Abstract
The Punch contributor who had thought that “every little author” was preparing a 5s. Christmas book in 1846 would have been overwhelmed by the greater flood of Christmas materials that inundated the market a few decades later when a variety of gift items were to be had for a range of prices.1 An 1861 entry in Thackeray’s “Roundabout Papers” exposed a writer’s subsequent appreciation for the annual packaging of Christmas cheer:
We have all admired the illustrated papers, and noted how boisterously jolly they become at Christmas time. What wassail bowls, robin-redbreasts, waits, snow landscapes, bursts of Christmas song! And then to think that these festivities are prepared months before—that these Christmas pieces are prophetic! How kind of artists and poets to devise the festivities beforehand, and serve them pat at the proper time!2
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Paul Davis, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), 4, 239.
For more information on the plentiful adaptations of the Carol, see Paul Davis’s exhaustive work or Fred Guida’s encyclopedic A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations: A Critical Examination of Dickens’s Story and Its Productions on Screen and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000).
Tom Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2007), 70.
Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich, Introduction to Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), xvi.
Miriam Bailin, “The New Victorians,” in Function of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, ed. Christine L. Krueger (Athens: Ohio UP, 2002), 39, 38.
Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry, 2nd ed. (London: Lawrence Erblaum, 2005), 210, 215, 219.
Anne Perry, A Christmas Guest (New York: Ballantine, 2005).
Evelyn Beilenson, ed. A Victorian Christmas (White Plains: Peter Pauper, 1990), 5.
John Grisham, Skipping Christmas (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 54.
Copyright information
© 2009 Tara Moore
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Moore, T. (2009). Modern Marketing of the Victorian Christmas. In: Victorian Christmas in Print. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623330_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623330_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37998-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-62333-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)