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Christmas in Nineteenth-Century
England
Neil Armstrong
Studies in
Popular Culture Manchester:
University Press, 2020 Paperback. xvi
+ 193 pages. ISBN 978-1526149930. £12.99
Reviewed by Jacqueline Banerjee The Victorian Web
With its cover design
of holly, mistletoe, evergreens and Christmas roses, the new paperback edition
of Neil Armstrong's Christmas
in Nineteenth-Century England looks like an ideal Christmas gift. But it is no mere stocking-filler.
Armstrong's approach to his subject is thoroughly scholarly. Researching both contemporary
and critical accounts of the festive season during these decades, he subtly
tweaks some of our common ideas about it and covers a wide area of popular culture
in the process. As well as family life, Armstrong deals with the highly
influential print industry, the growth of consumerism and the entertainment sector,
developments in philanthropy and the workplace, and more. Armstrong's
first chapter deals with the evolving iconography of Christmas in print—and with
good reason. This was the main way in which notions about Christmas were
disseminated. Take Father Christmas, for example. His origins might seem to lie
in some idealised Merrie Old England. But he arrived only in the seventeenth
century, and appeared in the Illustrated London News of 21 December 1844
as a larger-than-life personification of feasting and revelry. At this point in
the Victorian era, he looked like nothing more than an inebriated glutton. Only
gradually, by association with the Santa Claus of complex Continental and American
origins, did his image soften. Until his iconography became fixed by the illustrated
press, Armstrong tells us, he was sometimes said to sport yellow or blue attire,
instead of red. Even the long beard only really became significant when Victorians
started shaving theirs off. Then at last he was established and standardised as
an old-fashioned, benign, and altogether grandfatherly figure. Other, more
subtle, correctives of our view of Victorian Christmas follow. Dickens, for
instance, was less central to its development than we might have thought. Far
from issuing in the new Christmas package whole and entire, says Armstrong, "[w]hen
the Carol first appeared in print in 1843, significant changes in the structure
and meaning of Christmas were taking place which Dickens's novella failed to
represent" [51]. One example (although Armstrong only mentions this later)
might be Scrooge's sending a boy to the poulterer's to buy a turkey on Christmas
morning. By 1842, not only were shops closed on Christmas Day, but workers were
agitating for a compensatory Monday closure if it happened to fall on a Sunday.
The royal family too may be less central to the Victorian celebration of the
holiday than we assume. When Prince Albert imported the tradition of an indoor
Christmas tree from his native Germany, and the Illustrated London News
of 1848 published an illustration of the family gathered round it at Windsor,
the custom was sure to grow. But we have overlooked the way in which this influence
was bolstered by children's books translated from the German at this time, presenting
similar family scenes. Christmas cards come in for similar treatment. Yes, Sir
Henry Cole commissioned the first Christmas card and it was designed by J.C.
Horsley in 1843. But, again, there were other important factors in its adoption
as a custom, notably the arrival on the scene of chromolithographic printing, and
an improved postal service. Surprisingly,
in an age when so many attended church, and new churches were being built at
pace, few of the early cards were religious. Armstrong provides an interesting
explanation for this: the spiritual meaning of Christmas was, he says, more slanted
towards atonement in the early part of the century, only shifting to the incarnation
as the century progressed. The waning of moralistic Evangelicalism affected
much more than the Christmas card industry. Unreserved joy in the nativity helped
to put children at the centre of the festivities, and along with that came an emphasis
on gift-giving and celebrations. Christmas shopping and advertising, and seasonal
entertainment, all surged. Among the many signs of this were the popularity of children's
Christmas annuals, and special events like the "Christmas Fairyland" at
a Liverpool store in the 1870s, and Santa's Grotto in a Stratford (London)
store, probably the first of its kind, which was visited by 17,000 children in
1888. Pantomime flourished, and half-price seats for children were introduced. These
small details, these facts and figures, are fascinating, and indicate the changing
dynamics of family life as well as the commercialisation of the season. Less
happily, poorer children were recruited as performers. Like the semi-naked
little girls on some Christmas cards, the exploited "pantomime waifs"
remind us that not even Christmas sparkle could obscure some of the ills in
Victorian society. Many were aware
of this at time, and Armstrong has a good chapter on the way philanthropy
boomed as efforts were made to provide the poor with some of the pleasures
enjoyed by their wealthy peers. Decorations, extra rations and entertainments
brought Christmas cheer to the workhouses, as did the already well-established modest
allowance of alcohol—a controversial extra in the days of temperance, but one
which most people supported, preferring to offer the inmates a pint of beer instead
of "a ton of disappointment" [115; quoted from an issue of the Liverpool
Mercury in 1897]. Again, children were a special focus. Charities ran
Christmas campaigns for the hungry little "robins," as they came to
be called, encouraging the middle class to join the richer benefactors in providing
them with toys and entertainment as well as food. Entertainment in the workhouse
might take the form of a magic lantern show or a band, with the opportunity for
dancing. Still, there were
many who noted the discrepancy between the ideal Christmas and the one they
were experiencing now. Another way in which Armstrong's book differs from a stocking-filler
is in its references to the "Christmas Lament"—the recurrent complaint
that the spirit of Christmas has somehow been eroded. Surprisingly, the
tradition for this goes back as far as Father Christmas himself, if not further.
In the early seventeenth century, Armstrong explains, it was put down to the
fact that landowners went galloping off to London to avoid offering hospitality
on their estates. However, when the festival was banned by the Puritans, previous
celebrations took on a warm glow of nostalgia, which clung to them even after festivities
resumed at the Restoration. The new customs that have evolved since then, and
continue to evolve, cannot quite obscure those imaginary "olden
times", and even seem to intensify the feeling that they have been lost. As
well as providing us with a mine of scholarly information, Armstrong helps to
explain the persistent refrain that, for one reason or another, Christmas simply
isn't what it used to be. ☞ Illustrated version on The Victorian Web : https://victorianweb.org/history/reviews/christmas.html
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