Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

The Christian Year is a series of poems for all the Sundays and some other feasts of the liturgical year of the Church of England written by John Keble in 1827. The book is the source for several hymns.

It was first published in 1827, and quickly became extremely popular. Though at first anonymous, its authorship soon became known, with the result that Keble was in 1831 appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry, a post that he held until 1841.

In his book Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians, Victorian scholar Michael Wheeler calls The Christian Year simply “the most popular volume of verse in the nineteenth century”. In his essay on “Tractarian Aesthetics and the Romantic Tradition,” Gregory Goodwin claims that The Christian Year is “Keble’s greatest contribution to the Oxford Movement and to English literature.” As evidence of that, Goodwin cites E. B. Pusey’s report that ninety-five editions of this devotional text were printed during Keble’s lifetime, and “at the end of the year following his death, the number had arisen to a hundred-and-nine.” By the time the copyright expired in 1873, over 375,000 copies had been sold in Britain and 158 editions had been published. Despite its widespread appeal among the Victorian readers, the popularity of Keble’s The Christian Year quickly faded in the twentieth century.

Keble has been described thus:

He was absolutely without ambition, with no care for the possession of power or influence, hating show and excitement, and distrustful of his own abilities…. Though shy and awkward with strangers, he was happy and at ease among his friends, and their love and sympathy drew out all his droll playfulness of wit and manner…. In personal appearance he was about middle height, with rather square and sloping shoulders, which made him look short until he pulled himself up, as he often did with ‘sprightly dignity.’ His head, says Mozley, ‘was one of the most beautifully formed heads in the world,’ the face rather plain-featured, with a large unshapely mouth, but the whole redeemed by a bright smile which played naturally over the lips; and under a broad and smooth forehead he had ‘clear, brilliant, penetrating eyes which lighted up quickly with merriment kindled into fire in a moment of indignation…. a quiet country clergyman, with a very moderate income, who sedulously avoided public distinctions, and held tenaciously to an unpopular School all his life.

John Keble is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on 14 July (the anniversary of his Assize Sermon), and a commemoration observed on 29 March (the anniversary of his death) elsewhere in the Anglican Communion. Keble College, Oxford was founded in his memory, and John Keble Church, Mill Hill and the ancient clapper bridge over the River Leach near the church in which he was curate in the village of Eastleach Martin were named after him.

The view from Bulverton Hill, Sidmouth, where Keble was a frequent visitor, is thought to have inspired some of his best loved work. The hill commands a panoramic view of the Lower Otter Valley and Dartmoor in the distance. Folklore suggests that his favourite spot was where a wooden bench known as Keble’s Seat has been in place for many years.

The ‘Te Deum’ window in the south-east transept of St Peter’s Church, Bournemouth, was commissioned as a memorial to Keble, who had preferred to sit in the transept when worshipping at St Peter’s daily in the last months of his life. Later, in 1906, the transept was re-configured as the Keble Chapel.

Lives of Keble include one by John Taylor Coleridge (1869), who said, “The Christian Year is so wonderfully scriptural. Keble’s mind was, by long, patient and affectionate study of Scripture, so imbued with it that its language, its train of thought, its mode of reasoning, seems to flow out into his poetry, almost, one should think, unconsciously to himself.” Another is by Walter Lock (1895). In 1963 Georgina Battiscombe wrote a biography titled John Keble: a Study in Limitations.

John Keble (25 April 1792 – 29 March 1866) was an English churchman and poet, one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Keble College, Oxford, was named after him.