Abstract
During the 1820s and 1830s, literary annuals dominated the end of the year seasonal market, and it seemed like they always would. Before annuals came about, a limited number of poems and masterpieces formed the booksellers’ limited Christmas supplies, including Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, and a short list of books for children like Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote, and Mother Goose volumes.1 Then came the annual. From the romantic style of engravings to the material object of the annual and its Christmas-less prose, gift books exclaimed their disinterest in all of the customs of Christmas except gift-giving. Fewer gifts were given in the early-century Christmas, but for those who did exchange presents, books featured as a traditional choice. Annuals served as anthologies of verse and prose illustrated with sentimental engravings or reproductions of high art. The gilt-edged annual was seen as “fitting ornamentation” for middle-class homes, a “status gift rather than a book to read.”2
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Notes
Joseph Shaylor, The Fascination of Books, with Other Papers on Books & Bookselling (New York: Putnam, 1912), 39–40.
Harry E. Hootman “British Literary Annuals and Giftbooks: 1823–1861,” Diss. University of South Carolina, 2004, 1; Peter J. Manning, “Wordsworth in the Keepsake,” in Literature in the Marketplace, ed. Jordan and Patten, 45.
Kathryn Ledbetter, “Lucrative Requests: British Authors and Gift Book Editors,” Bibliographical Society of America, Papers 88 (1994): 214.
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Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public1800–1900 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957), 362.
Valerie Sanders, ed., Record of Girlhood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Childhoods (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 97.
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David Parker, Christmas and Charles Dickens (New York: AMS P, 2005), x, 78–90, 108.
Julian Wolfreys, Being English (Albany: State U of New York P, 1994), 5–6.
Hervey, The Book of Christmas, 66; Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians (Athens: Ohio UP, 2004), 13.
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Robert Burden, Introduction to Landscape and Englishness (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 17.
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John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 159.
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Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 24.
Robert Tracy, “‘A Whimsical Kind of Masque’: The Christmas Books and Victorian Spectacle,” Dickens Studies Annual 27 (1988): 113.
Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books, vol. 1, ed. Michael Slater (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), xxix.
Tracy, ‘“A Whimsical Kind of Masque,”’ 113; H.M. Daleski, “Seasonal Offerings: Some Recurrent Features of the Christmas Books,” Dickens Studies Annual 27 (1998): 107.
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Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 146–49, 153, 167.
Ruth F. Glancy, Introduction to Christmas Books by Charles Dickens (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), xv.
Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers, 187. Thackeray’s Christmas book sales would eventually improve. His 1850 The Kickleburys on the Rhine quickly sold out of its original run of 3,000 and went into a second edition almost immediately. Margaret Smith, ed. The Letters of Charlotte Bronte, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 471, http://www.nlx.com.
Wilkie Collins, Sharpe’s London Magazine 8 (January 1849): 188 in Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Collins, 145.
Charles Dickens to Rev. David Macrae, 1861, The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 9, ed. Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 556.
Charles Dickens to the Earl of Carlisle, 2 January 1849, The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 5, ed. Graham Storey and K.J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 466.
William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper, 1891), http://lion.chadwyck.com.
Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (New York: Cambridge. 1995). 6.
William M. Thackeray, “An Essay on Thunder and Small Beer,” in The Christmas Books of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh (New York: Harper, 1899), 166–67.
Richard Kelly, Introduction to A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003), 16.
Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 133.
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J.M. Golby and A.W. Purdue, The Making of the Modern Christmas (London: Batsford, 1986), 49–51.
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Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Moorland Cottage,” in The Moorland Cottage and Other Stories, ed. Suzanne Lewis (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 61.
Jeffrey Cass, “‘The Scraps, Patches, and Rags of Daily Life’: Gaskell’s Oriental Other and the Conversation of Cranford,” Papers on Language and Literature 35:2 (Fall 1999): 429–30.
Carol Lesjak, “Authenticity and the Geography of Empire: Reading Gaskell with Emecheta,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 35:2 (Fall 2002): 135.
See Ramona Lumpkin’s “(Re)Visions of Virtue: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Moorland Cottage and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss,” Studies in the Novel 23:4 (Winter 1991): 432–442. Lumpkin traces Eliot’s obligation to Gaskell’s narrative, themes, and characters.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “Christmas in the Olden Time, 1650,” in Fisher’s Drawing-Room Scrap Book (London: Fisher, Son and Jackson, 1836), 48.
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© 2009 Tara Moore
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Moore, T. (2009). Books for Christmas, 1822–1860. In: Victorian Christmas in Print. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623330_2
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