From shrieks to shenanigans, a Victorian Christmas was anything but normal. Queen Victoria’s reign over Great Britain (1837-1901) was highlighted by incredible advancements in technology, industry, and world power. The social issues these changes brought surfaced in the Christmas literature of the time, including works by Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Washington Irving, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Their Victorian Christmas literature not only includes nativity stories and traditional carols, but also social reform narratives that depict utter poverty and squalor in an attempt to enlist readers’ sympathies, and, strangely enough, depictions of the strange and uncanny in mumming plays and ghost stories that hearken back to pre-Christian traditions.
This digital exhibit is an online companion to an exhibit mounted in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library at Brigham Young University December 3-31, 2018. It was curated by a group of BYU students studying Victorian Christmas literature in a general education course during fall semester 2018. All items included in the exhibit catalog are from the holdings of BYU’s Special Collections Library.