A  perennial myth about the traditional English Christmas claims it all began with Charles Dickens. It was out in full commercial force last year, wit

Christmas Before Charles Dickens

submited by
Style Pass
2024-12-22 07:30:04

A perennial myth about the traditional English Christmas claims it all began with Charles Dickens. It was out in full commercial force last year, with the appearance of the big-budget film The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring Dan Stevens gamely playing the young Dickens having his Big Idea. The myth says much more about us than it does about Dickens, though. On both sides of the Atlantic, Christmas has been Victorianised and the door quietly closed on deeper imaginative and cultural continuities.

Part of the problem is that, from Dickens onwards, Christmas has left a strong trace in print media of all kinds, from hymn books to greetings cards. That Christmas has been an important cultural and social focus since the 1840s is well documented. But it is much harder to get a sense of what Christmas meant to people in the two centuries between the Puritan attacks on nativity celebrations in the mid-17th century and the appearance of Christmas trees and Christmas cards in the early- to mid-Victorian era. Writers who mentioned Christmas in this earlier period acknowledged that it was being celebrated – albeit not by everyone – but there are few extended descriptions of how Christmas was celebrated and little in the way of illustrative material.

A 1795 manuscript by Charles Dibdin, entitled Christmas Gambols, rediscovered in 2017, goes some way to filling in the gaps. It was acquired by the Houghton Library of Harvard University in 1945, but had seemingly never attracted the attention of researchers. Dibdin was the leading British singer-songwriter of his time and he pioneered the musical one-man show, or ‘Table Entertainment’, as he called it. These shows were performed at his own small London theatre, the Sans Souci, on the Strand, where Dibdin would sit or stand at a piano (he is the first person in Britain known to have played the instrument in public), talking and singing to his audience. Christmas Gambols is one such ‘Table Entertainment’. It demonstrates, among other things, that Dibdin, a shrewd cultural entrepreneur, was alert to the commercial possibilities inherent in Christmas. Two of the songs in Christmas Gambols became particularly popular: ‘The Margate Hoy’ and ‘Jacky and the Cow’.

Leave a Comment