Compliments of the Season

By

L.D. Ettlinger
and
R.G. Holloway

To-day the sending of Christmas cards is an essential feature of English Christmas. Most people would feel strongly that something was amiss with the festive atmosphere of the season if that gay/coloured part of the Yuletide decorations-were wanting in their homes. Few people will realise that, like the introduction of the Christmas tree, the invention of the Christmas card is a product of the Victorian revival of Christmas and only just a hundred years old. It was not until 1846 that the Christmas card made its appearance first before the public and not until full twenty years later that it was popularised.

The Christmas card is only one example of the Victorians' flight from the drab and horrific conditions of industrial civilisation into the pleasant realm of fantasy, romance and sentiment. It is a late-perhaps the latest-begotten child of Romanticism. We shall only appreciate its curious whims and fancies if we try to understand its parents and ancestors.

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In the eighteenth century, which was a comparatively secure and civilised period in England, sensitive men and women developed an artificial nostalgia for the less secure and the less civilised periods and places of the world's story. Some found their escape in romance, others in stories of noble savages in the Erewhon of South America. The son of a Prime Minister build himself a toy castle and lived in it to print old books, collect old ballads and write a Gothic romance. Professors and poets imagined or invented country retreats, and Doctor Johnson went on the terrifying journey to the Western Isles.

In their search for adventure and simple robust vigour some, as always, recollected the good old days with the same nostalgic sigh. They longed in the days of effeminacy for the stalwart yeoman of old, and in the days of delicate eating they regretted the passing of the 'Roast Beef of Old England'. Oliver Goldsmith's Mr. Hardcastle, the old-fashioned countryman of She Stoops to Conquer, sums up these sentiments when he says, 'I love everything that is old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines', and he contributes to the mistakes of a night by receiving his guests at the gate in an old-fashioned style.

What was more robust in country manners than the eating and drinking and revelries of Christmas, which the Puritans had one forbidden by law? But it is always the old Christmas for Christmas is never what it was, but belongs with the roast beef and the stout yeomen to the vague, undated 'old days', the golden days of one's own recollected childhood metamorphosed by the fireside glow of memory and conjured up by the fumes of Christmas punch.

Addison in 1712 tells of the old-fashioned hospitality of Sir Roger de Coverley. 'He afterwards fell into an account of the diversions which had passed in his house during the holidays; for Sir Roger, after the laudable custom of his ancestors, always keeps open house at Christmas. I learned from him that he had killed eight fat hogs for this season, that he had dealt about his chines very liberally among his neighbours, and that in particular he had sent a string of hogs puddings with a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish. "I have often thought", says Sir Roger, "it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of the winter. It is the most dead, uncomfortable time of the year, when the poor people would suffer very much from their poverty and cold if they had not good cheer, warm fires, and Christmas gambles to support them. I love to rejoice their poor hearts at this season and see the whole village merry in my great hall."'

American are popularly believed to look for the old world in Europe, and certainly it wan an American writer, Washington Irving, who summed up the Christmas sentiments in his Old Christmas published in 1819. He laments the passing of the old Christmas, its few relics 'resembling those picturesque morsels of Gothic architecture which we see crumbling in various parts of the country'. What a beautiful arrangement it is, he says, that the festival of Christmas should be the time when the families assemble 'about the paternal hearth, that rallying place of the affections'. A stranger in the land, he is himself taken to one of these family reunions in a magnificent stage-coach laden with game and presents and driven by an equally magnificent coachman. At Bracebridge Hall he finds ready hospitality, plentiful food and drink, the whimsical humorist and solid eater of solid fare, excited by schoolboys, snow, games and ghosts.

The sour Puritan mistrust of Christmas revelry died hard so that Lamb was able to write in 1827, 'Old Christmas is coming, to the confusion of Puritans, Muggletonians, Anabaptists, Quakers and that unwassailing crew. He cometh not with his wonted gait, he is shrunk nine inches in the girth, but he is yet a lusty fellow.' However, there were people who tried to turn Christmas to an improving purpose, and in A Week at Christmas, published anonymously in 1829, some children are given a Christmas gift of a new book which, they found, treated not of gnomes and dwarfs, but 'of beats and birds, and fishes and insects, also…of various other interesting matters concerning natural history'. The children spent their Christmas reading from the book and listening to pious instruction. The needs of grown-ups were catered for by Christmas Stories (1823), with such titles as 'John Wildgoose, the Poacher', 'The Smuggler', 'Good Nature, or Parish Matter', and accompanied by monitory illustrations by Cruikshank.

Another collection of tales, and surely a more popular one, appeared in 1832 under the title The Humourist: a Companion for the Christmas Fireside, by W.H. Harrison, with engravings by W.H. Brooke. Some of Brooke's comic figures built up from Christmas fare seem to have influenced the design of later Christmas cards. In the clumsy doggerel verse we find the basic ingredients soon so dear to the heart of the Christmascard designer, the solid fare and the stage-coach.

In 1836 there began to appear the work of a young man of twenty-four which had the greatest possible influence on the sentimental conception of Christmas. The writer was Charles Dickens, and the book Pickwick Papers. The truly immortal Christmas at Dingley Dell owes much to Washington Irving, but it and its author are far better known, and Dickens's enormous reputation and influence did much to spread the Christmas spirit among his admiring middle-class readers. 'Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back the delusions of our childish days, that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home.'

The Pickwickians arrive at Dingley Dell by stage-coach in brisk winter frost to find a glowing welcome among the assembled family and friends. They eat and drink heartily-the Fat Boy is a living though necessarily lethargic monument to this good fare.

Dickens later in 1842 repeated his Christmas success as the first of his Christmas Books with A Christmas Carol, containing a social message of charity appropriately and conventionally attached to the sentiment of Christmas good-will so universal as to enfold even the repentant Scrooge, lest anyone be left out in the chill. In the Household Words, which commenced publication in 1850, and All the Year Round, which replaced it in 1859, Dickens continued his Christmas stories and heaped more fuel upon the Christmas hearth.

Meanwhile in 1842, only eight years before he was so fittingly to become Victorian Poet Laureate, Tennyson lamented once more the lost glory of the old-time Christmas:

The host and I sat round the wassail bowl,
Then halfway ebbed and there we held a talk, —
How all the old honour had from Christmas gone
Or dwindled down to some odd games
In some odd nooks like this

But already, while the railways were rapidly superseding the stage-coach, and the great towns of England stood in dire need of practical good-will and sanitation, the most common token of Christmas charity had made its first appearance, the Christmas card.

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The Christmas card in spite of some continental ancestors is an English invention. Its introduction coincides with a newly kindled interest in the festival of Christmas. The birthright of the first English card is disputed, but it seems that a Royal Academician can put forward the most reasonable claim. In November 1843 Mr Henry Cole—later Sir Henry Cole—the inaugurator and first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, noted in his diary, 'Mr. Horsley came and brought design for Christmas card'. 'Mr. Horsley' is John Calcott Horsley, R.A., painter and illustrator, who designed a card for Cole of which, in 1846, one thousand copies were lithographed, hand-coloured and sold by Felix Summerly's Treasure House in Bond Street, an art shop which Cole had set up in order to improve the taste of his contemporaries. As Horsley himself said of Cole, he 'devoted much time and ingenuity in getting artistic treatment applied to "unconsidered trifles" as well as to weightier matters'. It is worth noting that Cole was a personal friend of the Prince Consort, who is generally credited with having introduced the Christmas tree from his native Germany. Cole's card (plate 1) is about the size of an ordinary postcard. The addressee's name could be entered at the top, whilst the sender would sign himself at the bottom. Trellis work and garlands of ivy create a rustic frame for a kind of triptych. The small oblong side-pieces depict the charitable acts of 'Clothing the Naked' and 'Feeding the Hungry', always connected with the Christmas season, whilst the large middle part shows a happy family gathering drinking a health to Christmas and the New Year and inviting us to join in, as it were, by the caption, 'A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you'. Good works and good eating and drinking, the two elements of Victorian Christmas, make their appearance together—as it should be—on this first card. The style of the ornaments—so popular at the time—is directly derived from Dürer's famous marginal illustrations for the Prayer Book of the Emperor Maximilian, a work much admired in the early nineteenth century and widely known through a lithographic facsimile edition.

Horsley's design has perhaps no great artistic merits, but it is a straightforward piece of solid workmanship in the style of book illustrations of the time strongly reminiscent of such German artists as Ludwig Richter.

Still, there are a number of things worth noting about this card. It may perhaps not surprise us to hear that the 'Puritans and Muggletonians' raised their eyebrows and frowned upon the central piece of the card. Their misgivings were only to be expected. But it is certainly surprising to learn that in spite of the growing popularity of Christmas the card found, with one exception, no immediate successors. Nor did Cole repeat his experiment. The reasons for such apparent neglect can only be understood if we bear in mind how closely linked in the Victorian age were artistic values and commercial success. Henry Cole was a man actively working—in his own way—for a revival of arts and crafts which had so badly suffered from the onslaught of industry and machinery, hence 'Felix Summerly', and the foundation of the Victoria and Albert Museum as a national school of good taste and his active support of living artists. Whether or not we agree with his aesthetic standards, Horsley's Christmas card commissioned by Cole was certainly an attempt in the right direction. But such handiwork printed in a limited edition, hand-coloured and thus necessarily fairly expensive, was ill-fitted for the age of cheap machine-made antimacassars and pinafores of printed cotton. The Christmas card had to be mass-produced if it was to be popular, in other words if it was to be a paying proposition. The difference between the Christmas card and the 'twopenny coloured' of the toy theatre was that the Christmas card had, by its very size and purpose, to be more detailed and complicated.

There is still another thing remarkable about the Horsley-Cole card. It added to the wishes for a Merry Christmas those for a Happy New Year. In doing so it attached itself to the very old tradition of New Year felicitations. Though not to be found in England, such greetings at the rise of the New Year were common enough in certain parts of the continent.

It is common knowledge that the festivals of Christmas and New Year were originally one and the same, and that many of our Christmas customs became Christmas customs only by transference from much older New Year celebrations. It may be said that the sending of Christmas cards belongs to these transferred customs.

The Romans of the imperial days used to remind their friends of their affection on the occasion of New Year. Officials would assure the emperor of their obedience by sending strenae. Originally real gifts, these gradually degenerated into tokens such as useless little terracotta lamps, clay tablets with pictures of fruits, garlands or cornucopiae with such inscriptions as 'Happiness in the New Year'. The Latin word strenae has survived in the French étrennes, the New Year gifts which take place of our Christmas presents.

The Christian Church, of course, had to suppress worldly heathen habits as the strenae together with the rest of the ancient folk customs, but in the end they came out again in a more suitable guise. A number of very charming German New Year 'Greetings' have come down to us from the early days of the copperplates as well as a few hand/coloured wood/cuts of the fifteenth century (fig. 1 and 2). As a matter of fact they are not greeting cards in our sense, but Andachtsbilder, i.e. devotional pictures such as were made in great numbers for the homes of people. On these New-Year pieces one design in particular occurs and re-occurs, the Child-Christ bearing the Cross and a scroll with the legend 'ein gut selig jar', a blessed and happy year. The celebrations of the birth of Christ and the beginning of the year are still one and the same. What appears to be a New Year's greeting by its words becomes a Christmas message through the iconography of the Christ-Child. Another design shows a ship—the popular symbol of hope—sailing the seas with the Christ-Child at the helm, accompanied by a female figure, possibly the Virgin Mary. This represents the same spirit which is present in the old English carol of the 'three ships sailing by'. Calendars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were also used to convey New Year greetings.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries such cards become not only more worldly but also rarer. When they were revived during the later part of the eighteenth century they were shorn of all religious character. They were symbols of the social rites of the age; for they began as a modified form of a visiting-card, which was then a new convention. It was a custom to call personally on one's friends to voice the compliments of the season. The visiting-card announced the caller. If one did not find at home those one had intended to see, what was more natural than to scribble one's good wishes on this visiting-card? Soon enough the card alone would pay the call—a token of the well-wishers' good intentions. As time went on these cards became more and more elaborate, almost as if they had to make up for the lack of a personal appearance of their sender. They became gay and pictorial, suited to all tastes and for all manner and sorts of people. Lovers in the first place, of course, but also lonely bachelors, school and university friends, maiden aunts and rich uncles, all were catered for, and would receive a suitable card.

Strangely enough England did not get its share of this snowstorm of greeting cards, but Austria, Germany and France spent talent and money alike lavishly on these paper assurances of friendship and love. Vienna in particular became the centre of a formidable industry at the end of the eighteenth century, and so did Berlin a little later. Those who could afford it might have their cards printed on silk; those who wished to appear as if they had afforded costly cards would have them with lace fringes made of paper. People who found engravings too expensive had to make do with lithographs. The artifices of the bookbinder too were called in to help with the construction of elaborate cards with movable figures, such as lovers who could lay bare their hearts, young men undoing boxes or scrolls which would loudly cry forth their devotion, and so on. The Berlin Iron Foundry kept pace with the advancing industrial age and issued New Year cards made of cast iron! Here indeed was a unique opportunity not only to depict patriotic monuments in a 'fitting' material, but also to advertise the skill and products of the enterprising firm. Some people probably preferred less frigid greetings such as silk or mother-of-pearl, embroideries on purple, or mosaics made of coloured wool.

As works of art, these cards have but little value. But they are interesting specimens of popular art. In common with the other applied arts they became more and more debased as the nineteenth century went on its course from solid craftsmanship to cheap machine-made glamour.

If we read through a list of subjects depicted on German cards of the thirties or forties we are hardly aware that it is not a catalogue of an English firm of the seventies. There are flowers in their dozens, flower-pots, cornucopiae bursting with horticultural produce, doves and other birds, pies and cakes, stage-coaches and other vehicles, three-masters and wheel-barrows, lads and lasses courting, and virtuous maidens pressing bouquets of roses against their chaste bosoms. Only when England developed its own Christmas-card industry do we find those ideas entereing which the Christmas literature of the first decades of the century had postulated as the essential features of a truly English Christmas.

But yet another ancestor of the English Christmas card, the so-called Christmas Piece, has to be added to the family tree before we may turn to the later offspring. Not so long ago small children used to write birthday wishes for their dear relatives on gaily decorated paper, proving to an admiring family not only their advances in the subtle arts of calligraphy and spelling but also making it plain that school fees had not been spent in vain. Such specimens of fine writing were fairly common at the beginning of the last century at Christmastime. They would carry some greetings of the season, and after they had adorned the walls of the schoolroom for a while children took them home, where they were used for the decoration of the house at the festive season. And who can say whether the custom of putting on the mantelpiece what so very often is the proof of a printer's lack of taste in typography and design is not just a descendant of that habit?

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Though 'Felix Summerly' had published Horsley's card in 1846—and this card had a kind of successor in a design by W.M. Egley in 1848—no other cards can be traces till the early sixties. The first advertisement for Christmas stationery appeared in December in 1863 in the Illustrated London News. Punch refers to Christmas cards for the first time in 1868, The Times not till 1871. In our opinion the reason has to be looked for not in a change of Christmas customs or an increased importance of the feast but rather in the fact that before that date there were no proper means for producing cards cheaply. It seems in retrospect that the cards of the sixties had nothing to do with Horsley's earlier card—it was probably unknown at the time—but had their origin in totally different motives. It may sound rather unpoetic and perhaps even uncharitable to a cherished English custom, but it must be said that the Christmas card when it finally appeared in the sixties was one of a great number of easily marketable cheap colour-prints. It was a commercial product and a mass-produced profit=making article of the machine age. It has remained at this level ever since, except for very few attempts to raise it to a higher standard.

The Christmas card is a work of popular art. Popular art always demands colour. The ordinary person with an untrained eye seems unable to appreciate the subtler uses of line and form. By the mid-nineteenth century popular taste was the ruling taste. Hence 'Art' as well as popular art was as colourful as could be. The thirst for colour was all the stronger since the multi-coloured world of artistic fancies had become an escape from the drab and sombre surroundings of grey middle-class respectability. Yet few members of the middle-class could afford to buy original works of art. Cheap substitutes had to be found, and in consequence the new and wonderful force of the machine was used to satisfy these needs, just as the Victorians harnessed machinery for every other purpose in life. This development was to have an important bearing upon the introduction of Christmas cards. In the mechanical reproduction of pictures in colour great strides were made between 1840 and 1870. These were naturally accompanied by an almost continuous cheapening of the process involved and hence of the prints. Hand-touched line-engravings, aquatinta and lithographs were replaced by chromolithographs and other types of mechanically reproduced colour-prints. The introduction of transfer paper and power-driven flat-bed printing machines is a notable instance of technical advance. Popular almanacks, pocket-books, needle cases, book covers and even pot lids were thus adorned. But the first appearance of the colour print in journalism is closely linked with our subject; for at Christmas 1855 the Illustrated London News published its first coloured Christmas supplement, consisting of four full-page pictures after John Gilbert and 'Phiz'. The latter's Waits is a foretaste of Christmas cards to come in the combination of folk custom, humour and popular art. In the same period the colour print as such increased its popularity enormously. The name of George Baxter (1804-1867) is familiar. It seems typical for the spirit of the age that he was more concerned with the mechanical perfection of his prints—they were to look like oil paintings—than with their artistic merits. Some idea of the kind of picture he popularised can be suggested by the title alone of one of his best-known prints: Come, pretty Robin! (1857), a subject later to be a favourite topic on Christmas cards. Baxter prints, which sold in their thousands, were offered—at least the cheaper ones—for 1s. 6d. apiece, a price which might explain why Baxter did not venture into the Christmascard trade. Christmas cards had to be cheaper still. During the sixties Germany made great strides in the power printing of chromolithographs, and German 'chromos' for all kinds of purposes were exported all over Europe. English publishers used German prints for making up Christmas cards, but began soon to produce their own. Even so, imports of cards 'Printed in Germany' continued at least up to the First World War.

Once cards appeared on the market in appreciable numbers at a moderate price the idea spread rapidly. When a Liverpool lithographer and printer read a paper on Picture Printing and chromolithography before the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society in 1868 Christmas cards printed by the new process were already produced in large numbers. He believed that because of their technical perfection many of them were 'gems of the art', but added a rather interesting caution. He felt that 'a desire...to produce them at a cheaper rate has in some instances at least led to the introduction of an article produced with less labour'. This early warning against shoddinesss is typical. No sooner could the machine produce a thing cheaply than its quality began to deteriorate. Applied art and machinery were not adjusted to each other, and, in common with many other things, early Christmas cards bear witness to this.

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But the Victorian Christmas card should by no means be considered only as a product of the machine age. It is also an excellent mirror of sentiment and taste, and so it may be worth while to examine what has to be called, in the absence of any simpler term, its iconography.

Many of the early cards of the sixties have much in common with the Valentine and were often produced by the same publishers. As as result they seem quite out of keeping with our usual conception of Christmas and winter. Two probably very early examples are small pieces of card embossed with a lace border and having in the centre a tiny chromolithograph. One represents a young man in eighteenth-century costume reclining on the bank of a very Rhenish river, while the other shows two little girls with a garland of flowers. The words 'A Merry Christmas' printed beneath are the only seasonal feature of the card. Many similar cards seem to be made up from 'scraps' which were usually designed and printed in Germany. Others, however, are even closer to the Valentine in design. Very many consist of a base of cut-out white paperwork in imitation of lace with some coloured scrap of flowers pasted on (plate 3). Often the scrap lifts to reveal a Christmas message printed beneath—the only feature which distinguishes it from a Valentine. It has not been possible to prove that these cards were produced for use according to the season and the market, but this conclusion seems inescapable. Fans also were designed both as Valentines and Christmas cards (plate 7).

Other cards of a similar type consisted of several layers of card mounted on paper hinges (plate 4). These layers could then be pulled forward to provide a perspective view of some scene, such as an Alpine Biergarten. Children's picture-books on these lines were very popular at the time, but the same technique may also be found in German cards of the early nineteenth century. A more intricate card still is composed of a nosegay of flowers which pull out to reveal that each flower has a suitable sentiment written on it. Another card folds out to represent a stage setting; yet another has a summer scene in the centre which can be changed into a winter scene by moving a lever.

In a way all these are not yet true English Christmas cards. They still betray too blatantly their origin from the Valentine and the German Biedermeier greeting card. Bur right from the beginning Christmas/card designers and manufacturers showed also some originality.

John Leighton—'Luke Limner', the book-illustrator—who himself designed early cards in the sixties stated that the first attempts were 'the size of an ordinary gentleman's address card on which were simply put "A Merry Christmas and A Happy new Year". After that there came to be added robins and holly branches.'

Only the early cards kept in mind the ideas generally connected with Christmas. 'Compliments of the Season' meant the season of merriment, of good fare and good drink. Cards designed by the well-known book-illustrator C.H. Bennett and issued in 1864 and 1865 show personifications of Christmas fare, Christmas bells, Cupids shovelling Christmas pudding into wheelbarrows, etc. These cards have no great artistic merits, yet they deserve to be mentioned here as they were probably the first to be issued to the trade.

Winter scenes were an obvious choice. Even before Christmas cards existed these had been the favourites of the Christmas Supplements of the pictorial press where Birket Foster's drawings of wintry scenery, of stage-coaches, of turkeys, gathering of holly, and so on, set a fashion for hosts of card designers. In these Christmas pictures we find also such subjects as the Christmas tree and Father Christmas. he first appears covered with holly and radiating good cheer, a conception based no doubt on the medieval Lord of Misrule. An early card shows him in his traditional red costume and white beard as a hermit engaged in the more suitable and temperate task of gathering fuel. The Christmas tree frequently appears on cards for children (plate 5). It is always laden with toys and mysterious parcels, and sometimes these are detachable. The Christmas holly is gathered by ragged rustic types; for the sentimental aura which surrounds the underfed inhabitants of insanitary cottages shone bright at Christmas-time.

It is easy to catalogue the models used by the designers of Victorian seasonal cards and their successors: a robin sitting on a snowy window-sill or cottage roof, mistletoe, a spray of holly, an open fireplace with a yule-log, a quaint old village church on Christmas morning, and of course plenty of snow. But in spite of similarity of motives the glow of Washington Irving or Dickens' warmth of heart are hardly ever felt.

It is a remarkable fact that religious subjects are very rare. Until the advent of the S.P.C.K. they hardly occur, and even then, in spite of the Society's efforts, the number of religious cards remained insignificant compared with the mass of other subjects (plate 14). Later on also, when the use of photographs for reproduction became more common, Nativities after the pictures of great painters rarely appeared. During the seventies and eighties there was for a short time a vogue for what we may perhaps call Oxford Movement Art. Carols were printed on Christmas cards. Lettering and music illuminated in tawdry gilt blues and reds unconsciously parodied the work of medieval illuminated manuscripts.

The Christmas card was modest enough in its beginnings. Yet this excellent and cheap means of assuring friends and relatives once a year of your affection changed soon enough the straightforward 'Compliments of the Season' into something that looked more like all sorts of compliments for every conceivable season. Allegories ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous and even obscene invaded the cards during the seventies. No wonder that the Christmas card soon outpassed the popularity of the Valentine—then just one hundred years old. The more varied the greetings, the more proof they bore of how carefully you had chosen your card to suit the recipient's tasate. Add to this the continuous hankering after something new, the idea of progress which always demanded more and better cards, and it will be easily understood why the Victorian card after a promising start degenerated into the most tawdry suburban stationery.

The sentimental Victorian enjoyed an enormous variety of designs: cats, kittens, dogs, sometimes carrying mistletoe, children feeding birds in winter and manikins dressed in period costume. There were various reasons for this intrusion of motives not really connected with Christmas. One certainly was the zeal for instruction. The Christmas card very often supplanted the earlier Christmas book. Christmas joy and teaching are combined when pictures of birds, fish and butterflies are introduced, drawn with so high a degree of accuracy that school-books could have benefited a great deal by using such illustrations (plate 9). Special studies of flowers were very popular also. A beautiful spray of oleander by Thomas Crane—a brother of Walter Crane—is a fine example.

Pictures illustrating scenes from one period of the past or another have been favourites for nearly two hundred years. In Christmas cards they also appear very frequently (plate11). Sometimes the period chosen is the dateless though vaguely medieval time of the 'good old days' of the Christmas story, with cheer and wassail, sometimes the jollity of the eighteenth-century squire. The end of the century warmed towards the stage-coach, the traditional vehicle of Christmas. No doubt it was of happier memory when looked at from the great days of the railway than from those of its own slow, cold and clumsy creakings. It makes a bright and cheery show in innumerable wintry countrysides, through countless half-timbered snow-laden streets, and halts before thousands of welcome inns with hot punch and hearty ostlers.

The country house, the destination of the early nineteenth century traveller, is also the subject of many cards of all periods. The wealthy send private cards showing their own mansions, but the ordinary suburban householder and rentpayer has to be content with the picture of the castle or manor of his dreams. Of recent years the mansion tends to be Georgian, but the vicarious enjoyment of wealth seems to persist.

Another favourite from the early years has been the ship. It appears as an emblem of luck. Ships of all kinds grace the cards, but by far the most common is the galleon with its associations with the old days of the sea dogs. The design varies from a colourful seascape to a more artistic formalised pattern. Perhaps the most interesting example of the ship motive on a Christmas card is the photogravure of the Endeavour sent by Sir Ernest Shackleton to his friends in 1910.

Topical allusions like that of Shackleton's card make some cards an interesting subject of study. There was a card celebrating the end of the Boer War, while William Lockyer, the pioneer balloonist, had a card for 1909 which, suitably enough, employed the novel technique of a montage of aerial photographs. On the Lord mayor of Birmingham's card for that year Santa Claus arrives in a primitive aeroplane to distribute over the 'Forward' city not toys but the gifts of a benevolent corporations—trams, electric lights, dust-carts, baths and policemen.

But surely the most interesting and certainly the most amusing of these topical cards was one noted by The Times in its annual card review in 1882. This card, presumably commemorating the defeat of the Egyptian mutiny in September of that year by Lord Wolseley at Tel-el-Kebir, showed those most incompatible queens, Cleopatra and Victoria, the former welcoming her successor as mistress of Egypt. Where else in any world have these two met, where else could they meet save in the general amnesty and good-will of a nineteenth-century Christmas card?

The same sentiment is often a saccharine disguise for sex appeal. What a curious fin de sicle mentality is revealed by cards showing a fashionable décolletée young lady gambolling with a whole bevy of cupids against a background of mistletoe or flowering South Sea plants? The Christmas message is banished to a small frame artistically unconnected with the rest of the picture. Or what can be said of a card showing a number of nude or scantily clad young maidens shown against a background of mountains, luscious tropical fruit and lily ponds (plate 13)? Punch at once spotted this chance of a parody and published a drawing of naked maidens and boys meeting Father Christmas in a blizzard.

Can we discover any reason behind this variety of subjects, from Shackleton's Endeavour to the pretty semi-nude? A certain narrative element seems common to most Victorian cards. No proof is needed for the statement that the second half of the nineteenth century was the age of the 'narrative picture'. The catalogues of the Royal Academy of that time read like publishers' lists of cheap fiction. Whether heroic or trivial the subject matter was so treated as to make a story. It is the same with the illustrations of the popular art periodicals like the Graphic and the colour print. Only the narrative has been adapted to the mentality of the less sophisticated classes. The Victorian Christmas card was heir to the colour print in form and content. It has a lot in common with the pictorial press of the day.

The paraphernalia of the 'good old days' as popularised by the Christmas literature brought the narrative element. It was the interest in the anecdote which made designers forget the seasonal associations—consequently a colour print alone remained. It is characteristic that when this happened inscriptions of good wishes vanished from the front and found room only on the back where a poem often had to evoke the Christmas sentiments which the picture could not possibly hope to conjure up. Thus senders of Christmas cards made it plain that they did remember their friends not only in the spirit of the season but were also bestowing on them a picture fit to be preserved in an album together with Valentines, reward-tickets and press-cuttings.

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Still, all would not have been well for the Victorians' exuberance of good-will at Christmas, if Sir Rowland Hill had not introduced the Penny Post. In the days when a letter from London to Windsor had cost fivepence and from London to Durham as much as a shilling, people had to think twice before they posted an expression of seasonal merriment. the Christmas card, in spite of the stage-coach on its front, belongs to the age of the railway engine and the post van. By the end of the seventies—after the halfpenny card post had been introduced in 1870—the popularity of the Christmas card made its mark in the Parliamentary reports on the Post Office. In 1879 the Postmaster-General reported difficulties in sorting Christmas correspondence for the night mail, while in 1880 comes for the first time the by now familiar appeal to post early at Christmas. There were by that time over four and a half million extra letters at Christmas. Thereafter the Christmas postal congestion replaces the earlier references to extra work on St. Valentine's Day. But the official note came, as so often, somewhat late. The craze for sending cards to as many people as one could think of could no longer be restrained. Postmen on Christmas Eve were going their rounds till the small hours of Christmas morning. They were consequently rather late with th eChristmas Day deliveries, thus raising the wrath of a correspondent to The Times in 1877 at 'the delay of legitimate correspondence by cartloads of children's cards'. He called the new fashion a 'great social evil', and went on like this: 'The whole population, men, women and children, seems suddenly to have given itself up to the stationers and fancy shops and their endless variety of Christmas and New Year cards...The number received by the individual and the family are recounted with a zest and pride marvellous for its childishness...It is like the Boat Race or the Harrow and Eton match and will only disappear when...Mary-Ann, the maid, can boast of as many Christmas cards as her mistresses, the young ladies. Meanwhile if the present fever continues I recommend it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer as affording a clue to a very productive tax.' A year later Punch, that unfailing commentary on the social life of the Victorian era, wrote, 'Christmas comes but once a year. Punch is thankful for it. For Christmas has taken to leaving so much pasteboard that should this fatherly visit come twice Punch would have to put up outside his door, as people do after their wedding, a notice "No Cards".' And in 1882 Punch introduces us to the feelings of a card-worker about his products, 'Well, it brings in a very useful custom which keeps us employed nearly all the year round'. That surely is a good indication of the enormous amount of cards produced.

Publishers' firms of the eighties prided themselves on the quantity rather than the quality of their ware and on the fabulous sums they lavished on designers and printers. That is a marked change from the earlier days. In 1869 Punch had complained about the monotony of Christmas cards. 'I wish...that somebody would invent a new felicitation card. I hate those Redbreasts.' Nobody would have uttered such a wish twenty years later. One firm alone boasted of having produced in one single year—-1886—600 sets with about 2500 different cards (normally a set consisted of 4 cards), and by 1895 it was estimated that during the thirty years since its real inception no less than 200,000 cards had been designed. No wonder that only a small fraction of them bore any semblance to real 'Compliments of the Season'. Some publishers seem to have been conscious of their shortcomings, as one firm tried to explain away its many very unseasonal summer motives on the ground of large exports to those unfortunate antipodes who had to celebrate Christmas in the 'wrong' season.

*

To treat a Christmas card as a work of art would be a serious misjudgment. It is true that even a number of Royal Academicians condescended to design cards, and a few of the early cards were designed by such first-rate book-illustrators as Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane. Kate Greenaway did a number of delightful drawings of children in various costumes, girls dancing and so on (plate 10). As a matter of fact she did her first work for a Christmas-card firm, and it was her cards that made her famous. many imitated her, but, as they lack her easy grace, they are patently imitators. Walter Crane designed a number of fine coloured as well as black-and-white cards which are conspicuous by their sensitive draughtsmanship (fig. 3). Both used a subdued colouring in fairly large surfaces free from all blatancy. But such cases are rare. With the exception of these two, hardly any of the famous illustrators of 1860 to 1890 ever designed for coloured reproductions, and so the main interest of the Christmas card of those years lies in the fact that it is an anonymous product of popular art and that its designers do not figure to-day in any book on the history of English painting. Artistically Victorian cards might be condemned outright. But then most of them do not aspire to Art with a capital A. They are plainly and outspokenly a commercial product created by draughtsmen who unashamedly stooped low to satisfy the common craving for a coloured print.

Still if the Christmas card may not be of interest as an individual work of graphic art, it yet deserves an important place in the history of taste. For it reflects unerringly what trends of art had at one particular moment filtered down to the level of popular taste. Thus for instance the work of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press was imitated in the 1890's and later by black-and-white ornamental lettering and illustrations, while the weird imagination of Burne-Jones appeared faithfully imitated in strange surrealist medieval worlds. The popularity of FitzGerald's Omar Khayyaám may have suggested a series of faintly Persian cards which appeared in the seventies. Again the art of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, P.R.A., who liked to picture patrician Roman ladies at the baths, appears to be the source of those saucy bathers of W.S. Coleman who whisper their seductive 'Merry Christmas' sometimes in French (plate 13).

The Aesthetic Movement—parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience—was mocked in a set of cards by A. Ludovici. At least one hopes it is mockery that sets a young lady gazing at a teapot held in her outstretched hand and a young dandy of affected appearance admiring an enormous dahlia (plate 12). But so great were the absurdities of the time that one can never be quite sure.

The sensuous style of Aubrey Beardsley with its contrast of black and white and its tangle of rococo flourishes soon also appeared in cards of a meaningless, complicated design.

This imitation of fashionable or just outmoded styles is always to be found in popular art. Cubist and surrealist cards have made their appearance in our day alongside the traditional designs, while the scenic art of Walt Disney may be may be made the excuse for some of the 'fruit jelly' landscapes, snow scenes and quaint old villages which were the stock-in-trade of the cheaper designer of the nineteen-thirties. Similarly, Victorian sentiment embraced in a warm hug the hounds of Landseer and the doggies of the Christmas card.

In order to achieve improvements in the standard Victorian publishers organised competitions and exhibitions. The most famous was held in 1880 at the Dudley Galleries. Press comments strongly criticised the lack of 'imaginative art except for the most hackneyed kind', and in 1886 Lewis Carroll wrote to a friend, 'I write to...deprecate your sending me a Christmas card. Indeed they are of no use to me! They are a very low type of Art and I can do nothing with them but hand them on to other children with the faint hope that they will not ultimately return to the original senders.'

In connection with the 'style' of Christmas cards one other thing must be mentioned, the influence of photography and the picture postcard. These of course do not appear till right at the end of the Victorian age and had their peak in the Edwardian time. The beginning of the twentieth century was the age of young ladies' picture-postcard albums, and Christmas cards were made in size and design to fit into such collections (plates 15 and 16). Usually these cards proclaim that they are 'real photographs'. Most of them were printed in Germany just as were the early chromolithographed cards. Glossy pictures of fashionable young ladies and their sweethearts or children on sleighs were often decorated with glittering texts or frosted with sparkling snow.

*

Almost every aspect of Victorian life is represented in the Christmas card. The worst features are easily perceived; snobbery, sentimentality, a grossly bad taste and even a good deal of hypocrisy can be noted in many cards. Their secular nature is a clear indication of the divorce between religious faith and practice. At the same time their amazing development and diversity bear witness to the industry and ingenuity of Victorian manufacturers. And yet again in this diversity there is a uniform lack of daring of imagination.

Why were they sent? Why are they still sent? Surely the reason can hardly be artistic. It is more their human than their artistic elements which make them worth some study. The Victorian liked to count his possessions and his friends. So much of his time he spent locked up in his frock-coat that at Christmas-time he loved to relax and review the past year. The Christmas card was the currency for this stocktaking. No doubt there was real warmth of friendship which urged people to keep together a group of acquaintances by these slender annual links. There was something very comforting about a habit which helped to keep Christmas as a season apart from the rest of the year, a time of childlike emotions and childish extravagance. So the good-will expressed in countless reams of Christmas stationery remained very largely a pious wish belonging to the unpractical idealism of Christmas-time.

The habit has persisted because of the commercial pressure from the Christmas-card trade, but also because of the real emotional desire to retain traditional Christmas customs as something unchanging in a chaotic modern world. In spite of its odder features the Christmas card, just as it survived in its infancy its Victorian opponents, has survived two world wars, which is best proved by a recent report of a famous publishing firm:: 'Never...has the demand for greeting cards which included Christmas, birthday, Valentine, Easter and general occasion cards, been greater than in these war years. Without question the British public had become more greeting-card-minded than ever before and regarded the greeting card as an effective means of self-expression on these various occasions of the year.'

*

Let us face facts then, and as we contemplate the colourful array on our mantelpiece let us meditate on the long and distinguished ancestry of the Christmas card from the imperial strenae through the medieval devotional prints and Biedermeier greeting cards, the nostalgia and charm of the Victorian Christmas literature and the mighty energy of the later Victorian printers and publishers. Such thoughts will be more charitable than comments on the tasteless design of the cards sent by one's friends. So, after all, we may feel inclined to agree with Punch who wrote in 1883:

E'en though you sneer at Christmas cards you'll feel inclined to gush
O'er wondrous screens and novelties in satin, silk and plush!

Notes to the Plates

1. The fist Christmas Card. Designed by J.K. Horsley, R.A., 1843. One thousand copies lithographed and hand-coloured in 1846 for Sire Henry Cole, the first director of the South Kensington Museum.
2. (a) Early embossed card, c. 1865-1870.
   (b) Early chromolithography, perhaps printed in Germany. c. 1865.
3. Christmas Card in the style of a Valentine. Impressed gilt and blue border; 'scrap' of bunch of flowers over greeting. Dated by sender 1874.
4. Coloured paper card with 'pull-out' scene of the Nativity. c. 1870.
5. Embossed card with Christmas tree. Probably a children's card. c. 1870-1880.
6. Five-folder card; blue and white, cute and impressed silver and white paper; coloured flower 'scraps'; published by Mansell. c. 1865-1870.
7. Card in form of a five-leaved fan. Impressed border and flower garlands surrounding greetings; white silk tassel. c. 1875
8. Three-folder card; blue silk, cut and impressed gilt and white paper. Robins as coloured 'scraps'. c. 1870.
9. Butterflies and branches. c. 1880.
10. Kate Greenaway: Dancing girls. Published by Marcus Ward, for whom Kate Greenaway had been designing card since 1871. This card was published c. 1880. The Illustrated London News of Dec. 22nd 1877 published caricatures of Christmas Cards, including one of Kate Greenaway. Punch, Dec. 10th and 24th 1881, had drawings of 'Punch's "Mother Hubbard" Grinaway Christmas Cards'.
11. Stacy Marks, R.A.: one of a set of four, showing a 'medieval' Christmas. The designs for this set were first published in Churchman's Family Magazine 1870 under the title 'London Society'. This particular card is dated by the send 1876.
12. A. Ludovici: The Flower Gazer. A parody of the Aesthetic Movement. Compare W.S. Gilber's famous 'If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily', from Patience, produced 1881.
13. W.S. Coleman. Card from a set of 'Bathing girls'. Probably 1881. Punch of Dec. 24th 1881 mocks this card with a drawing of Father Christmas meeting some naked children in a snowstorm. 'Christmas (New Style)-"We are the modern Christmas Cards, we are-we are-we are!" Christmas (Old style)-"You represent Christmas! Pooh! What do you mean by coming out like that at this time of year?"'
14. The Journey of the Magi. Chromolithography. c. 1880.
15. Picture Postcard of a Christmas tree, based on a photograph. Edwardian. Printed in Saxony.
16. Picture Postcard as Christmas Card. Wintry Scene in embossed holly wreath. Edwardian. Postmark 1908. Printed in Berlin for E.A. Schwerdtfeger & Co., of London.