Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (75 page)

This dose of ‘Empire’ was a visible eruption of the more generally invisible internationalism that went to make up a British Christmas: Germany had supplied the trees, the USA had exported both Santa Claus and mass advertising; the Dutch had provided the origin of Santa Claus’s name, and also their shoes to hold presents (even though somehow, in the transmission, the shoes had turned into stockings). By the end of the century the traditional Christmas, that luxurious moment of homegrown tradition, was produced by manufacturers, delivered by railways, advertised by newspapers and magazines. Christmas books, Christmas travel, Christmas pantomimes, Christmas concerts, Christmas exhibitions: Prince Albert’s ‘products of all quarters of the globe’, from which ‘we have only to choose which is the best and cheapest for our purposes’, had now been reshaped, reordered, repackaged and delivered to create an image not of the industrial age, but of the age of domesticity.

*
Lord Amberley was at the heart of the British Establishment, although of heterodox views. He was the son of the prime minister Lord John Russell, and the father of the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

†
Knecht [‘Servant’] Ruprecht was, in the German Christmas tradition, one of St Nicholas’s helpers - sometimes a demon who punished bad children, sometimes just a more general attendant.

*
Which surely helped to spread the notion even further: the story sold 15,000 copies in its first year, and it went on selling throughout the century. Even those who did not necessarily read would have known of it: forty years after it was first published, nine stage versions appeared in London alone in one single year.
¹⁵

*
Calling him just this does his reputation a great disservice. Davies Gilbert (1767-1839) was an extraordinary character, a facilitator and administrator who influenced much behind the scenes. Born to a clergyman in Cornwall, Gilbert took a degree in mathematics and astronomy at Oxford, offering encouragement to a young scientist from Cornwall named Humphry Davy. His mathematical skills were used to look at the efficiency of the compound steam engine, the design of the rotary engine, and even Richard Trevithick’s high-pressure steam engine. Thomas Telford’s design for the Menai suspension bridge was adapted after Gilbert published his calculations on the relationship between the maximum tension in the chains and the depth of curvature of the suspension; his methods of calculating strength remained the norm for suspension bridges for the next hundred years.
¹⁶

*
Even at this date, there was not a carol in sight. Planché chose songs that were ‘principally old national melodies or ballads, and snatches from operas equally familiar to the general ear’, including ‘Se vuol ballare’ from
The Marriage of Figaro
and ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate’ from
Nabucco
; the traditional songs ‘Begone Dull Care’ and ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’; and a ‘Gavotte de Vestris’, which was most probably, given Planché’s working relationship with her, a song from a show in which Mme Vestris was currently appearing.

*
As with the workhouse parties, these celebrations were generally held in January of the following year.

*
Sam Weller was looking at a middling kind of card. The price could be as little as
¹
/
₂
d.
, or as much as 5
s.
³⁸

*
In the 1880s picture postcards were first produced and if the pictures were seasonal these too became ‘Christmas cards’.

Pounds, shillings and pence were the divisions of the currency. One shilling was made up of 12 pence; one pound of 20 shillings, i.e. 240 pence. Pounds were represented by the £ symbol, shillings as ‘
s.
’, and pence as ‘
d.
’ (from the Latin
denarius
). ‘One pound, one shilling and one penny’ was written as £1.1.1. or £1 1s. 1
d.
‘One shilling and sixpence’, referred to in speech as ‘One and six’, was written 1/6 or 1s. 6
d.

A guinea was a coin to the value of £1 1
s
(The coin was not circulated after 1813, although the term remained and tended to be reserved for luxury goods.) A sovereign was a 20-shilling coin, a half-sovereign a 10-shilling coin. A crown was 5 shillings, half a crown 2
s.
6
d.
, and the remaining coins were a florin (2 shillings), sixpence, a groat (4 pence), a threepenny bit (pronounced ‘thrup’ny bit’), twopence (pronounced tuppence), a penny, a halfpenny (pronounced hayp’ny), a farthing (
¹
/
₄
of a penny) and a half a farthing (
¹
/
₈
of penny).

There were many slang names for various sums of money: a pound was (and is) a ‘quid’, while a shilling was a ‘bob’, sixpence a ‘tanner’, and a £5 note a ‘finnif’ or ‘finnuf’. These were the most common, although there were many other terms, including the confusing ‘half a dollar’ for 2
s.
6
d.
(A ‘dollar’ for 5
s.
seems to have been rather less common.)

Relative values have altered so substantially that attempts to convert nineteenth-century prices into contemporary ones are usually futile. As I am usually discussing the costs of everyday articles, some sense of the value of goods should be apprehended. However, if a more precise attempt to convert is wanted, the website http://www.ex.ac.uk/_RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html is useful.

KEY

* Survives today

† Survived into the second half of the twentieth century
Italics
Not a department store

From [Thomas Mortimer],
’Pholanthropos’, Every Man His Own Broker Or, A Guide to Exchange-Alley.
(London, S. Hopper at Caesar’s Head, 1761; rev. ed. 1801)

* Holidays with an asterisk are, if they fall on a Sunday, observed the following day.