Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (73 page)

Throughout these mid-century decades, newspapers printed Christmas appeals for donations, for the deserving poor, for the sick, for the elderly. In 1868 the
Baptist Magazine
approached Christmas as an entirely charitable time, and advertised that it had 10,000 gifts available to give
to the needy - many Nonconformists rejected all Christmas celebrations, and the magazine found that stressing charitable giving as the centrepiece of Christmas was a good way of helping its readers to avoid the ‘Popish’ superstitions the holiday represented.
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Other magazines similarly became conduits for charitable Christmas campaigns. The
Children’s League of Pity Paper
and the
Band of Mercy Advocate
had a number of year-round fund-raising projects - for a cot in a hospital, a lifeboat, or other worthwhile causes - but they always mounted special Christmas campaigns.
Young Man
had a fund for Christmas dinners for hungry children, while girls’ magazines ran competitions for home-sewn donations of warm clothing.
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These were matched by articles in the mainstream press that depicted the poor dining sumptuously, courtesy of this or that benevolent society.
The Times
, in 1877, told how

Cow Cross Mission collected one hundred and fifty little mudlarks to act as beefeaters on Christmas day. They were arranged according to sex at two long tables on which were knives and forks, water cups, and hunks of bread. In less than a couple of minutes the whole of the bread was eaten. Immediately afterwards large joints of beef and pork were brought in and great sieves of potatoes. These were soon cut up by half a dozen carvers, with numbers of ladies and gentlemen acting as waiters. There was no stint of either meat or plum pudding, everyone being allowed to come as often as he or she liked, and many sly bits of meat and pudding were slipped into pinafores and caps to take home.
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Such meals were an attempt to create for the paupers a semblance of the domestic felicity now found at a family Christmas dinner, which for many was the centrepiece of the festivities. In 1853 Charles Manby Smith wrote about Christmas presents, and then immediately dismissed them: ‘But…these are very minor and subordinate preparations. Eating and drinking, after all, are the chief and paramount obligations of the Christmas season.’
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Obligations, mind. He was using the word with a journalistic flourish, but he didn’t think it was too overstated. As with every other tradition, the Christmas dinner had also mutated over the century. Plum pudding had at some stage replaced the earlier plum porridge, a beef broth thickened with bread and enriched with dried fruit, wine and spices. This had been a staple in the eighteenth century - ‘Everyone’, wrote a French visitor at the time, ‘from the King to the artisan eats soup

and Christmas pies. The soup is called Christmas-porridge, and is a dish few foreigners find to their taste.’
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Twelfth Night cakes with their bean and pea tokens had long been traditional, and continued to appear well into the nineteenth century, when the bean, the pea and the iced fruitcake were seamlessly transferred into the new Christmas cake. By 1840 the Twelfth Night cake was no more.

Both the cakes and the mince pies depended on the richness of dried fruits, which until the steamships and railways of the nineteenth century had been both rare and expensive - prime luxury goods. Railways also brought down the price of the main course, which traditionally had been goose. Many of the working classes belonged to paying-in clubs, usually run out of their local pubs. At the end of the year a lottery was held, and all received the goose they had paid for, with the holder of the winning ticket given the fattest bird. Turkeys were only slowly becoming more common: for many purchasers they were still far too expensive, as the birds did not travel well. In the early nineteenth century turkeys were reared for the most part in East Anglia, and were driven down to London in August, wearing little leather boots to protect their feet. They started their trek in August because they lost so much weight on their
forced march that much of the fattening-up process had to be recommenced once they arrived at their destination. Some were transported by stagecoach, but this meant Norfolk was three days’ journey from London. Only with the arrival of the railways did it become feasible to slaughter the birds where they were reared.
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Goose may have had a better flavour, but the size of the turkeys made them more desirable for the large mid-Victorian family. In
A Christmas Carol
the goose that the Cratchits eat on Christmas Day has to be eked out among the seven of them; when Scrooge becomes a reformed character, he sends a boy to buy them a turkey, an animal that more than goes around.

With the great stress laid on the Christmas feast came additional items for the table. In 1847 a London confectioner, Tom Smith, attempting to create a novelty to distinguish his imported sweets, produced a wrapping that made a small explosion when it was opened. The result, first sold as ‘fire-cracker sweets’, then as ‘Bangs of Expectation’, harked back to the Lord of Misrule elements of the old holiday, but soon the sweet vanished and the (fire)cracker took on the form we know, complete with paper hats and trinkets.
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These tamer, more domesticated objects chimed better with the tone of the sedate, multi-generational gathering that was now looked on with approval, and they became enormously successful: in the 1880s Tom Smith’s, now a dedicated cracker manufacturer, had 170 types of cracker for sale, and in the 1890s it was producing 13 million crackers a year.

The type of decorations recommended by women’s magazines in the second half of the century completed the bourgeois, domesticated picture: hanging banners that said things like ‘A Hundred Thousand Welcomes’ or, more straightforwardly, ‘Happy Christmas’, with the mottoes picked out in cotton wool or tinfoil, or embroidery, or shells or evergreens shaped in the form of letters. By the middle of the century ‘fairy lights’ were in use: small candles in jars, placed decoratively on the mantelpiece or the dinner table. (By the 1890s electric fairy lights were on show in some of the more advanced houses.) Many of the magazine suggestions at the end of the century were unfeasible for all but the very wealthy, and were probably more the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination than a reality. Nevertheless, they do show how the holiday had become a festival of display, of artifice, with the expectation that this would be supplied by bought-in goods. The
Lady
in 1896 suggested that the dinner table might have pieces of mirror
laid down the centre, surrounded by scraps of moss, branches of holly and mistletoe, ‘and sprays of red-veined tree ivy, in which some electric lamps, or, failing these, fairy lights are half hid’, to resemble a ‘mimic lake’ with illuminated bushes. Out of the greenery ‘rise other little trees, and here and there are placed birch-bark canoes, painted with silver paint, and each apparently guided by a “Father Christmas”, bright with silver drapery, the boats being freighted with glittering white bon-bons’, while the four corners of the table hold four miniature trees - ‘in reality the top of a seedling fir gleaming with frostine powder’.
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Should one choose to take this as having the slightest connection to any arrangement that might in reality appear, the question must arise, where to put the food?

However, the message of these magazines was that theirs was a vision of what Christmas
should
be like: how, if everyone had endless disposable income, things
ought
to look. And the way it ought to look was, apparently, shop-bought. While stories and songs centred on the bliss of domesticity, on how happy families entertained themselves, in fact Christmas was becoming the most commodity-based time of the year. All the games and indoor pastimes that were mentioned were promoted and marketed by magazines; their rules were laid out in magazines, pamphlets and books; riddles, puzzles and charades were not homecreated, but published and purchased. Music was played at home, carols were sung at home and in the streets, but the sheet music for carols was now a commercial enterprise, and fashionable seasonal songs were all the rage: ‘The Christmas Bazaar Gallopade’, ‘The Christmas Tree Polka’, ‘The Christmas Tree Quadrille’, ‘The Christmas Quadrille for 1865’, ‘The Christmas Echoes Quadrille’, ‘The Christmas Box Quadrille’, ‘King Christmas Quadrille’, ‘Around the Christmas Tree Quadrille’ and ‘A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year Quadrille’ were a few out of hundreds that poured off the presses to be purchased.
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These seasonal purchases provided pleasant hours for the families at home; they also provided work for the needy, as the increase in business meant a seasonal rise in casual labour. One of the main beneficiaries of the latest Christmas tradition to develop was the Post Office, with the arrival of the Christmas card. These cards and the Post Office were symbiotic developments: until the arrival of the penny post in 1840, sending and receiving Christmas greetings was too expensive to become a mass preoccupation; with the arrival of the seasonal missive, by 1878
the Post Office was seeing a December increase to its income of £20,000 every year - and rising.

A number of different precursors all exerted an influence on the creation of the Christmas card. Firstly, in the eighteenth century, children at school were often required to produce ‘writing sheets’ or ‘Christmas pieces’ to show their parents their new handwriting skills. On specially decorated paper bought from printers and stationers, they drew pretty borders and wrote greetings, proverbs and mottoes. The second influence was the Christmas broadside market (above). The final eighteenthcentury ancestor was the vogue that sprang up at the end of the century for sentimental cards with lettering and a verse, and perhaps a scrap of cheap lace or ribbon attached, with a message of affection hidden inside: Valentine’s Day cards. These were widely available. In
The Pickwick Papers
Sam Weller stops at a stationer’s window:

The particular picture on which Sam Weller’s eyes were fixed…was a highly coloured representation of a couple of human hearts skewered together with an arrow, cooking before a cheerful fire, while a male and female cannibal in modern attire, the gentleman being clad in a blue coat and white trousers, and the lady in a deep red pelisse with a parasol of the same, were approaching the meal with hungry eyes, up a serpentine gravel path leading thereunto. A decidedly indelicate young gentleman, in a pair of wings and nothing else, was depicted as superintending the cooking; a representation of the spire of the church in Langham Place, appeared in the distance; and the whole formed a ‘valentine’, of which, as a written inscription in the window testified, there was a large assortment within, which the shopkeeper pledged himself to dispose of to his countrymen generally, at the reduced rate of one and sixpence each.
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These cards were no passing fad. They grew in popularity until, by 1820, the Post Office estimated that as many as 200,000 cards were being dispatched in February in London alone.
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Given that valentines were expressions of love, not friendship, it must be assumed that each sender sent only one (or perhaps two, if one is being cynical) each year, so 200,000 cards meant that a lot of people were participating in this custom. The market was certainly large enough to sustain the publication
of a number of small booklets that appeared in the 1820s, supplying quantities of verses for the unimaginative to inscribe in their cards. They were carefully focused: some for women, such as
Cupid’s Garland, or, Love’s Annual Resource, A Collection of Original Valentine Verses…for Ladies to Declare their Sentiments to Gentlemen
, and some for men, such as
Hymen’s Rhapsodies, or Lover’s Themes…Written expressly for this Work, for Gentlemen to Address Ladies in Sonnets, Superior to any other.
By the 1830s most of the books with valentine verses were now, instead of romance, producing ‘Amusing’ offerings, or ones ‘Calculated to Excite Risibility in all Countenances’. These may have represented a more profitable trend for the card manufacturers - a decent person could send an expression of love to only one person, but comic verses could go to many.

The first Christmas card was produced under the aegis of Henry Cole. In the early 1830s Cole had been given leave from his clerkship at the Record Commission to help Rowland Hill in his campaign for postal reform. Cole, rather brilliantly, came up with the idea of producing a weekly newspaper with news about the campaign: because this was a newspaper, the Post Office was forced to carry without charge propaganda for its own reorganization. Until the reforms were implemented, however, the sender paid a heavy price for the receipt of each letter. An expression of love from a swain in Birmingham might be worth the 9
d.
charge levied by the Post Office on his heart’s desire in London, but would Christmas greetings from a friend? The penny post arrived in 1840, and in 1843 Cole commissioned a drawing for a card. The picture was probably produced by the artist and illustrator J. C. Horsley: it showed a family at Christmas dinner toasting ‘absent friends’, while, in a panel, charity was being administered to the poor.
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Cole had about a thousand of these cards printed and hand-coloured by a professional colourer; they went on sale at 1
s.
each, but there was no great demand. Instead, printers began to pick up on the older example of the children’s Christmas pieces, producing packs of notepaper printed with engravings, with twelve different engravings per set - one for each month of the year. Each sheet had the month engraved along with the picture, but the image with the December sheet did not usually have a Christmas-theme. One that has survived, from 1853, had a seaside picture for December, with a naked child refusing to go into the water and his mother saying, ‘Go in, do, you naughty boy.’ Others had mottoes like ‘Grand-Mothers
[
sic
] Love to all the little Children that are good’.
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These were all-purpose greeting cards, now made viable by the penny post.