composer is Felicia Hemans’s sister, Harriett Mary Browne Hughes (then Owen), a clergyman’s wife who lived in Wales, published music in London, and never traveled to America.
What do we know about this song composer? Harriett Mary Browne (1798–1858) was the youngest sibling of Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans. Their father was a businessman in Liverpool, England. Harriett was still a toddler when the family moved to nearby Wales. They eventually settled in the village of St. Asaph, Denbighshire, in the northeast corner of Wales. The sisters sang and played the piano or harp at home, as was the expectation for middle- and upper-class young women in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. Harriett began to compose music while still a teenager. She may have published some music before her marriage to Rev. Thomas Lewis Hughes on 13 September 1828. Hughes was a Welshman from Denbighshire who had attended Brasenose College, Oxford. He served as a vicar choral (a churchman who intones or chants the liturgy) at the Anglican cathedral in St. Asaph, which may explain how the couple met. He was also the rector of Penegoes, a village near the west coast of Wales, some seventy miles away from St. Asaph.
Felicia Hemans was so successful with her poetry publications that she was able to support herself and five young sons after her husband abandoned the family and left England. After his departure, Mrs. Hemans and her sons shared a home in Denbighshire with her mother and sister Harriett until the latter’s marriage. The womenfolk were fortunate that their brother Henry—the distinguished army officer Gen. Sir Thomas Henry Browne—was able to purchase two adjacent homes in the Welsh countryside: Bronwylfa and Rhyllon, located near St. Asaph. Rhyllon still stands, an eighteenth-century listed farmhouse now celebrated for the poetess who lived there.
Felicia Hemans subsequently moved to Wavertree, near Liverpool, to enhance her sons’ education. During her few remaining years, she lived first in England and then with her brother George in Dublin, lamenting all the while her beloved Wales. Mrs. Hemans continued to publish poetry despite poor health until her death at forty-one. After Felicia passed away in 1835, Harriett wrote a detailed account of her late sister titled Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Hemans. By Her Sister (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1839). In this work she described the childhood they shared and her sister’s unwavering love of writing poetry. In some literary works from the 1830s, Harriett was identified as Mrs. Hughes, but that name never appeared on her music publications.
After Rev. Hughes died in 1836, Harriett returned to St. Asaph. In 1842 she remarried. Her second husband, William Hicks Owen (1800–86), was also a clergyman who was active at the cathedral in St. Asaph. Harriett maintained her calling as a pastoral vicar’s wife until her death in 1858. Rev. Owen continued to serve at St. Asaph and as vicar in the village of Tremeirchion. While no image of Harriett may have survived (in contrast to her more famous sister), an engraved tribute in words was carved on the tablet of a memorial window at the church in St. Asaph. The lengthy homage describes her personality and virtues:
This Window was erected by many and attached friends, to the glory of God, and in affectionate remembrance of Harriett Mary Owen, who departed this life 14th March, 1858. She was the wife of the Rev. W. H. Owen, vicar of this parish, and was sister of Felicia Hemans, many of whose lyrics she set to music. She was a woman of great intellectual endowments, of deep and varied reading, a good linguist, and an accomplished musician. With these high qualities was combined the most practical good sense in the common things of every-day life. A gentle and considerate mistress and one who “looked well to the ways of her household.” She had so disciplined her temper, that no provocation caused an impatient or fretful feeling. Very pitiful and courteous, but gifted with a brave and independent spirit, which unhesitatingly marked its abhorrence of all that was base and dishonorable. For sixteen years she fulfilled indefatigably all the duties of a country clergyman’s wife, and was unceasingly occupied in furthering deeds of charity and loving-kindness. In this course, even when weighed down by extreme bodily anguish, she steadfastly persevered to the very last. In joy and in sorrow, in prosperity and in adversity, she presented to those around her, and who knew her best, a bright example of the Christian graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity.
The tribute demonstrates that Harriett fully satisfied the many obligations of a “country clergyman’s wife.” The inscription on the tablet, as well as vital records (1828 marriage, 1851 census, and 1858 newspaper obituaries), show conclusively that her given name was spelled with a double “t” rather than the more common “Harriet.”
How long Harriett was able to continue her efforts as a songwriter, while fulfilling her endless duties as a vicar’s wife, is not known. Most of her published songs bear no year or copyright date. The Harmonicon, the leading British music periodical of the early nineteenth century, noted songs of Mrs. Hemans, “composed by her sister,” from 1828 through 1832. Harriett’s publications include about fifty songs.
“Mrs. Hemans and Sister”
Poetry by Mrs. Hemans was as beloved in antebellum America as in Victorian England. Motherhood, death, and heroism were themes of her most familiar works. Felicia’s sister Harriett may have published the most songs based on poetry of Mrs. Hemans, but many composers set her verses to music, both in Britain and the U.S. Augusta Browne was one among many American songwriters who used her poems for lyrics.
“Mrs. Hemans and Sister” was the listing in music catalogs of the London music dealer I[saac] Willis, publisher of Harriett’s works. Harriett’s married names—Mrs. Hughes and then Mrs. Owen—never appeared on her sheet music imprints. Protocol for a vicar’s wife in Victorian England probably weighed against using her married name on a commercial publication. Victorian-era conduct demanded that respectable women behave with exacting modesty; a vicar’s wife would have faced even greater pressure to conform to codes of propriety. And, too, publisher Willis may have preferred to keep the title page focused on the famous Mrs. Hemans, who had tremendous name recognition and marketing draw, rather than “Miss Browne,” “Mrs. Hughes,” or “Mrs. Owen.”
Two sets of keyboard dances (Welsh Quadrilles and Cimarosa Quadrilles) advertised in in 1830 by Willis listed the composer as “Miss Browne.” A few American sheet music imprints specified “Miss Browne” as the “Sister.”
Despite the many songs with “music by her sister,” Felicia and Harriett were probably not songwriting partners like Lerner and Lowe. Thus “collaboration” would be a misleading way to describe these songs. The poems were published in collections by Mrs. Hemans before Harriett made selections to set to music. The “Tyrolese Evening Hymn” was one of the most popular of their combined efforts. The Willis catalog advertised the song as the “55th edition,” suggesting brisk sales indeed.
These short parlor songs were easy to play and sing, requiring only modest training to read and perform, as the first page of the “Tyrolese Evening Hymn” demonstrates. An 1830 issue of the Harmonicon harumphed, “There is an absence, a want of originality in the melodies, and occasional oversights in the accompaniments, which lead us to conclude that the fair composer has not yet had the advantage of that experience which, we do not doubt, will ultimately enable her to become as much distinguished in music as her relative is in the sister art.”
Despite such critiques in the Harmonicon, plenty of “musical young ladies rejoiced in the songs set to charming melodies by her sister” (The Poetical Works of Mrs. Hemans, London: Frederick Warne, n.d. [ca. 1840], xviii). Mrs. Hemans wrote with a golden touch in her poems, and Harriett delivered them in simple musical settings that suited the tastes of many. For example, her popular song “The Captive Knight” was in its 65th edition by Willis, and pirated editions came out as well. “The Messenger Bird” and “Ave Sanctissima” were duets for two voices that turn up in many binders volumes, that is, the personal sheet music volumes compiled and bound together for women and girls in nineteenth-century America. The songs were as well known in the U.S. as in England, but the American sheet music imprints published in New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore earned no royalties for author or composer.
Enter Augusta Browne
Augusta Browne (ca. 1820–82) was born in Ireland twenty-two years after Harriett Mary Browne and came to North America as an infant. She first set verses by Mrs. Hemans to music during the mid-1830s. Among these early works were “The Voice of Spring,” no. 9, “The Stranger’s Heart,” no. 14, “The Orange Bough,” no. 15, and “Song of the Skylark,” no. 16, all based on poetry by Mrs. Hemans. Augusta’s duet for two singers and keyboard, “The Stranger’s Heart,” circulated in Godey’s Magazine in December 1841. This may have initiated the confusion with the British “Miss Browne,” who had set the same poem as a “ballad” with the same title, “The Stranger’s Heart.” The young American composer took pains to use her full name, “Miss Augusta Browne,” on her works, presumably to clarify her identity and to distinguish her music from Mrs. Hemans’s sister.
Another song that fostered uncertainty was Augusta’s “Reply of the Messenger Bird.” The title was very similar to Harriett’s popular “Messenger Bird” duet, even though the two songs were settings of different poems. Harriett used words by her sister; Augusta Browne used a poem authored by the American poet Edward Young (1818–d. 187?) Young described his poem as a “reply” to the “Messenger Bird” by Mrs. Hemans, in his self-published Lady Lillian, and Other Poems (Lexington, Georgia: 1859), p. 92.
One of Harriett’s best songs held special attraction for Americans. The “Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers” (or simply “The Pilgrim Fathers”) celebrated the “band of exiles” who “moor’d their bark / On the wild New England shore,” where forests rang with their “anthem of the free.” Mrs. Hemans’s poem resonated with nineteenth-century Americans, and the valiant song was printed throughout the nation. Early U.S. publishers of “The Pilgrim Fathers,” such as the New York firm Dubois and Stodart, appended “Miss Browne” to the customary British attribution, “written by Mrs. Hemans, the music composed by her sister.” Thus originated the most significant muddle between Augusta Browne and the other “Miss Browne.” It must have seemed implausible that such a patriotic song could be the work of a British composer rather than an American.
In 1879 Simeon Pease Cheney had no doubt that Augusta Browne was the “Miss Browne” who composed “The Pilgrim Fathers.” In The American Singing Book, an anthology of songs for home and school, he wrote:
Miss Augusta Browne, of New York, (now Mrs. Garrett, of Washington, D.C.), is an American composer of note. Wherever or when born, she is of English descent, and early enjoyed the advantage of a scientific musical education; many years ago becoming famous as a composer and as a performer upon the organ and piano-forte. Her compositions, many of them, are for the instruments upon which she performed; but she has written music for songs also, and for sacred compositions; among which, one of the most popular and perhaps the best known in this country, is the “Pilgrim Fathers”; the words being composed by Mrs. Hemans (Felicia Dorothea Browne), who was born at Liverpool, Eng., September 25, 1793, and who died May 16, 1835, aged 41. The age of Mrs. Garrett is not known; but she was born to adapt the beautiful words of Mrs. Hemans to excellent music.
Cheney was murky about some facts concerning Augusta Browne, such as when and where she had been born. The summary of her life was generally correct, although she was Irish by birth. Augusta never admitted her precise age or year of birth, but any sister of Mrs. Hemans would have been a very elderly woman by 1879. Cheney nevertheless promoted Augusta as the poet’s sister, and generations of librarians and popular song enthusiasts dutifully passed on the attribution of “Pilgrim Fathers” to Augusta Browne. She is still often credited as the composer of “Pilgrim Fathers,” even though the musicologist Judith Tick explained the mix-up a century later in American Women Composers Before 1870 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983).
Augusta Browne proudly placed her name on her sheet music imprints. By contrast, Harriett Browne either did not choose to put her name on her publications, or her publisher preferred not to list her name. But it is correct to infer that if the words Mrs. Hemans and sister are associated on the title page, then the music was composed by Harriett Mary Browne (Hughes or Owen).
As a catalog list from Willis demonstrates, Harriett was a very successful composer with many published works in the sheet music market. This advertisement shown below demonstrates that Harriett Mary Browne and Augusta Browne shared a strong commercial impulse in addition to their family surname and a mutual love for music. It is high time to render unto Mrs. Hemans’s sister the music that was hers.
©Bonny H. Miller, All Rights Reserved 2020