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VICTORIAN VALUES
By Judith Flanders

Financial Times (UK)
December 8, 2006

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b6c079d4-85c8-11db-86d5-0000779e2340.html

As the shops fill up in the weeks before Christmas, and we are bombarded with advertising and credit-card offers, even the most festive souls get jaded. Most people prefer to believe in an idealized vision of Christmas, with rosy-cheeked youngsters singing carols while the family gathers around the tree.

What we are dreaming about is a traditional Victorian Christmas, as seen on Christmas cards. But the mythical Christmas turns out to be just that: a myth. The Victorians invented Christmas as we know it, and it was a consumer bonanza from the beginning. Materialism is nothing new, and the 19th-century merchants knew that bigger festivals meant bigger sales. The advent of the railways, and with them a more mobile population, created the perfect audience for newly minted "traditions."

When Charles Dickens first described a typical Christmas -- in 1837, the year Queen Victoria came to the throne -- some of the trappings of the modern festival were in place: family parties, mistletoe and holly, church-going, charity, turkey, plum pudding, and mince pies. But there were no trees, no carols, no cards, no Father Christmas, and, perhaps most surprising of all, no presents.

The holiday had been in hibernation since the 17th century, when the Puritans condemned it as a "pagan" festival. It swiftly died in popular memory, replaced by the riot of Twelfth Night, which was a continuation of the old, rowdy winter-solstice celebrations.

When Christmas returned to the calendar, it rapidly became associated with family "togetherness." As public-school education spread to more of the middle classes, children were often away from home. The working classes were also likely to work far away from home in factories in the new industrial cities. Now the speed of the trains made a short visit home feasible -- the cost was reasonable and trains ran on Christmas Day. The only people unlikely to see their families were servants, who had to be on hand to run the festivities for their employers.

As with every other tradition, Christmas dinner had been transformed since the start of the 19th century. Plum pudding had replaced the 18th-century staple, plum porridge, a beef broth thickened with bread and enriched with dried fruit, wine, and spices -- "a dish few foreigners find to their taste," noted a French visitor. Twelfth Night or Epiphany cakes, with bean and pea tokens to designate the king and queen of the festival, mutated into Christmas cake. Plum pudding, fruit cake, and mince pies started to appear everywhere: they require large quantities of dried fruit, which had been rare and expensive until steamships and railways allowed goods to be shipped cheaply.

The railways also brought turkeys to the mass-market. Traditionally, families had eaten goose for the celebration meal, although in the early 19th century turkey was also gaining popularity as a larger alternative, better suited to the extended Victorian family. But getting turkeys to the table involved a huge amount of effort.

The birds were reared in East Anglia, and then herded all the way to London wearing little leather boots to protect their feet. They had to begin their trek in August, and because they lost so much weight on their forced march, the fattening-up process had to be started again once they reached market. The railways made it possible to butcher birds in Norfolk and ship them across the country overnight. A new tradition was born.

The great importance of the family Christmas feast created new niche marketing opportunities for businesses. In 1847 a London confectioner, Tom Smith, attempted to distinguish his sweets from those of his competitors by adding wrapping paper that made a small explosion when it was opened. These were initially sold as "firecracker sweets," then as "bangs of expectation," but soon the sweets vanished and the cracker took on the form we know, complete with paper hats and trinkets. These became enormously successful: in the 1890s, Tom Smith's was producing 13m crackers a year.

The importance of the "family" Christmas meal was even extended to paupers. In 1837 the Times noted that the workhouses were making "not the slightest relaxation in discipline or addition of diet" for Christmas Day, although as a concession the treadmill had been stopped. By 1842, the Poor Law Board instructed that workhouses must expect no work to be performed by paupers on Christmas Day. And in 1847, the board also added a rider that the local guardians were now at liberty to dole out extra food to the workhouse inmates on this one day.

It was a sign that charity had become a big component of the middle-class Christmas. The link between Christmas and charitable giving became stronger as the century went on, coinciding with a shift from food to present-giving as the focus of the celebration. As the Victorians started to fill their homes with gifts at Christmas, there was an equivalent need to look outwards to those who had less.

The ritual of gift-giving to family and the needy started to be associated with Father Christmas towards the end of the century. After the Reformation, St Nicholas, whose Saint's Day was on December 6, vanished, and was replaced by Old Christmas, or Sir Christmas, representing the spirit of the season. Illustrations in the late 1840s show a thin old man, bearded and a bit droopy, rather like Old Father Time.

In the 1880s, the American "Santa Claus" was melded with Old Christmas and transformed into Father Christmas; the jolly, red- robed figure we all recognize. In the 1890s the Santa Claus Gazette appeared, "The Official Organ of the 'Santa Claus' Christmas Distribution Fund" and every New Year's Eve its charitable workers dressed up to give gifts to the poor. This was no small group of eccentrics: by 1910 they were handing out 10,000 parcels.

Food was the usual gift given as charity, but at home the presents tended to be less practical. Among the earliest Christmas gifts were annuals, a tradition started in 1823 by a print-seller called Rudolph Ackermann. His literary annual, Forget Me Not, was a great success, and by 1825 there was competition from another nine annuals; 62 were published in 1831. The content of all the annuals was similar -- literary pieces, travel-writing and pretty engravings.

These were soon followed by annuals for children -- such as The Juvenile Forget Me Not, which appeared from 1830 -- and by those with a more religious bent. The Christmas Tree: A Book of Instruction and Amusement for all Young People had essays with titles such as "The Vanity of Earthly Things," as well as stories about pious children who died beautiful deaths.

In the 1840s Christmas presents were still mainly given to children, not adults. When it was noted that Prince Albert expected "the agreeable accompaniment of Christmas presents" for adults as well as children, it was considered unusual enough to comment on. But by the middle of the century, Christmas shopping was already beginning its long march to retail domination. In 1856 the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne had noticed that in London a few shops were showing "some tokens of approaching Christmas" on December 20. A decade later, the Times was carrying its Christmas advertisements and reviews for children's books as early as December 11. And present-giving received a huge boost when the Post Office's new parcel-post department opened in 1883, so families could send gifts to absent friends.

In 1888, J.R. Roberts Stores in Stratford set up an annual Christmas grotto. This was probably Father Christmas's first outing to a department store, but by 1889 he was making appearances across the country, promoting shopping for children as a seasonal activity. In 1906, Gamages advertised that it held stock of 500,000 toy soldiers, "but owing to the exceptional demand at Christmastime, customers are urged to give their orders as early as possible."

By the end of the century, shopping and Christmas were so firmly linked that companies that produced non-Christmas items refused to be left behind. Many ran seasonal advertisements for the most non-seasonal of goods: Pears' Soap advertisements showed a small child hiding under an overturned bathtub, with the caption, "Oh! Here's a Merry Christmas." The Sen-Sen Cachou Company was rather less festive, and at the height of the Boer War produced "The Sen-Sen War Puzzle" as a Christmas giveaway. It was a board game where players raced to be first to beat the Boers.

By the end of the century the "traditional" festival was produced by manufacturers, delivered by railways, and advertised by newspapers and magazines. Christmas as we know it was firmly in place, and remains almost unchanged a century later.

--Judith Flanders is the author of Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (HarperPress, £20).

CARDS

One of the most recent Christmas "traditions" is the Christmas card. In the early 1830s, Henry Cole, a civil servant (later the prime mover in organizing the Great Exhibition and the Victoria and Albert museum) was seconded to the Post Office to help develop postal reform. At this time, the recipient of each letter paid for its carriage. This changed in 1840, when the radically cheap penny post arrived: now minimum-weight letters cost 1d, and were paid for by the sender.

Three years later, Henry Cole commissioned a hand-colored picture of a family at Christmas dinner toasting "absent friends." About a thousand went on sale at 1s each, but there was no great demand until printing technology had moved on.

In the 1870s it became possible to produce colored prints cheaply, and by 1878 some 4.5m cards were sent in December. To meet this extraordinary demand, a huge variety of cards appeared.

Few had religious images. Instead, there were fairy-tale characters, or traditional folk characters such as Robin Hood; other cards were humorous, and in 1884 the first art-reproduction card appeared. Most had what were by now the traditional Christmas symbols: plum puddings, holly, mistletoe, and Christmas trees.

TREES

The decorated pine tree arrived from Germany in the early 1830s, when German merchants in Manchester imported one of their native traditions: "pine tops which are generally illuminated with a paper for every day in the year."

Prince Albert is often mistakenly assumed to have introduced the tree to Britain, but the royal couple got their first decorated tree nearly a decade after these Manchester merchants. However, the royal connection did make trees fashionable, and the custom took off after an illustration of the royal family grouped around a tree appeared in a magazine in 1848.

Shops were early adopters of the commercial possibilities of the Christmas tree. Sweet-sellers decorated trees with their wares and gave their regular customers a seasonal token from their branches. The idea of the tree as a source of presents spread quickly from these commercial displays, and soon the tree was just a background to sweets, toys, flowers, and fruit, hung on its branches or placed underneath.

CAROLS

Most traditional Christmas carols had been written between 1400 and the 1640s, but died out with the Puritan suppression of the seasonal holiday. It was only in the 1850s that the carol-singing revival really took off. Antiquarian research had done much to make old carols popular again, but mass revival was helped by new printing technologies and mass distribution by railway for the resulting sheet music. As many well-off families now had pianos in their drawing-rooms, they could gather around the piano and sing merrily together.