Christmas past: A selection from Victorian magazines - Hardcover

Dulcie M. Ashdown

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241894611 ISBN 13: 9780241894613

Publisher: Elm Tree Books, 1976

Synopsis

The Victorian Christmas is everyone's ideal of what a Christmas ought to be; children enraptured before a candlelit tree, tables groaning under an abundance of turkey, goose and pudding, stories of ghosts and hobgoblins, carol singers, church bells ringing through the midnight air. It is only in the last hundred years or so that such Christmas feasts and entertainments have been shared by the majority, rather than by the privileged few.In Victorian times, 'Christmas as at Windsor' became the established order, for it was the festivities of the Royal Family that people took as their model. The popular Press was mainly responsible for the wide dissemination of the new ideas and from the mid-1860s Christmas features, stories, poems and pictures, beyond the purely religious sphere, won a place in December issues of magazines.Culled from the pages of the Victorians' own reading matter, this book provides a kaleidoscope of their Christmas celebrations and festivities. Their meals, their clothes, their home-made entertainments and gifts, even their self-conscious awareness of charity and the claims of the poor in the midst of their own indulgence, all combine to recreate the atmosphere of Christmas Past .

Edition details

• Publisher: Elm Tree Books
• Publication date: 1976
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241894611
• ISBN 13: 9780241894613
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 152