"To keep Christmas well": gender and consumerism in the Age of Industrialization
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Christmas evolved as an outgrowth of the mid-winter pre-Christian festivals of Saturnalia, Kalends, and Yule, to an overly commercialized, mass-market driven enterprise. Modern Christmas celebrations are inextricably connected to place, family, and food, but today’s observances have one thing in common with their early predecessors—excessive indulgence of food and drink. Although Christmas—the combined term referring to Christ mass—introduced Christ’s birth to the solstice festivities, the annual holiday has been associated with secular tendencies since Gregory, Archbishop of Constantinople, issued his warning against dancing and feasting to observers late in the fourth century. This secular side would expand dramatically—and transatlantically—centuries later after Washington Irving published Knickerbocker’s History of New York in 1809, Clement Clarke Moore published his famous poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, in 1823, and Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843. Not only did St. Nicholas, who morphed over time into the figure known as Santa Claus, usher in a new and popular dimension of the holiday that included children, he encouraged widespread consumerism, propelled further by the Industrial Revolution. This dissertation examines how industrialization altered Christmas and guided women’s participation in the holiday in select urban centers of England between 1840, the year Queen Victoria and Prince Albert marry, and 1861, the year Albert died. My goal is to produce a literary and historical comparison of the impact of industrialization on three forms of consumerism—foodways, print materials (particularly how the press marketed the Christmas tree), and charitable spending—during the Christmas holiday. Christmas had been associated with secularism and indulgent eating long before Victoria’s coronation, but holiday meals took on new meaning during her reign. Most notably, in the middle-class home they were prepared and served by women. These meals, like gifts of food, formed and maintained familial bonds, and played a central role in “manufacturing” the correlation between Christmas observance and domesticity. But holiday fare, such as the quintessentially English plum pudding, likewise served as print culture symbols to make political statements about British global trade and colonization, another variation of consumption. Periodical artists and editors, especially those associated with Punch, or the London Charivari, frequently satirized the holiday to make social and political statements, and more than one issue of Punch featured the English plum pudding to illustrate food’s ability to transmit national identity within political discourse. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the periodical press, with the assistance of Victorian women readers, ushered in and popularized the “new” domestic Christmas. In addition, the Christmas holiday created a means by which women could challenge and circumvent patriarchal order and enter the public sphere in ways complicit with yet defiant to the cult of domesticity. Such an intriguing paradox exemplifies the rich complexities of women’s lived experience in the nineteenth century. Thus, the Industrial Revolution redefined Christmas, as women, then as now, became essential to proper observance.
Table of Contents
Industrializing Christmas -- “England's annual luxury:" national identity and the Christmas plum pudding -- "That pretty German Toy:" Christmas trees and women's periodicals -- "The great duty of charity:" Christmas noblesse oblige and consumer charity -- Afterward
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Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)