Victorian Christmas

Charles Manby Smith was a radical journalist who undertook a project to depict the lives of the ordinary people of Victorian, London. 

Originally published as Curiosities of London Life, or Phases, Physiological and Social of the Great Metropolis in 1853, their work offers a fascinating insight into the real lives of ordinary Victorian men and women. This extract describes Christmas in the Metropolis

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The first indication of the approach of Christmas - a literal "note of preparation," generally steals over us in this crowded city in a dream of the night. Somewhere about the beginning of December, in the small hour "ayont the twal'," a sense of something Elysian qualifies one's quiet slumber; then a faint and distant sound of sweet harmony glides agreeably upon the ear, and grows louder and louder, and we dream rapturous dreams, and float among a countless host of singing seraphs bright - on, and on, and on, when, suddenly, with a start, one wakes to find the dream not all a dream.

For there, beneath your window, is a band of French-horns, flutes, oboes, and trombones, warbling the pastoral symphony of Handel with low-toned instruments, whose quiet voices thrill you with pleasure. Pausing in your breath, you drink in every note, and listen greedily till the strain has ceased; then a stentorian voice rings through the fog and mist and moisture, invoking in behalf of all and sundry within hearing, "a merry Christmas and a happy new-year." Then you drop off once more to sleep, in the dreamy intervals of which the strain is renewed again and again; and you rise in the morning with the full- blown consciousness that Christmas is at hand, and that all the world, and the London world in particular, is bound to be as merry and as happy as it can be.

So the "waits" having thus warned you of the advent of the great annual fact, you begin to look about in your walks abroad for the verification of it; and though it yet wants three weeks or more of Christmas-day, there is no lack of indications of what is expected. In anticipation of the liberal expenditure of ready cash - the most interesting consideration of the season to a London trader - and which expenditure every shopkeeper is dutifully anxious to engross as far as possible to himseld; a thousand different persuasive devices are already placarded and profusely exhibited. "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; so-and-so being blotted out in a few hours by "The New Patent Wig," so that the appeal remains a perplexing puzzle to affectionate parents, till both are in turn blotted out by a third poster, announcing the sacrifice of 120,000 gipsy cloaks and winter mantles at less than half the cost-price.

Cheap Christmas books are a part of every bookseller's display; Christmas fashions fill the drapers' windows, and stand on full-dressed poles in the doorways. There are Christmas lamps, lustres, and candelabra; Christmas diamonds made of paste, and Brumagem jewellery for glittering show, as well as Christmas furniture for parties and routs, to be hired for the season-carving, gilding, hangings, beds; everything which, being wanted but once a year, it may be cheaper to hire than to purchase or to keep on hand.

The slopsellers especially are in a state of prodigious activity, taking time by the forelock, and pushing their unwieldy advertising vans out in every direction, freighted with puffs of their appropriate Christmas garb - Hebrew harness for a Christian festival. These are a few of the broad palms thus early stretched forth to catch a share of the golden shower about to fall.

But these and such as these are very minor and subordinate preparations. Eating and drinking, after all, are the chief and paramount obligations of the Christmas season. As the month grows older, the great gastronomic anniversary is heralded at every turn by signs more abundant and less equivocal. Among the dealers in eatables, one and all of whom are now putting in their sickles for the harvest, the grocer, who is independent of the weather, leads off the dance. Long before the holly and the mistletoe have come to town, he has received his stock of Christmas fruit, on the sale of which, it may be, the profit or loss of the whole year's trading is depending.

For months past, he has been occupied at every leisure hour in breaking to pieces the rocky mass of conglomerate gravel, dirt, sticks, and fruit which, under the designation of currants, came to him from the docks; and it is not before lie has got rid of near half the gross weight, that the indispensable currants are fit to meet the eye of the public. This is one of the nuisances of his trade, and forms a ceremony which, as every housekeeper knows well enough, is but indifferently performed after all. The currants, tolerably cleaned and professionally moistened, occupy a conspicuous place in his window, along with the various sorts of raisins- Sultanas, Muscatels, and Valencias - dates, prunes, and preserves in pots, and candied lemons and spices, built up in the most attractive and gaudy piles and pyramids, edged round with boxes of foreign confections, adorned with admirable specimens of the lithographic art, and all ticketed in clean new figures at astonishingly low prices.

The gin-shops, or, to speak more politely, the wine-vaults, now begin to brush up. They wash and varnish over their soiled paint, cleanse the out-sides and decorate the insides of their faded saloons; and concocting new combinations of fire-water, prepare for thirsty poverty new incentives to oblivious intemperance. Every third-rate inn and back-street public-house is the centre and focus of a goose-club, the announcement of which stares you in the face twenty times in the course of a day's walk. They owe their existence to the improvidence and want of economy of the labouring and lowest classes. A small weekly sum subscribed for thirteen weeks, entitles each subscriber to a goose; and by increasing his weekly dole, he may insure, besides the goose, a couple of bottles of spirits. The distribution of geese and gin takes place on Christmas-eve; and in large working establishments, where the goose-club is a favourite institution, and where, for the most part, the innkeeper is not allowed to meddle, the choice of the birds is decided by the throw of the dice, the thrower of the highest cast having the first choice. We will drop in at the hour of distribution, and witness the consummation of one of these affairs.

But time rolls on, and the great cattle-show in Baker-street has come off. The pig of half a ton weight has held his last levee, and grunted a welcome to the lords and ladies of the aristocracy, and to hundreds of thousands of less distinguished visitors. The prize animals are all sold, and marched or carted off to their new owners. The periodical insanity of the butchers has been developed as strongly as ever.

The love of fame glows beneath a blue apron as fiercely as beneath a diamond star; and determine

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