ABSTRACT
This chapter considers hymns and songs produced for the benefit of charitable institutions for women, such as the Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes, and compares female and male-authored texts' treatment of the female object of charity. It examines some charitable projects involving female musicians, and looks at the complex production of material and symbolic capital in cases where both the patron and the charitable object are performers. Music with lyrics expressive of Christian piety and neoclassical sympathy was promoted by numerous eighteenth-century music historians and aesthetic theorists as capable of regulating the dispersal of charity and of establishing social attitudes to charitable objects and practices. The Magdalen Hospital was first proposed by the moralist Jonas Hanway in an anonymous 1758 pamphlet entitled A Plan for Establishing a Charity-House, or Charity-Houses, for the reception of Repenting Prostitutes: to be Called the Magdalen Charity.
