Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England

Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England Neil Armstrong Manchester University Press 208pp £60 ISBN 978 07190Ï7 593

Christmas was hardly an'invented tradition', emphasises Neil Armstrong, but it was, from the middle of the 19th century, an 'expanded one', when commercialisation and consumerism added to (obliterated some would say) earlier meanings of seasonal 'simple pleasures of warmth and good fellowship'. A time when the iconography of Santa Claus, the wide exchange of Christmas cards, decorating the home with a Christmas tree...