Christmas Through the Ages: From Shakespeare, to Austen, to Dickens

Journey through 300 years of British Christmas traditions with The Brit Lit Book Club! Discover how Christmas was celebrated in Shakespeare's England, Jane Austen's Regency world, and Charles Dickens' Victorian era.

From the twelve days of Tudor revelry and the Lord of Misrule to the quiet family gatherings of Regency drawing rooms, and finally to the Victorian Christmas that shaped our modern celebrations, explore how Britain's greatest authors lived and wrote about the holiday season.

Learn about wassailing, Yule logs, plum pudding, the invention of Christmas cards, and why the Puritans actually banned Christmas in 1647. Discover how Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" transformed the holiday forever, and what Jane Austen's letters reveal about Regency festivities.

Perfect for Anglophiles, book lovers, history enthusiasts, and anyone curious about the origins of Christmas traditions. Whether you're planning a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, Chawton House, or Rochester's Dickensian Christmas Festival, this episode brings British literary history to life.

British literature, Christmas history, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Victorian Christmas, Regency era, Tudor England, A Christmas Carol, literary tourism, British traditions, English literature, book club, literary travel

Book Recommendations:

For Shakespeare's Christmas and Tudor/Stuart Celebrations:

📚 Christmas in Shakespeare's England by Liza Picard - Wonderfully readable social history of Elizabethan Christmas celebrations

For Jane Austen's Regency Christmas:

📚 Jane Austen's Christmas by Maria Hubert - Christmas references from Austen's letters and novels

📚 Christmas with Jane Austen - Edited by the Jane Austen Society

📚 What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool - Guide to 19th-century English life

For Dickens and Victorian Christmas:

📚 The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford - The story behind "A Christmas Carol"

📚 Christmas: A Biography by Judith Flanders - How Christmas evolved through history

For Christmas Traditions:

📚 The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum - British traditions and their evolution

For Christmas Literature:

📚 Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens - Beyond "A Christmas Carol"

Love this podcast? Imagine walking the Yorkshire moors where the Brontës found inspiration, visiting Jane Austen's writing desk at Chawton, and exploring Shakespeare's birthplace with fellow book lovers. We do all this and more on The Book Club Tour!

Follow along with our adventures, or join us! 

🌐 Explore our tours: thebookclubtour.com
📸 Instagram: @thebookclubtour
👥 Facebook: @thebookclubtour

Transcript

0:06

Hello, and welcome back to the Brit Lit Book Club. I'm your host, Vanessa, and today we're doing something a little special. We're taking a journey through time to explore how Christmas was celebrated across three of Britain's most beloved literary eras. We'll be visiting Christmas in Shakespeare's England, stepping into the elegant Regency world of Jane Austen, and finally arriving at the cozy carol filled Victorian Christmas that Charles Dickens helped create and that still shapes so much of how we celebrate today. So grab your tea. I'm having a spice Christmas blend with cinnamon and orange peel, which feels appropriately festive. Settle in somewhere cozy and let's unwrap the history of British Christmas together. Let's start our journey in the late 16th century and early 17th century. The age of Shakespeare of Elizabeth, the I and James, the I of Ruffs and Doublets and the Globe Theater. Now Christmas and Tudor and Stewart England looked very different from what we might picture today. There were no Christmas trees, no Santa Claus, no stockings hung by the chimney with care. But that doesn't mean it wasn't festive. In fact, in many ways, the Elizabethan Christmas was far more racous and extended than our modern celebrations. The Christmas season didn't just mean December 25th. It was a full Twelfth days of festivities running from Christmas day all the way to the Twelfth night on January 6th. And when I say festivities, I mean festivities. This was a time of feating, drinking, music, dancing, games, and general revelry. The social order was playfully inverted. Servants could give orders to their masters, and a Lord of Misrule was appointed to preside over the chaos. The court celebrations were particularly lavish. Elizabeth the first was known for her love of entertainment. And Christmas at court meant elaborate masques, plays, and banquets. In fact, several of Shakespeare's plays are believed to have been performed during Christmas season at Court. Twelfth Night, the title itself is a dead giveaway, was likely written for the Twelfth night celebrations of 1601 or 1602. The play's themes of disguise, mistaken identity, and topsy-turvy romance fit perfectly with the carnival atmosphere of the season. For ordinary people, Christmas meant a break from work and a chance for rare indulgences. The Yule log was a major tradition, a massive log, often from an ash or oak tree was dragged into the house and set a blaze on Christmas Eve. It was meant to burn throughout the 12 days, and there were all sorts of superstitions attached to it. If it went out, that was bad luck. A piece of the log was saved to light, the following year's fire. A feasting was central to Christmas celebrations at every level of society. For the wealthy, this meant spectacular displays, roasted meats, elaborate pies, minced pies filled with actual minced meat, fruit, and spices. The boar's head was a particular delicacy at grand tables and often brought in with great ceremony. For poorer families. Christmas might be the one time of year they ate meat at all. Carols were sung, though they sounded quite different from our modern Christmas songs. These were often lively dancing songs. Remember the word "carol" originally meant a ring dance. Wassailing was another beloved tradition. Groups would go door to door singing and drinking from a shared wassail bowl filled with a spiced ale or cider, wishing good health to their neighbors. But here's where things get complicated. Not everyone was pleased with all this merriment. The growing Puritan movement viewed these celebrations with deep suspicion. They saw them as pagan holdovers dressed up in Christian clothing, and they weren't entirely wrong. Historically speaking, many Christmas traditions did have roots in older midwinter festivals. The Puritans also objected to the drinking, the gaming, and the general excess. They wanted a more sober scripture focused form of worship. This tension, would eventually come to a head in the mid 17th century after Shakespeare's death when the Puritans came to power during the English Civil War and the interregnum. In 1647, parliament actually banned Christmas celebrations. Can you imagine? Shops were required to stay open on December 25th. There were actual Christmas riots and some towns where people refused to comply, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. In Shakespeare's day, Christmas was still a time of joy, theater and festivity, even if storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. If you ever get the chance to visit Stratford upon Avon during the Christmas season, by the way, it's absolutely magical. The town does a wonderful job of capturing that Tudor Christmas spirit with period decorations and Carolers in historic costume. It's one of my favorite places to visit in December, and in 2027, we're going there on the Christmas Book Club tour. Now let's jump forward about 200 years to the Regency era, the world of Jane Austen of elegant drawing rooms, country dances, and very specific social rules about who you could speak to and when. Christmas and Jane Austen's time was quieter. I know that might be surprising, but bear with me. Remember those puritans I mentioned? Well their influence had a lasting effect, even though Christmas celebrations came back after the restoration in 1660, they never quite regained their former exuberance. By the late 18th and 19th century, Christmas was a relatively subdued affair compared to both what came before and what would come after. There were no Christmas trees in Austen's England. That tradition wouldn't arrive until the 1840s brought over by Prince Albert from Germany. There were no Christmas cards, no Christmas crackers, no Santa Claus, and in the modern sense, the extended 12 day celebration had largely shrunk down to Christmas Day itself, perhaps extending through to Twelfth Night in some households, but that doesn't mean it wasn't celebrated. Christmas in the Regency era was primarily about three things, church, food, and family. Christmas day began with church attendance. This was expected of everyone. The service would include special hymns and a sermon appropriate to the season. For a family like the Austens, this would've been at their local parish church. In their case, the church at Steventon, where Jane's father was a rector. Then came dinner, and this was a real centerpiece of Regency Christmas. The meal would be held in the afternoon around three or four o'clock, which was the fashionable dinner hour of the time. The menu would feature roasted meats. Goose was particularly popular for Christmas along with beef and pork. Mince pies were still essential though by this time they were more like what we know today. Sweet rather than savory, filled with dried fruits and spices rather than actual meat, though suet was still used, plumb pudding was a great dessert of the season. And when I say plumb pudding, I should clarify it contained no plums at all. Plums was an old term for raisins or currents. This was a rich, dense, steamed pudding full of dried fruits, spices, brandy, and sue it, and it was often made weeks or even months in advance to allow the flavors to develop. It was traditionally served flaming, doused with brandy and satellite at the table for dramatic presentation. Games and entertainments would follow the dinner. These might include card games, charades, forfeit games, or musical performances. If young people were present, there might be dancing. Jane Austen herself was a talented pianist and would have entertained at family gatherings. What's interesting is how rarely Christmas appears directly in Austen's novels. The main exception is Persuasion, where we get that wonderful scene of the Musgroves' Christmas preparations, their house all in commotion with their children, home from school decorating with evergreens and preparing for the holiday. We also see Christmas reference in her letters, which give us a better sense of how the Austen family celebrated. Jane writes about gifts giving and receiving, usually practical items like handkerchiefs or lengths of fabric, sometimes books. She mentions holiday visits and family gatherings. It's all quite modest by our standards, but clearly meaningful. Decorating with Evergreens was one element of visual festivity that had survived from earlier centuries. Holly, ivy, and mistletoe would be gathered and used to decorate the house, the church too. These were ancient symbols of life persisting through the dark of winter, and they brought a bit of color and nature indoors during the coldest times of year. Visiting was also an important part of the season. The days around Christmas were a time to call on neighbors and friends to strengthen social bonds. For a family like the Bennett's in Pride and Prejudice, this might mean dinners with the Lucas' or a ball at Netherfield, though Austen doesn't actually set any scenes at Christmas in that novel, perhaps the best way to describe Regency Christmas is intimate, family centered, and quietly festive. It was a pause in the year, a time to gather with loved ones, to eat well, to enjoy each other's company, but it wasn't yet the enormous cultural event it would become in the next generation. If you're ever able to join me on our Jane Austen tour, we visit Chawton House, Jane's final home, and in December when they do a beautiful period appropriate decorations that really capture this Regency Christmas feeling. It's such a wonderful way to connect with how Jane herself would've experienced this season. And now we arrive at Victorian England and the man who, more than anyone else, shaped our modern idea of Christmas: Charles Dickens. Now I want to be careful here because you'll sometimes hear people say that Dickens invented Christmas, and that's not quite accurate. As we've discussed, Christmas had been celebrated in Britain for centuries, but what Dickens did, particularly with a Christmas Carol in 1843, was to reinvent it, to transform, it to create a vision of Christmas that has endured for almost two centuries. Let me set the scene by the 1840s, Christmas, was at a low ebb. Industrialization had transformed British society and not necessarily for the better when it came to holidays. Factory workers couldn't take 12 days off. They were lucky to get Christmas Day itself. The old ritual traditions had faded as people moved into cities. There was a real sense that something had been lost. At the same time, there was a growing concern about poverty and social inequality, concerns that Dickens shared deeply. The Industrial Revolution had created great wealth, but also terrible suffering. The Poor Law of 1834 had established workhouses that were designed to be deliberately harsh, to discourage people from seeking help. Into this context stepped A Christmas Carol. Dickens wrote it in just six weeks in the autumn of 1843, and it was an immediate sensation. The first edition sold out by Christmas Eve and its impact went far beyond book sales. It genuinely changed how people thought about Christmas. What did Dickens do that was so revolutionary? Several things. First, he made Christmas about generosity and charity, not just church attendance or feasting for its own sake, but actively caring for the less fortunate. Scrooge's transformation isn't just about becoming happier, it's about becoming more generous, more aware of his responsibilities to others. The Cratchit family's Christmas dinner isn't lavish, but it's filled with love and gratitude. The message is clear. Christmas should be a time when we think of others, especially the poor. Second Dickens made Christmas about family, the warm domestic scenes in A Christmas Carol, the Cratchits gathered around their modest table, Scrooge's nephew, Fred, hosting a joyful party. These established Christmas as fundamentally a family holiday. This was a shift from earlier traditions where Christmas might be celebrated in large public gatherings or in church. Dickens brought it into the home. Third, he established a particular emotional tone for Christmas, a mixture of nostalgia, warmth, good cheer, and just a touch of melancholy. Think of Scrooge revisiting his childhood, the ghost of Christmas present, showing scenes of celebration across the city. The bittersweet awareness of time passing. This specific emotional cocktail is still what Christmas feels like to most of us. But Dickens wasn't operating in a vacuum. The Victorian era saw an explosion of new Christmas traditions, many of which we still practice today. The Christmas tree came to Britain, and the 1840s popularized by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. When the Illustrated London News published an image of the royal family gathered around their decorated tree in 1848, it sparked a nationwide craze. Suddenly, everyone wanted a Christmas tree. Christmas cards were invented in 1843, the same year as A Christmas Carol. The first commercial card was designed by John Calcot Horsley and showed a family celebration. By the 1860s, with improvements in printing technology and the introduction to the penny post, sending Christmas cards had become a widespread custom. Christmas crackers came along in the 1850s, invented by a London sweet maker named Tom Smith, who was inspired by French Bombon, wrapped in twists of paper. He added the crack mechanism, the paper hats, and the little trinkets and mottos inside. Santa Claus or Father Christmas evolved during this period too. Gradually merging British traditions with the American Santa Claus, who was himself based on Dutch Sinter Claus traditions. By the end of the century, the red suited white bearded gift giver we know today was taking shape. Carol singing enjoyed a revival. Many of the carols we sing today were written or popularized during the Victorian era. Good King Wenceslas was written in 1853. Oh Come All Ye Faithful was translated into English in 1841. The tradition of carolers going door to door, which had faded, came back in a more organized, more respectable form, and the food. Victorian Christmas dinner became increasingly elaborate. The Turkey, which had existed as an option for centuries, began to overtake the goose as the bird of choice for those who could afford it. Scrooge famously sends the Cratchits a surprise turkey at the end of A Christmas Carol. Christmas pudding, minced pies and yule log cakes all became firmly established traditions. Dickens himself celebrated Christmas with gusto throughout his life. His Christmas gatherings at Gads Hill Place were legendary, full of games, theatricals, dancing, and enormous dinners. He took the vision of Christmas. He'd helped create and lived it. What's remarkable is how much of the Victorian Christmases survived. The trees, the cards, the crackers, the carols, the Turkey dinner, the emphasis on family and generosity. This is still recognizably our Christmas. Dickens, and his contemporaries gave us a template that has proven remarkably durable. If you're interested in experiencing a truly Dickensian Christmas, Rochester and Kent, where Dickens spent part of his childhood and his final years hosts a wonderful Dickensian Christmas festival. Every year, the town dresses up in Victorian costume. There are readings from Dickens Works, carolers in period dress, street food vendors selling roasted chestnuts. And it's one of the experiences we sometimes include on our Christmas book Club tour. So there we have it, Christmas through three centuries of British literature and life. From the 12 days of racous Revelry in Shakespeare's England through the quiet family gatherings of Jane Austen's Regency World to the transformed, reinvented Victorian Christmas that Charles Dickens helped create. What strikes me looking across these eras is how Christmas has always been about certain core things, food fellowship, a break from ordinary life to appreciate what we have and above all about Christ. But the way those things are expressed has changed dramatically. The Elizabethan Lord of Misrule and the wassailing bowl. Gave way to the regency drawing room and the plumb pudding, which gave way to the decorated tree and the Christmas card. And here we are still carrying on our traditions that connect us to those generations before us. When we sing Carols, were joining voices with centuries of English singers. When we exchanged gifts, were participating in customs that would be recognizable to Jane Austen. When we gather with family around the festive dinner, we're living out the vision that Dickens painted so vividly. That's one of the things I love most about studying British literature. These connections across time. The books are wonderful on their own, but they also give us windows into how people lived, what they valued, and what brought them joy. If today's journey through British Christmas history has inspired you to delve deeper. I've got some wonderful recommendations for you, organized by era, so you can explore whichever period caught your fancy. For Shakespeare's Christmas and Tudor Stewart Celebrations, "Christmas and Shakespeare's England" by Liza Picard. This is a wonderfully readable social history that brings the Elizabethan Christmas season to life with all its Feastings, revelry, and Lord of Misrule chaos. The Trials of Christmas" by Peter Marshall. This fascinating book tells the story of how the Puritans banned Christmas and what that reveals about religious and cultural conflicts in 17th century England. For Jane Austen's Regency Christmas, Jane Austen's Christmas" by Maria Hubert. A lovely collection that gathers all the Christmas references from Jane Austen's letters and novels with context about Regency celebrations. Christmas with Jane Austen" edited by the Jane Austen Society. This includes Austen's own writing, contemporary accounts, and recipes for a proper Regency Christmas. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew" by Daniel Poole, despite the quirky title, this is an excellent guide to daily life in the 19th century England, including wonderful details about how holidays were celebrated. For Dickens and Victorian Christmas, "The Man Who Invented Christmas" by Les Staniford. The story of how Dickens wrote a Christmas Carol and those frantic six weeks, and how it changed Christmas forever. "Christmas, A Biography" by Judith Flanders. A comprehensive and entertaining history of how Christmas evolved with substantial focus on the Victorian transformation. For Christmas traditions more generally, "The Battle for Christmas" by Steven Nisenbaum focuses primarily on America, but includes excellent material on British traditions and how they cross the Atlantic. "Christmas Past" by Judith Flanders, A wonderful collection of primary sources, letters, diaries, advertisements that show how real people experience Christmas throughout the centuries. For literature and Christmas, "Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens: Beyond a Christmas Carol." Dickens wrote many other Christmas tales. This collection shows the full range of his Christmas writings. For food history, "Jam Yesterday" by Katie Ball. Social history, told through food with excellent chapters on Victorian Christmas feasts. If you want to see these traditions come to life, there are several excellent living history sites in England that do Christmas properly. The Museum of the Home in London shows how Christmas was celebrated in different periods of British history. Hampton Court Palace does Tudor Christmas events and various national trust properties recreate Victorian Christmases. I hope this episode has given you some food for thought and maybe some conversation starters for your own Christmas gatherings this year. Imagine telling your family about the Lord of Misrule or the fact that there were Christmas riots in 1647 or that the Christmas card was invented the same year as A Christmas Carol. I hope you have a Merry Christmas. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey through British Christmas history. If you'd like to give me a little Christmas present, you can go ahead and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Well, my tea's getting cold till next time. Keep reading. Stay curious.