This month’s Special Collections Spotlight Session focuses on some of the books in the collection which relate to Christmas, and to the traditions and celebrations of the festive season. Anja introduces four books, and the videos of those presentations can be found on our YouTube channel, or watched back-to-back by clicking below. The full set lasts about 25 minutes.
For December’s Special Collections Spotlight Session it seemed appropriate to focus on books related to Christmas, and to the traditions and celebrations of the festive season. There are many items in the collection with festive connotations, and the four selected here give some insight into the customs of Christmas in past centuries.
The first book highlighted could be said to be the quintessence of a Victorian gift book! ‘Christmas with the Poets: a collection of songs, carols, and descriptive verses, relating to the festival of Christmas, from the Anglo-Norman period to the present time’ [Db 278] was published in 1851 and is clearly a book which was designed to be looked at. Its cover is leather, with a broad paper border showing a design of holly and mistletoe which has been pasted onto both front and back covers. This border is rather delicate, so the book is stored in a box on the shelf to help protect it. The page edges are gilded, and the internal pages are lavishly decorated in black and gold ink, with illuminated capitals, gilt page borders, and illustrations throughout. It is a very beautiful book.
It was also a very popular book. It was reprinted repeatedly in its first year, such that by Christmas 1852 it was on its seventh edition. Our copy is the first edition, and it seems that one was the only version to have the paper border on the covers; later editions had the border of holly and mistletoe embossed and gilded directly onto the leather. The book is an example of the growing interest in traditions of the British past, which was an expression of the Victorian love of nostalgia and the sentimental lauding of the family Christmas.
The book was edited by Henry Vizetelly, who was a London publisher, writer and engraver. He was born in 1820, and as a young man he started two periodicals – Pictorial Times and Illustrated Times – before being appointed as the Paris correspondent for the Illustrated London News, in 1865. In later life he established a publishing house, and he was also an authority on wine! The illustrations for the book were done by Vizetelly’s near contemporary Myles Birket Foster. Foster’s artistic talent was recognised at a young age and he was apprenticed to engraver Ebenezer Landells, through whom he got work on Punch magazine and the Illustrated London News, amongst others. He also branched out into book illustrations, as here. However, he is mostly renowned as a watercolourist, producing rather sentimental works which were both critically acclaimed and, more popularly, featured on the lids of Cadbury’s chocolate boxes! His illustrations for ‘Christmas with the Poets’ show the customs which are being described, as well as some aspects of the Christmas story. There are quite a number of fine illustrations of people drinking, like the one at the top of this page!
The traditions of Christmas past also form part of the content of the second book in this session, ‘Ancient Mysteries Described, especially the English Miracle Plays, founded on Apocryphal New Testament Story, extant among the unpublished manuscripts in the British Museum […]’ [Dd 479]. This book was published in 1823 by William Hone, and it has a rather interesting genesis. Hone was born in 1780, and rose to prominence as a radical journalist, writer, and satirist. He is particularly remembered for a series of court cases in 1817, where he was put on trial for publishing material which was considered harmful to public morals and likely to bring the prayer-book into contempt. After a gruelling time in court he was eventually acquitted on all counts, and the cases are now acknowledged as an important stage in the development of the notion of freedom of the British press. This book is an indirect output from that trial, since during the research to prepare his defence, Hone spent time investigating the archives at the British Museum where, amongst many other things, he came across papers detailing some aspects of medieval religious customs. Following the trial, he resolved to publish some of these largely unknown works. The first result was ‘The Apocryphal New Testament’, which he issued in 1820 with the intention of helping to explain pictures and references in other works, which may otherwise be incomprehensible to those not familiar with the Apocrypha. This was followed three years later by ‘Ancient Mysteries Described […]’ which introduced readers to a number of traditions and customs which were then largely unknown.
The ‘Miracle Plays’ of the title were part of the medieval European tradition of vernacular drama. Scenes from the bible, and its Apocrypha, were interpreted and performed in tableaux and antiphonal song, initially by monks. They often took the form of a cycle of plays, which were not necessarily presented at Christmas but did include elements of the Christmas story. This book publishes some surviving accounts of the Coventry Mysteries, together with the Apocryphal sources for the stories presented. In addition, Hone has supplemented this with details of other traditions, including ancient carols, and the custom of the ‘Boy Bishops’. This latter was a tradition of the festive season, whereby on the Feast of St Nicholas (6th December) a boy was elected as a bishop, in parody of the proper office. He was installed on the bishop’s throne and he took part in processions and granted blessings. His authority was maintained until the Feast of the Holy Innocents on 28th December. Hone’s book is an interesting insight into the period when the British public was just starting to take an interest in the way religious ceremonies were celebrated in the past.
Another tradition which grew up around Christmas is the telling of ghost stories. There has long been a notion that Christmas Eve was a night when the veil between the living world and the world of the spirits was thin, and this was enhanced by the natural tendency of families gathered together at home to entertain each other with storytelling. In the Victorian period this custom was heightened and codified by the publishing trade, and particularly by the efforts of Charles Dickens. Dickens was, of course, a hugely popular novelist, and most of his novels originally appeared as serialisations in periodicals. The author created and edited two very influential weekly titles – ‘Household Words’ in the 1850s, followed by ‘All the Year Round’, which he launched in 1859. This latter included journalism and factual reporting, but was mostly renowned for its serialisations. It launched with the first part of Dickens’ own ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and also brought other classics to the public, such as the Wilkie Collins novels ‘The Woman in White’ and ‘The Moonstone’. At Christmas, however, ‘All the Year Round’ deviated from its usual structure by providing a special, double-sized issue which included standalone short stories, rather than parts of longer novels. Many of these stories had supernatural themes, and helped to popularise the idea of the Christmas ghost story.
The Bromley House collection includes a book which contains five of the Christmas issues of ‘All the Year Round’, bound together into one volume [Dc 166]. These comprise the publications for the years 1863 to 1867, which were the last five years of the first series of the journal before the launch of its second series in November 1868. Each issue has an overarching theme which acts as a framework for the stories, such that 1863 is ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings’, and 1865 is ’Dr Marigold’s Prescriptions’, for instance. The individual stories loosely conform to this theme, but cover many different topics. They are also known to have been written by a number of different authors, although Dickens only occasionally acknowledges this in the publications, with most stories remaining anonymous. 
A few of the stories from these issues have retained reputations in their own right too, such as “No. 1 Branch Line. The Signal-Man” from the 1866 issue ‘Mugby Junction’, which is a particularly creepy tale, and was filmed as the 1976 BBC ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’, with Denholm Elliott in the title role.
The book has a little stamp inside the cover which reads “BOUND BY G & J. ABBOTT. NOTTM”. The Abbotts were a family of Nottingham bookbinders who worked throughout the 19th, and into the 20th, centuries. The ‘G and J’ recorded here are most likely George Abbott, who lived from 1830 to 1923, and his brother James Abbott, who lived between 1832 and 1914. Census records indicate that their bookbinding business was based on Huskinson Street in Sherwood in 1861, and then on Parliament Street in the city centre in the later years of the century. It therefore seems likely that these were the original bookbinders who took a customer’s five Christmas issues of ‘All the Year Round’ and bound them into a book, probably sometime in the late 1860s or 1870s.
The final book in this Spotlight Session brings us in something of a circle as it is another gift book for Christmas, like the first book highlighted above. This is ‘The Queen’s Christmas Carol: an anthology of poems, stories, essays, drawings and music by British authors, artists and composers’, from 1905 [JWC/5 (284)]. As the title suggests it contains short prose pieces, verses, and illustrations, as well as sheet music, by some of the most famous names of its day, such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Elgar, Thomas Hardy and even Bram Stoker! The book is lavishly produced, in a white bookcloth cover embossed in green and with pictorial plates throughout.
The Queen mentioned in the title is Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, and the frontispiece of the book is a photographic portrait of her on her coronation day. As with ‘Christmas with the Poets’ from 54 years earlier, this is a book which is intended to be looked at.
However, ‘The Queen’s Christmas Carol’ also has another purpose. The dedications in the front indicate that it was “…published on behalf of the Queen’s Fund for the Unemployed…”, so that as well as providing an appropriate gift, it could also be bought as a donation to charity. The first national unemployment benefits in Britain were not brought in until the National Insurance Act in 1911, which was part of a broad range of welfare reform enacted by the Liberal government following their defeat of the Conservatives at the General Election of 1906. 
When this book was published, the year before the election, there was therefore no formal governmental benefit for the unemployed, but there was a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo. The Queen’s Fund may have provided a socially acceptable way for public figures to be seen to be helping those less fortunate than themselves, within the framework of traditional, Edwardian society. It was a way for people to contribute to the private organisations which aimed to help the poor (without having to offer support for radical changes to wider society!) This sort of philanthropic giving was particularly encouraged at Christmas, so gifts which benefit good causes were very popular – and continue to be so up to the present day!
‘Ancient Mysteries Described’ and ‘All the Year Round’ are both available for loan. ‘Christmas with the Poets’ and ‘The Queen’s Christmas Carol’ are books for reference only, so cannot be borrowed. Members can consult them within the library, though.
Anja Thompson-Rohde