OF all the coming events which mark the succession of the London season,
there is none which is so generally and so agreeably foreshadowed as the advent
of merry Christmas. To the common observer the earliest indication of the
festive era are visible in the shop windows; and he may remark that it is not the
highest order of tradesmen who take the lead in the universal display made on
all sides; but a rat.her humble class, who take time by the forelock, and hasten
to produce a sensation if they can, before they are eclipsed, as they know they
will be, by the men of capital. The first insinuating feelers are put forth in
second-rate thoroughfares, in crowded courts and back streets, and rather more
obtrusively in the windows of public-houses. They are the written or printed
announcements referring to clubs of various kinds, but all tending to a
convivial consummation. The poulterer has his goose-club; the publican, on the
plea that the Latin for goose is brandy has his goose-and-brandy
club; the poor man's butcher has his roast-beef club; and the popular grocer has
his plum-pudding club. All these clubs are on the simplest plan: You pay
sixpence or a shilling a week for thirteen weeks before Christmas, and when
Christmas comes you get yourˇ poultry or plums, your beef or your pudding at a
good bargain, and have the materials of a feast without feeling that it has cost
you much. That, at least, is the popular appreciation of clubs of this kind; and
on the whole they are good, so far as having a tendency to teach people
forethought. and to impress them, ˇin a pleasant way, with the advantages of a
little self-denial. Now, though these clubs all begin about Michaelmas day, they
are mostly behind the scenes for the first month or so: people intending to be
members being in no hurry to deposit their subscriptions; but about the
half-quarter, these reminders appearing in the shop windows, bring the matter
home to them, and they hasten to inroll themselves and pay up the arrears. It is
never too late to join these clubs, and in practice, multitudes of working men
do join them even in the last month.
It is not until December is in his teens that those who cater for the
material enjoyments of Christmas time begin seriously to set about their
seductive demonstrations. The grocer, for the reason that he deals in provisions
which will suffer least by keeping. invariably leads off the game. His
preparations are all on the grand scale; the raisins, the currants, the
sultanas, the muscatels, are heaped in mountainous slopes, as though they had
comedown by a landslip, and are scattered over with spices, as though it had
hailed nutmegs and snowed cinnamon and mace. His conserves and sugared sweets
flank the fruit in delicate envelopes; boulders of delicious candy, bursting
trom the frosted sugar, have drifted on to the black mass of currants; jars and
vases of jams and jellies, marshalled in ranks, take up commanding positions,
keeping ward over files of luxurious sweets, and bonbons, charged with the
flavour of the pine, the peach, the apricot, and of every exquisite fruit that
grows. Solid.walls are built up of sardines, and potted meats, and drummed figs,
and bottled pickles, and preserved ginger "hot i' the mouth." There are dense
strata of fancy biscuits, cases of dates and French plums, shelves of British
wines, from cowslip to the ruddy elder, and, thanks to the new tariff, bottles
of French claret and champagne; while the congou and the hyson, the bohea and
the gunpowder teas, with the clayed, muscovado, aud.
refined sugars, form a general background. Arching over all is an artificial
bower of glazed canvas leafage, from which hang thumping clusters of red, black
and white grapes, from Hamburgh and the Rhine, and the shores of the
Mediterranean. Thus the institutional pudding, with all its appetizing
accessories, is cared for by the grocer, and all you have to do is to walk into
the shop and give your orders liberally.
As to that other institution, the roast-beef, if it is not so forward with
its demonstrations, as indeed it never can be, it is equally well looked after.
Christmas beer, at least that which is so par excellence, it must be remembered,
comes from the dismemberment of the prize cattle and exhibition cattle, which
are all alive at the Agricultural Hall long after the grocer has received his
consignments and displayed them to the public. The butcher's display must
necessarily begin much later, and will depend much on the state of the weather;
warm damp days tending to spoil the meat, which can be kept an indefinite time
if the air is clear and frosty. Sometimes the butcher will exhibit his beef
while it is yet alive, tethering the huge oxen to the kerb in front of his door,
and decking them with flowers and -ribbons like a heathen sacrifice: at others
he will have them stalled for a few days in the rear of his dwelling, and admit
his customer to a private view, allowing them to choose their joints before they
are killed. However this may be, he will kill as soon as he dares before
Christmas day, and make as striking a show as he can. And indeed there are few
more startling spectacles among London shops, than the shop of the butcher
during the Christmas week. The ponderous carcases of oxen, the scientifically
fatted calves, the huge broad-backed sheep - all appear like creatures of other
races than we know them to be; their natural outlines are destroyed by their
overgrown bulk, and at first sight one hardly knows what to make of them. They
are spotlessly clean, and the masses of fat bear sprigs of holly and evergreen,
while green boughs depend from the ceiling and overshadow the entrance. At night
the whole is powerfully lighted up with gas; and it is now that the admiring
crowds gather round to speculate upon their "breed and feed," and rejoice the
heart of the enterprising tradesman with unsolicited applause. The quartering
and cutting-up comes later, being deferred as long as it can be; and the several
joints when severed are ticketed with the names and addresses of the purchasers,
in pretty large characters, that the whole neighbourhood may see what a highly
respectable connection Mr. Carnifex has the honour to serve. Unfortunately for
the butcher, the honour and reputation derived from his sales at this season,
are not unfrequently the only profit he makes upon his outlay: exhibition cattle
have, unluckily for him, the habit of selling for much more alive than they will
fetch when dead; alive they are prodigies of breeding and feeding - a credit to
the country, and reflecting credit upon everybody who has to do with them; but
when killed an alarming proportion of their bulk is but material for the
tallow-chandler; and hence the loss to the butcher, who has to buy at the higher
estimate.
The consumption of poultry in London always reaches its climax at Christmas
time; and if one can judge by appearances, there must be ten times as much
devoured in the Christmas week as in any other week of the year, with the
exception of Michaelmas week, so fatal to the geese. As the festive time draws
near, the shop of the poulterer - and not only his shop. but his entire
housefront - undergoes a striking transformation; by degrees it envelopes itself
in plumage up to the fourth story, if it happen to be so high, as though it were
preparing to fly away. The geese, turkeys, and barn-door fowls may be reckoned
the staple of his store; but besides these, there is every species of British
game, from grouse to larks, with no small collection of foreign birds from
France, Belgium and Holland. More than this - the poulterer, in the pride of his
profession, will exhibit anything rare or curious that has wings to fly,
independent of its adaptation to English appetites; a plump seagull, a sprawling
stork, a brilliant peacock, a heron, a bittern, a bustard, a huge jack raven -
any or all of them he will hang out to view, and would only be too glad of an
adjutant, or an ostrich, or a pelican, if he could get one. Some years back, a
fortunate tradesman actually displayed an albatross, or rather the skin and
plumage of one, measuring over ten feet between the tips of the extended wings.
Such displays gratify the tradesman, who thus hints to the public that the whole
domain of earth and air is his warren, and feels his own dignity dilate as that
impression gets abroad.
The poultry supply is a very complex and rather puzzling subject. Of the
turkeys, an immense number come from Norfolk, which county has a high reputation
for breeding them; but other counties send their quota. As a rule, they come
ready plucked; and they may be compared to diamonds in one respect, inasmuch as
their value increases in a geometrical ratio with their weight - a bird of nine
pounds being purchaseable at about seven shillings, while three guineas will be
asked for one of twenty-five pounds. The monster specimens are exhibited with
much pride, and hang as it were in a kind of honourable state for many days,
while their repute gets abroad and people make expeditions to see them. The
gooae, being a more savoury relish, is much more popular than the turkey, as is
evidenced by the enormous numbers of them which find their way to London at this
crisis. They are borne by steam and rail from France and Ireland; they come by
truck-load from near and distant counties : one sees them unpacking from boxes
and hampers, ready plucked; while at the same time and place they are pitching
by hundreds, with their feathers on, out of waggons and carts, into underground
cellars, where fifty women and girls are plucking away at them day and night;
they hang, heads downwards, in dense battalions, on bulks and window-boards, not
only in poulterers' shops, but at grocers', at milkshops, and dairies, at the
pork-butcher's, at the greengrocer's, at the fishmonger's, and even occasionally
at the publican's. In no inconsiderable proportion they flank the thronged
thoroughfares, go where you will so that you cannot get rid of the idea of goose
and. anticipatory stuffing. In the eastern approaches to London, we have before
now met large flocks of them waddling in their own funeral procession, under the
charge of the goose-herd - forlorn hopes, we may call them, coming up to meet
the sage and onions which are to consummate their career. A wretched figure they
cut, their sleek plumage matted and clotted with mire, and their hungry throats
agape, after a march without rations from the neighbourhood of Epping Forest.
If, however, they are not in the best condition on arrival, they can be fattened
before killing; and as they are killed only when wanted, they thus subserve the
exigency of the market. In the bye-ways of Whitechapel we have occasionally seen
groups of them in charge of a countryman, who drove a brisk trade by selling
them to the lieges by a species of Dutch auction.
While strolling the streets about this time, one is apt to be deliciously
arrested by the exquisite odour of sweets, provokingly stimulating the salivary
glands: it may be the mingled aroma of raspberry jelly and caviare, with the
ghost of a flavour of mince-meat; by which we understand that we are under the
influence of the confectioner. A busy man is the confectioner at this holiday
period; for he has not only to provide for impending Christmas, but to meet the
demands of Master Tom and Harry, and Miss Bell and Kate, who are home for their
holidays, and have no intention of waiting for Christmas day before going in for
the pies and tarts. There are numerous orders to be executed, in pastry for
bachelors' banquets, in cakes, tartlets, and blanc-manges for bewildered
housekeepers, who have more than they can do, and in preparing solid dinners for
clubs and
cliques, and social dining parties, who, taking their Christmas feast together,
have no one else to prepare it for them. Then there will be a cart-load or two
of bonbons and minute paper-clad mysteries, wanted to stick on the Christmas
trees, all of which will be expected to bear honied fruit, whatever else they
may carry. It is true the confectioner does not make the mass of these, but gets
them sent in from the wholesale manufacturer, along with the comfits and
jujubes, and candies and sweeties, and fruity conserves, all which are made by
machinery, and by the ton.
An ally of the confectioner - though in a humble way - is the ice-raker, who
may make his appearance about this time in the streets, or who may not, as the
weather shall determine. In the case of a sharp frost or two coming before
Christmas, he is sure to be seen. He knows that the first ice of the season is
always readily bought up, since it may happen that it shall prove the only ice
that is to be got, save from the importers. Consequently, when he gets up in the
morning after a night of frost, instead of driving his cart to Covent Garden for
vegetables, or to Billingsgate for fish, he runs off with it to the ponds and
pools in the outlying suburbs, which his experience has taught him are the
soonest frozen. Armed with a long rake, he skims the surface of the pool of its
crystal coating, even though it be not half on inch thick, and conveys it to the
confectioner's ice-cellar. So long as the frost continues, the raker will make a
prey of the ice, and turn it to his profit. The business seems one of great
hardship and doubtless is so; but to a certain class it has a double fascination
- not only is it more profitable than casual costermongering, bt it incurs no
risk of capital, and can entail no loss - an important consideration to a poor
man. This industry always continues as long as the frost endures, as it would
take a very long time to glut the London ice-market. As for the rakers and the
rakeresses (for the women co-operate eagerly in this sloppy work), their
appetite seems to grow with what it feeds on; they are more numerous and more
active as the frost intensifies, and would skin the Serpentine or the Grand
Junction itself if they were allowed to do so.
Some one has remarked that London never looks so cheerful, so prosperous,
and so satisfied as in the clear dry days before Christmas. This is perfectly
true when the days are dry and clear; and there are few pleasanter ways of
passing an hour than by walking abroad at such seasons to see what is to be
seen. Shops of every description are now in their best trim, and are making
their gaudiest show, while the streets are crowded with holiday people. The
children are home for the vacation, and have lugged papa and mamma out with them
for a shopping expedition. One recognises the girls by the rosy cheeks they
ha.ve brought from the country, and the boys by their loud playground voices,
and rollicking disregard of promenading etiquette. These young people make
holiday with characteristic vigour and independence; they perform astonishing
feats at the confectioner's; regiments of them storm the toy-shops in the
Arcade. They are clamorous for the appearance of the ghost at the Polytechnic,
hailing his apparition with shuddering delight, which dissolves by degrees into
saucy familiarity; and are in ecstacies at the marvellous juvenile memoirs of
Herr Whistler, and his imitations - not a whit less marvellous - of the
singing-birds. They beseige the Cosmorama; they take the Zoological Gardens by
storm; and they get lost and found a dozen times in the interminable galleries
of the Museum. They clamber to the top of St. Paul's; they dive to the bottom of
the Thames Tunnel; they "do" the Tower, and the Monument. One meets them at the
nursery-man's choosing their Christmas trees; one jostles them in the crowd,
staring at the prize capon or fat rabbit suspended as a spectacle in the
dairyman's window and one meets them again at the photographer's, getting
themselves done in groups, where some of them are apt to appear without their
heads, because they are too excited to keep them still. At the fruiterer's -
whose shop at this season is the "mellow shrine of Pomona" herself - you catch
them cracking walnuts, or sucking oranges, or doing both at once, while their
bright eyes are glancing round to see what shall come next; and, find them where
you will, in whatever varied or motley scene, they are shedding the sunshine of
our long-vanished days around them, and reviving the cherished associations of
our childhood. Going into the bookseller's shop. one is sure to meet them there,
and puzzled enough they are sometimes, in that storehouse of riches, by the
difficulties of the choice which papa has allowed them to make; and not a few of
them. we are naturally gratified to remark, are of opinion that libe bonniest
bargain they can buy is the annual volume of "The Leisure Hour," with its
coloured cartoons, its hundred and fifty choice wood engravings, and containing
pleasant reading enough, as the schoolboys word it, "for a whole half," and
profitable reading too.
Another addition to the ordinary London crowds which one sees in the streets
at Christmas time, are the children of a larger growth - the groups, often whole
families, of country people, who arrive here in time to spend the Christmas
holiday with their city relatives. Their visits have been long in prospect, and
they are sure to arrive furnished with a rather long programme of the exploits
they intend to perform. Country-people now-a-days don't come up to town, as
their forefathers did, merely to get dazed with the din and mystery of the great
Babylon, and go back again no wiser than they came. Farmer Glebe and his wife
and daughters now know what's what; the cheap journals and the pictured
newspapers have banished the old ignorance and wonderment: now, if the farmer
brings his family to town, he takes care that they see its lions, and reap a
little knowledge as well as pleasurable excitement from the trip. And our
country cousins are not only sight-seers - they are moreover persistent
shoppers, and one might wonder how they can afford to spend so much cash, were
we not aware that they boy on these occasions for friends at home, and spend
other money than their own. They are always exceedingly welcome to the
shopkeepers, who, knowing that they will not ask for credit, spare neither pains
nor politeness in helping them to settle their choice. The omnibus is the
country people's coach and pair, and they are ever ready to patronize it; and
you may observe that one of them seldom gets in without attempting to get up a
hearty conversation with his neighbours - in which attempt we need hardly say he
does not succeed. On the whole, however, the provincial of the present day takes
much better care of himself than his forefather could do; and though he is given
to lose himself by confounding the points of thc compass, and going north when
his way lies south, and so on, yet, thanks to the ever-present police, he is
sure to be put right again. The police also befriend him in another way, by
keeping at this season a sharp look-out after the light-fingered gentry, who are
too apt to make free with the countryman's pockets. The visitors whom
Christmas-tide bring to London from the provinces, are said to be at the present
time fifty times as many, relatively to the population, as they were fifty years
ago.
Leisure Hour, 1863
CHRISTMAS LONDON
by GEORGE R. SIMS
[-152-]
A MIGHTY magician has touched London with his wand. The spirit of
altruism has descended upon the City of Self. The note of preparation for the
great festival of the Christian Church, which was sounded early in November when
the windows of the stationers, the booksellers' shops, and the railway stalls
became suddenly gay with the coloured plates of Christmas numbers innumerable,
has increased in volume as time went on. Now, on the eve of the great day, there
is not a street in the capital containing a shop, from its broadest thoroughfare
to its narrowest by-way, that has not decked its windows for the Christmas
market.
The meat markets speak of good cheer in the substantial prose
of the Briton's national beef; the poultry markets strike a more romantic note
with the turkeys and the geese that lift the Christmas dinner above the Sunday
level, but it is at Covent Garden that the true poetic atmosphere prevails.
There not only does the yellow glow of the orange give colour to the foggy
arcades and the dimly-lighted central avenue, but the holly and the mistletoe
piled high in every direction speak to our hearts of the Christmas that Charles
Dickens entwined with the love and sympathy of family reunion. The scarlet berry
and the white gleam out from the masses of green, the fir-trees spread inviting
branches that suggest a hundred delights, and the most jaded citizen, passing
through Covent Garden on the eve of the great festival, sees the shadows of life
lifted in the glow of the yule log, and amid the roar of the traffic and the
hoarse cries of the street hawkers hears the merry laughter of little children
happy in their English homes.
[-153-] In the busy streets the
market is at its height. The grocers are so gay with good things that grown-up
men and women stop in front of them as fascinated as were Hansel and Gretel by
the witches cottage made to eat. The sweetmeat shops are cunningly set out that
even the aged dyspeptic feels his loose change burning a hole in his pocket. The
stationers' shops are packed from morning till night with men, women, and
children who are purchasing pictoria1 Christmas greetings that will tax the
capacity of his Majesty's Post office almost to the point of the last straw.
"Post early," the Postmaster cries beseechingly for
weeks before the festival, and the great public obeys. From the twentieth of
December it begins to crowd into the post offices with hands full of envelopes
and arms full of parcels, and the post office assistants, male and female, seem
to become machines. They sacrifice themselves nobly to a grand cause. The flower
girl has cried aloud in her weariness that she "hates the smell of the
roses," but the loyal army that serves under the banner of the
Postmaster-General has not yet given us one weakling to cry aloud that he (or
she) hates Christmas.
Presently the bustle and the tumult, the crowding and
confusion, are over the streets that all through Christmas Eve have been like
fairs grow gradually darker as the [-154-] flickering
lights go down and the shutters go up.
Thousands of men and women who earn their living in London
have crowded the railway termini, and gone to their friends in the far-away
towns. Londoners themselves have always the home feeling strongly upon them on
Christmas Eve. It is a night to spend with the wife and bairns in happy, eager
anticipation of the morrow. So the theatres are mostly closed, the music-halls
are half empty, and even the street market grows deserted towards ten o'clock.
Midnight finds the great thoroughfares given up to the policemen and a few
stragglers. The great home festival has commenced. All London is under its own
roof- tree waiting for Santa Claus.
But long before Christmas Eve has melted into Christmas Day
in mighty London has had mighty deeds to accomplish, that there may be no hitch
in the preparations for the Gargantuan feast.
The great railway carriers have been at their wits' ends to
deliver the parce1s, the packages, the hampers, the cases of gifts and good
things that have been entrusted to them. On hundreds of hampers the word
"Perishable" stares the officials in the face. But trains are late
owing to the increase of the goods and passenger traffic. And the
"perishable" hampers arrive in such vast quantities that horses and
men have to be kept at work night and day in order to deliver them. Sometimes it
happens - it cannot be helped - that the long-expected poultry or game from the
country [-155-] that was to have been the Christmas
fare is delivered too the disappointed householder just as the family are
sitting down to something else purchased in despair at the last moment.
The theatres are mostly closed on Christmas Eve, but do not
imagine that they are deserted. In some of them the preparations for the
gorgeous Christmas pantomime which is to delight the children, young and old, on
Boxing Day are in full swing. It is the dress rehearsal.
We pass the public-houses which are still open, but which are
not thronged as usual. Here and there we come upon men carefully carrying the
goose that they have secured in the goose club, and others who are carrying home
the hamper of spirits and wine that Boniface has presented them with in return
for their weekly subscription. But there is little noise, and there is a marked
absence of the old riotous excess. London at Christmas time to-day is a great
improvement on the Christmas London of the past.
Time creeps on, and the quiet hours have come. Now and again
the old tunes float out on the silence of the night. "The Mistletoe
Bough" is rendered more melancholy than even the composer intended it to be
by a cornet with a cold. The waits have had their day, but still in some of
London they wake the sleeper from his pleasant dreams, and call for a
Christmas-box in the morning. And the carollers still remain with us to sing the
old world words that bear us back to the days of the Yule log, the masquers, the
mummers, the squire, the stage coach, and the snow-clad earth of the Christmas
of our forefathers.
* * *
It is Christmas morning. London does not rise so early
as usual to-day and it is well on towards ten o'clock before there is any
considerable movement. Then people who are going to spend the day with friends
in the suburbs or at some little distance, begin to make their way to the
railway stations. Here are youths and maidens hastening by themselves, here an
aged man and woman making their way slowly, here are family parties, papa,
mamma, and olive branches innumerable. Almost without exception each bears a
brown-paper parcel. It is the Christmas gift, the little present that is usually
taken to the hosts by the visitors to uncle John, to aunt Mary, to the cousins,
to grandmamma and granpapa.
All the morning long the little stream of parcel bearers
going out too spend the day with relatives and friends continues, but towards
eleven it is joined by another crowd, a crowd that carries a church service
instead of a paper parcel, a crowd that is spending Christmas in its own homes.
The church bells are ringing merrily. When they cease there is a noticeable
thinning of the stream of pedestrians. The trains on the local lines
[-156-] have ceased running until after Divine service, and now there are
only the travellers who are taking bus and tram and cab to their destinations.
The private carriages, the hired broughams, will not start with the little
family-parties outward bound until later in the day.
Up till half-past one there are always people in the streets
taking the Christmas walk which is to prepare the appetite for dinner, a lengthy
meal that taxes the digestive powers of most of us, and the parks and open
spaces are fairly filled if the weather is fine. But after half-past one quiet
reigns once more. London is indoors again. The richer folk are at lunch - the
poorer folk are at dinner.
This is the hour to walk abroad observently and take an
unobtrusive peep at the windows as you pass. Everywhere you see that it is
Christmas Day. At many a window you can see the little ones happy with the gifts
that Santa Claus has brought them. Little boys are already testing the strength
of their play-things. Little girls are enjoying the first sweets of motherhood
in their tender attentions to the new doll. The studious children and the
romantic children are absorbed in the pages of the new story books.
Over the children's heads at the windows you have a glimpse
of the table spread and waiting for the feast that is being dished up in the
regions below. The fire light flickers and dances on the walls, and catches the
bunch of holly over the mantelpiece and the evergreens twined in the gasalier.
And up through the area railings there comes a fragrant odour that makes you
look at your watch and remember your own luncheon hour.
From one to half-past there is a little stream of visitors to
the workhouses and certain charitable institutions, where Christmas is being
celebrated by a dinner to the inmates. Fashionable philanthropy which has
contributed to the good cheer passes a pleasant half-hour on Christmas Day in
assisting the poor, the lonely, and the afflicted to share in the common joy.
Even in the great palaces of pain, where suffering is ever present and death
rarely absent, the doctors, the nurses, and the students do their best to bring
a little of the worlds happiness to the bed-side of the patient. For the
children there are toys and Christmas trees, for the grown-up folk such fare and
amusement as they can appreciate.
There are people, of course, who have nothing on Christmas
Day, but they are [-157-] few. Some by nature of
their work have to make shift and take their Christmas dinner where they can.
The bus driver may have to take his in the bus, but in his way he manages to
make up a little family party. His wife brings the meat and the pudding in two
basins, and she and his little daughter sit with him in the 'bus, and make it
homelike. The conductor who is unmarried is invited to take a seat at the
"table." Appreciating the kindly thought he goes into the
public-house, fetches the beer, and pays for it.
The crossing-sweeper goes off duty after the folk have
returned from church, and does not come on again till evening. He generally has
a "home" and his table, if it does not actually "groan," is
well covered with good things. For the charitable ladies of the neighbourhood
have always a corner in their hearts for the crossing-sweeper, and many are the
gifts he gets in the shape of creature comforts for his Christmas
entertainment.
About four o'clock the Christmas dinners of the well-to-do
begin. Except among the aristocracy it is a usual thing to make the dinner hour
afternoon instead of evening. From four to seven you may picture family parties
in almost every house you pass in the best neighbourhoods. The lamps of the
street are just lighted, and darkness is setting in.
The blinds of the houses are drawn, but behind them you know
that a united family are gathered round the board, and that merriment is the is
the dominant note. From seven o'clock the sounds of festival strike your ears.
You can hear the bang of the Christmas cracker, the merry laughter of the
children, at times the sounds of unmistakable romp. All over London the same
spirit is present. Young and old have given themselves up to the joy of living.