I have just been re-reading ‘Jane Austen’s Christmas’ a book my late wife and I wrote back in
the 1990s. I updated it for this year after an approach by The History Press.
The extraordinary thing is that in the post Napoleonic Wars era that Jane Austen enjoyed only briefly before her death in 1817 at age 41, there is very little difference in the rural Christmas celebration her parents would have enjoyed some 40 years before, while 40 years after her death, everything was changing very rapidly.
In fundamental terms, there was no Christmas industry in Austen’s time yet four decades later, it was one of the growing social and economic phenomena of the Victorian era.
Had Jane Austen lived a reasonable lifespan even for those days, she would have seen the birth of Victoria reported some 2 years later in 1819 when there was still very little evidence of anything approaching a commercial Christmas that we would recognise today. By the time that Victoria was a queen and mother, the Christmas tree had been popularised, decorations were beginning to make an appearance and the greetings card industry was already well on the way.
Industrial processes certainly helped as did a rapidly expanding urban population and a middle class that was beginning to have disposable income, literacy, access to mass printed media with the expansion of popular newspapers, a coherent advertising industry and courtesy of the burgeoning railway network, a means of rapid distribution.
A journey from London to Manchester in Austen’s time would, depending on the weather, take at least two days for most passengers and considerably longer for the mass transportation of goods which would have been reliant on a canal network.
By the 1850s such a journey would have been routine in a matter of hours.
A similar revolution was underway in terms of international trade with the move away from sailing ships to steam and regular, reliable services to the continent, opening up the free flow of goods, people and influence. Imports were becoming cheaper and new market opportunities had opened up.
In the late Georgian era, which was marked by country house celebrations greenery and a lot of food, there would have been one absentee, which perhaps symbolises the radical change in the domestic Christmas celebration; namely the Christmas tree.
Certainly there were published accounts, contemporary with Jane Austen, of various royals, such as the Duke of Clarence and indeed Queen Charlotte putting up a tree decorated with candles and sweets, but as described by the queen’s biographer, Dr John Watkin, it was a yew, not the German Tanne which would have been familiar to many of the royal family with their relations and origins in Saxony, Bohemia, Prussia, Coburg and many of the other fragmented states that had yet to be unified under a German banner. Fundamentally these were not popular figures among the British public at large.
King George III was largely known as ‘Mad Jack’ because of his very erratic behaviour, the Prince Regent was divorced from reality, overweight, extremely self indulgent, unpleasant and definitely lacking in anything resembling the common touch, surrounded with wealthy sycophants.
The society of the time was very stratified with very little in the way of real cultural exchange from top to bottom. The wealthy landowners were themselves a long way down from royal circles and very unlikely to be privy to how the royals conducted themselves at Christmas.
All that said, it terms of food at least and particularly poultry, there were mass market changes. It began with driving geese from East Anglia to London, a process that took weeks rather than days. Extraordinarily, these geese would be driven through drying mud, providing them with what looked like bootees to protect their webbed feet. Once at Smithfield Market they would be slaughtered and distributed a few days before Christmas for almost instant preparation. There was no effective refrigeration other than cold weather and larders.
This was followed in fairly short order by the ‘Turkey Stage’, where freshly killed and drawn turkeys were festooned in and around the express stagecoaches of the era and brought at high speed for distribution to outlying towns within a day’s journey.
Basically the food market was there it just needed mechanisation which the next forty years would bring.
It was the popularisation through accounts of Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree in the 1840’s that kicked off the realisation that growing spruce trees and harvesting them young made commercial sense. Spruce, pine and other fast growing evergreens were already being grown in plantations to supply pit props, masts, furniture and a variety of other domestic products, now there was a growing market for trees grown specifically for the Christmas celebration, but they needed something to enhance the effect and that came in the sale of mass produced wooden, cast metal and glass ornaments from Germany.
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