Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  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.37

  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.39*

  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.40 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 9d. 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.41 Cole had about a thousand of these cards printed and hand-coloured by a professional colourer; they went on sale at 1s. 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’.42 These were all-purpose greeting cards, now made viable by the penny post.

  In the 1850s a printer in London began to produce cards that were specifically for Christmas, and their design was so similar to the card that Horsley had designed for Cole that this must have been the inspiration. But, again, this was only a small ripple. It was not until printing technology had moved on that cards became more popular. In the 1860s, die-sinking arrived, which meant that decorative embossing could be added to the cards as well as a printed image. Most importantly, in the 1870s it became possible to use chromolithography, first invented in the 1830s, on a large scale to produce mass-coloured prints. Cole and Horsley’s original Christmas card, which had sold for 1s. in 1843, was reprinted in 1881 by chromolithography and sold at 3d.

  One final factor was necessary before Christmas cards were ready to spread into the mass market, and it occurred at exactly the same time as chromolithography was taken up by most printing firms. This was the arrival of the postcard. To begin with, postcards were small blank cards that could be sent through the post without envelopes, with the address on one side and a space for a brief message on the other. The important point was that they cost half the price of a letter to post, and they were seized on gladly as the perfect way to send brief messages. With multiple postal deliveries each day, for just 1/2d. a husband could send his wife a postcard at lunchtime to tell her he would be home late that evening. Soon people were sending postcards with Christmas messages on them, and the phrase ‘Christmas card’ appeared in common speech for the first time.* In 1871 the Christmas Letter Mission was set up by a church group in Brighton, with the aim of sending a Christmas card to every hospital patient in Sussex. By 1881, as a great number of people began to send cards to their nearest and dearest, th
e sending of charitable cards had increased in a similar fashion. The Christmas Letter Mission became a national charity, posting cards to every hospital patient in the country, and then, in a further expansion of ambition, to every prison and workhouse inmate.43

  To meet this extraordinary demand, a huge variety of cards appeared for sale. Some had fairy-tale characters like Little Red Riding Hood, or traditional folk characters like Robin Hood; others were humorous - ‘Christmas with Punch and Judy’. Still others were elaborate paper constructions, some created concertina-style, in which the card came in sections; each page could be bought separately, or as part of a set. There were also ‘Rough Rustics’, which were illustrations of village children; ‘Humorous Gatherings from the Animal World’, with ‘Three clever sketches - “The Puppy and the Chicken”, “The Kitten and the Crab” and “A Very Strange Bird” ’; and ‘Fairy Glimpses. Highly attractive and pleasing delineations of fairy gambols in sea and air, from original water-colour drawings, by Miss E. G. THOMSON.’44 In 1884 the first art-reproduction card appeared, with an engraving after Raphael.45 Few of the cards had religious imagery: most had what were by now the traditional Christmas symbols - plum puddings, holly, mistletoe and Christmas trees. There were a large number of cards - probably even the majority - that were neither seasonal nor religious, showing animals, flowers, seaside pictures and comic images. Other styles of card were not illustrated at all, but instead were heavily decorated, with embossed or lace-bordered paper, or with silk fringes, or tassels, or silk cords. Still others had perfumed strips of cotton wool glued into sachets and sealed inside a doubled card.46

  In 1883 The Times was pleased that this ‘new trade’ had ‘opened up a new field of labour for artists, lithographers, engravers, printers, ink and pasteboard makers’. Even more trades and professions than this benefited. Many book illustrators, including such luminaries as Marcus Ward, Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, found in Christmas cards a lucrative new market. Postal workers, too, had a seasonal rise in employment. In 1878, 4.5 million cards were being sent every December - about the same number as went through the system on 14 February.47 And the Post Office processed far more than mere cards and letters, finding it expedient in 1883 to establish a parcel-post department. When private carriers had been the only way to send parcels, it had been too expensive for many to send tokens home at the end of the year. In the first year of the parcel post, a package weighing 7 pounds cost 1s. to dispatch; seven years later, 11 pounds could be sent for 11d. - a penny a pound.48

  There were similar seasonal increases in other businesses, and the need for seasonal labour was felt throughout the large industry that had built up to service the Christmas market. The railways required additional porters as people began to travel for the holidays. Theatres put on special Christmas shows, and more performances meant more backstage crews, more extras onstage. Theatres and shops hired sandwich-board men and bill-stickers to advertise their seasonal products. Some street hawkers came in from the country with seasonal goods - holly, ivy and mistletoe - although it is possible that there was no change to their actual numbers: street sellers were accustomed to rotate their goods seasonally throughout the year. Even if there were no additional sellers, many tradesmen by the end of the century fully expected an increase in their sales in December. In 1895 a Christmas-tree vendor in Covent Garden claimed that he sold 30,000 trees a year.49 Even if the number was closer to half that amount, it still meant a tidy sum to set aside for his own Christmas presents.

  For, by the middle of the century, Christmas shopping had already begun its long march to seasonal domination. In 1856 Nathaniel Hawthorne had noticed that on 20 December a few shops were showing ‘some tokens of approaching Christmas’. A decade later, in 1867, The Times was carrying its Christmas advertisements and reviews for children’s books ten days earlier, on 11 December. This date held for some time: women’s magazines did not to run advertisements for seasonal goods until mid-December in the 1880s. But by the 1890s the Lady had articles on Christmas shopping at the end of November, and The Times began its Christmas advertising on the same date. By the turn of the century, Gamage’s department store had its Christmas catalogue printed by October.50

  In the early part of the century, it was food that had preoccupied many who were shopping for Christmas: as the meal was the heart of the home celebration, so food was the centre of the preparatory shopping. Manby Smith was rhapsodic about the displays:

  There are apples of all hues and sizes, among which the brown russet, the golden bob, and the Ribston pippins, are pre-eminent. Among the pears are the huge winter-pear, the delicious Charmontel, and the bishop’s-thumb. Then there are foreign and hot-house grapes…large English pine-apples, pomegranates, brown biffins from Norfolk, and baskets of soft medlars; Kent cob-nuts, filberts and foreign nuts…all gaily mingled and mixed up with flowers of all hues, natural and artificial.

  He was less enthusiastic, however, about the other types of shopping that were appearing: ‘ “Christmas presents” forms a monster line in the posters on the walls and in the shop-windows. Infantine appeals in gigantic type cover the hoardings. “Do, Papa, Buy Me” so-and-so…’51

  As the century progressed presents came to the fore, and in particular more and more presents were specifically marketed for Christmas: the connection of Christmas with presents was also moving into the world of the shop-bought. New Year’s gifts had been common, as were ‘boxes’ (tips) for servants and tradesmen. But gifts before the early nineteenth century revolved around food or, to a lesser degree, small gifts for children. Perhaps the very first advertisement to suggest that a purchase should be made specifically as ‘a present at Christmas’ (although it adds the more conventional ‘or a New Year’s gift’) appeared as early as 1728, when ‘Famous Anodyne Necklaces’ were suggested for ‘All God-Fathers, God-Mothers, Relations, Friends, and Acquaintances to give to CHILDREN…approved of by the Great Dr Chamberlen for Children’s teething fits, fevers convulsions, &c.’52

  Some New Year’s gifts made the move to Christmas quite easily, and some created a niche market of their own. As early as the 1740s books such as The Merry Medley; or, Christmas-box for Gay Gallants and Good Companions and A Christmas-box for Masters and Misses, Consisting of Stories to Improve the Minds of Children were advertised.53 But it was not until improved printing technology - especially for the illustrations - arrived in the nineteenth century that gift books became standard Christmas gifts. In 1823 the book- and print-seller Rudolph Ackermann published Forget Me Not, A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1823. It was a great success, and by 1825 there was competition from another nine annuals; by 1831 there were sixty-two. The content of all the annuals was similar - literary pieces, whether essays, stories or poetry, often commissioned from some of the most famous writers of the period; travel writing; and pretty engravings. The selling point was not really the contents. Instead, the annuals sold because they were beautifully bound, often with silk ribbon markers, and with the engravings printed lavishly on expensive paper. It was as luxury objects that they became ubiquitous in fashionable homes. The Keepsake, one of the most successful, had a presentation plate at the front, which made it clear that these books were entirely to be given as gifts. A review of another, The Winter’s Wreath, in the Athenaeum commended it for having a binding ‘that excels that of any Annual which we have yet seen; and, considering that not the least honourable office of an Annual is to adorn the tables of drawing rooms, this is far from

  slight praise’.54 The annuals managed to convey the idea that they were personal presents while being mass-produced, and this helped them achieve great success. In 1825 Alaric Watts (‘the Father of the Annuals’) produced the Literary Souvenir, which sold 6,000 copies in the first two weeks of publication; in the next year it sold 10,000 copies, and annually thereafter he expected sales of 15,000 while the annuals remained in fashion.55 (For equivalent sales figures for non-gift books, see pp. 167-8.)

  The
re were also annuals for children, such as The Juvenile Forget Me Not, which appeared from 1830. This was followed by annuals for those whose lives took a more religious bent. The Christmas Tree: A Book of Instruction and Amusement for All Young People was published for over a decade, and had essays with titles like ‘The Vanity of Earthly Things’, as well as stories about children whose mothers had died. (‘They talked over all the circumstances of that last day of their dear mother’s life; and the mention of her name only seemed to inspire them with good and gentle thoughts. “If we had a Bible, we might read that psalm papa told us she asked him to read to her just before she died.” But the twins needed no book; their minds were well stored with holy things…’)56 Secular children’s magazines joined in the annual publishing frenzy. One example was the magazine Youth’s Monthly Visitor, which in the 1820s began to bind up its year’s output as Youth’s Miscellany of Knowledge and Entertainment. Rather than stories about beautiful religious deaths, Youth’s Miscellany specialized in useful knowledge: arithmetic, optics, how many pores a body contained, and how coal was mined.57 For, outside the niche market for elegant anthologies, as late as the 1840s Christmas presents were still for the most part for children. In A Christmas Carol, the husband of Scrooge’s ex-fiancée comes home bearing ‘Christmas toys and presents’ for the children only. When it was noted that Prince Albert liked ‘the agreeable accompaniment of Christmas presents’ for adults as well as children, it was unusual enough to comment on.58