Much of the Christmas people picture today took shape in England under Queen Victoria: the card in the mail, the robin on the card, Father Christmas, the carol singers at the door. Most of these images were first drawn for illustrated newspapers, and a few were stranger than anyone now remembers, starting with a greeting card that shows a dead bird.
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What Christmas Asked of Victorian Artists
The English Christmas found its pictures in the 1840s. In 1840 the penny post made a letter cheap to send, and from 1842 the illustrated weeklies, The Illustrated London News first among them, brought out a Christmas number every December that needed fresh images of the season each time.
Most Victorian Christmas art is therefore printed: cards, engravings in the papers, illustrations in books, with paintings alongside them. Every winter the same few subjects came back, a feast, a family, snow, a bird, an old man who stood for the season, and each time they had to look new.
Every work chosen was made in Britain during the queen's reign, and each one either fixed a piece of the Christmas still pictured today or showed who stood outside it. Often the same years did both, because the decades that invented the family Christmas were also the decades that drew its poor.
12. Unknown artist, "May Yours Be a Joyful Christmas" (late 1800s)
Feet in the air, a robin lies dead on its back in the snow, and above it the card says "May yours be a joyful Christmas." It was printed in England in the late 1800s by an unknown artist, and every December it goes around the internet as proof that the Victorians had odd ideas about Christmas.
The robin on its own was ordinary. British postmen of the period wore red coats and waistcoats, and some people called them robins. Anthony Trollope, a novelist who also worked for the Post Office, wrote of a "Robin Postman" in a novel of 1860, and on Christmas cards the bird took over the postman's job, perched beside a letterbox or carrying an envelope.
A dead robin is harder to explain, and cards like this one were not rare in the 1880s. An old custom points toward luck. Killing a wren at the end of December was once a ritual meant to bring good fortune, and in Ireland December 26, Saint Stephen's Day, is still called Wren Day.
Pity is the likelier reason, and I read the card that way, as a reminder on a happy day of those for whom winter could be fatal. Newspapers and stories of the time told of poor children found frozen at Christmas, and the nursery rhyme "Who Killed Cock Robin?", which follows the bird to its death and funeral, was just as familiar.
Above all, most Victorian children knew the old ballad of the Babes in the Wood, in which two abandoned children die in a forest. The robins cover their bodies with leaves.
At a Glance
Artist: Unknown
Made: Late 1800s
Medium: Printed card
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Tea Tree Gully Library, South Australia (one copy)
11. Hubert von Herkomer, Christmas in a Workhouse (1876)
In the Christmas number of The Graphic, an illustrated weekly published in London, dated December 25, 1876, an engraving shows a bare room in a workhouse. Old women in workhouse uniform sit beneath two banners, "Merry Christmas" and "God Bless our Master and Matron," while a well-dressed lady hands them tea. Some forty years earlier, the law had tried to forbid any Christmas treat in rooms like this one.