The Common, 1780 George Hogtrough is risking his neck.
When his friend lures him into the murky world of smuggling, unexpected events unfold. Fearful of destitution, his wife Molly turns to drink, and her attention soon wanders towards her husband’s hated brother. Jesse is everything George is not – sober, hardworking, God-fearing. Should George discover her eye has strayed all hell will break loose.
Christmas in the 18th Century – Fact or Fiction?
My debut novel, King Oak, published in 2021, was inspired after researching my family tree and discovering that some of my ancestors, who lived in and around Ashtead Common in Surrey, were not always holy or even very good. Their histories were sometimes intriguing but often grim. However, I really only had access to parts of them and so began an endeavour to re-create their lives and see where their stories led. I picked a date in June 1780 and began there.
Not knowing anything about everyday life in the late 18th century, I began to look for resources which would help me build a picture of what things might have been like. Some of the most fascinating, and perhaps authentic, are two invaluable diaries.
In 1758, James Warne, a farmer from Dorset wrote about his agricultural activities, while Thomas Turner wrote several entries in his diary every week between 1754 and 1765. Turner was a shopkeeper, schoolmaster and overseer of the poor, among many other roles he took on when he moved to the Sussex village of East Hoathly, less than forty-five miles away from Surrey.
While King Oak is set over four days in summer and the second in the series, Michaelmas Fayre, takes place in September, the third book begins at the winter solstice. Christmas traditions will definitely feature! However, the Advent Calendars we know today are a relatively new idea, as the tradition of opening doors to reveal a tiny picture only began in the 1920s. So what did they do to celebrate Advent in what was at that time a mainly Protestant country? For research I turned to the diaries.
Warne spent the whole of December dredging rivers, delivering loads, selling his barley and organising his business. Disappointingly, he does not even mention it is Christmas Day on the 25th December.
I hoped that Thomas Turner would tell us more about his preparations for the Yuletide season, being more concerned with village life than farming. However, things were not as I had expected.
Turner didn’t really get going with his diary until 1755 when he began writing more regularly. In December of that year, his entries were concerned with such delights as registering the number of rooms in his shop with the excise office so he could sell tea and coffee (a requirement of a statute made under George I) and having an ‘issue’ opened on his back, to enable the grim practice of letting blood. His wife had a tooth pulled, neighbours regularly turned up to dine with the couple or just to drink tea, while other entries were concerned with what he bought for his shop and what he subsequently sold.
On 19th December, Thomas writes that ‘his’ boys broke up, presumably related to the school, since he was the schoolmaster. St. Thomas’s Day is on 21st December, and as it was his name day, our diarist handed out some pennies for the poor, along with a ‘draught of beer’.
On Christmas Eve, we get the first mention of Christmas, albeit rather tenuous. The day was very busy, with a lot of activity in the shop, when mutton and beef arrived, as did cotton waistcoats and hats, and two of his customers paid their bills. A nice gift for him, perhaps. And finally, here comes the seasonal reference: Thomas gave a delivery boy 6d ‘for his box’.
On Christmas Day, Thomas mentions going to church with his wife, and then spending the rest of the day at home, reading. That’s about it, apart from a couple more donations to ‘boxes’ for the delivery boys which he gave out on 27th December. No decking the halls with boughs of holly, no mention of a special meal, no carol singing or wassail cups or any kind of large, happy gathering.
Skip forward eleven months to the beginning of December 1756, and things are not much different, except that this year, ‘trade is dull and everything expensive’. And no church on Christmas Day this year, but two visitors who dined with the Turners on a sirloin of beef ‘roasted in the oven’, with a batter pudding under it, plum suet pudding, boiled potatoes and some bullace (plum) pies. The evening was not spent singing carols around the hearth but reading Tillotson’s sermons.
In December 1757, Christmas Day saw Thomas attending church twice, morning and afternoon. Dinner was much the same as the previous year, except they also had a pearl barley pudding, potatoes and turnips with their beef. The only deviation to the Christmas dinner over the years was the thrilling addition of raisins to the suet pudding, and having gooseberry instead of bullace in their pies.
I learned from Mister Turner that Christmas was very much like any other day, with perhaps a little more extravagance at dinner and the donation of money for the delivery boys’ boxes. There seemed to be no preparation, no special baking of mince pies, nor were there any gifts or decorations. Church was not mandatory but often attended, visitors were no more or less than on any other day, neither were activities such as reading or drinking tea.
All in all it was all a little disappointing. Was this usual? Thomas was a relatively wealthy member of the community, not rich, but certainly not poor. When compared with a Jane Austen Christmas, admittedly half a century later than Turner’s time, it makes one wonder whether women and men saw the holiday very differently. While the men were working, was it the women who were making Christmas happen? Or was it perhaps that Austen’s characters were higher up the social scale than the Turners and the Warnes of the world?
Every one of Austen’s novels mentions Christmas, a time when there were festive dances, wholesome dinners, and in the words of Mister Elton in Emma, ‘…quite the season indeed for friendly meetings.’ In Persuasion, Jane describes a typical scene of Christmas preparation: ‘On one side was a table occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper…’
Fanny Burney was writing at exactly the time my series is set; her first novel Evelina was published in 1778 and her next, Cecila, four years later. In Cecila we find one mention of a Christmas game called ‘Move-All’, which ensured the most interesting person at the gathering was not monopolised by one person. Other than that, nothing. References to spending the Christmas holidays here or there, but nothing describing the décor or the preparations.
So, it will be left to my imagination to recreate the Christmas my characters will experience after all. And, I suspect, that if it were not for the creativity of women through the years, the Christmas tradition as we know it may have died out long ago. The church, of course, has its own celebration, but remove all the preparation and planning women do today and how much would remain in our homes, I wonder?
Happy Christmas everyone! Enjoy the plum pudding and bullace pies.
Catherine Arthur
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About the Author
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