Not all Victorian Christmas stories, songs, and publications were simply celebrations of the holiday. In this 1893 A Book of Pictured Carols, students at Birmingham Art School pair John Mason Neale’s 1853 carol Good King Wenceslas with an Art Nouveau illustration. This art period opposed the constraints of nineteenth-century academic art. The artists’ contributions also continued the Arts and Crafts Movement’s fight against the tawdry production values of industrialization. This effort is balanced with Victorian morals and social reforms, as reflected in Neale’s portrait of a monarch leaving his castle during a time of plenty to help a poor man.
