1978 Christmas message: ‘God rest ye merry gentlepersons’

Press, 22 December 1978, Page 13

1978 Christmas message: ‘God rest ye merry gentlepersons’

At Christmas play and make flood cheer. For Christmas comes hut once a rear.

So, we might now' add to this verse by some anonymous sixteenthcentury bard, do Christmas cards. But the habit of sending these cheap and sentimental items willynilly round the country to friends, relatives, and the most casual acquaintances and clients is a relatively recent one.

The floriferousness or snow-covered romanticism of many designs that reappear year after year are sure clues to their origin, wdiich was in the Victorian era — a time renowned for the opulence and sentimentality of its graphic design.

In many ways, Christmas cards represented a pinnacle in the graphic design of the period. A century ago they were not cheaply printed and mass produced like the cards of today. But, thanks to the abundance of cheap labour, were elaborately handmade, often animated, with lacework, tiny pieces of printed cardboard or paper, ribbons, silken tassels, and tinsel. Hundreds of individual pieces went into some cards. Their invention is credited to a British artist. J. C. Horsley, a prominent member of the Royai Academy in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

In 1837, on the commission of his patron, Sir Henry. Cole, Horsley designed a card which showed p.n bhvinn«K' wealthy

family tucking into Christmas wines and food, and carried the now-familiar legend. “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.” The card must have impressed its recipients, for in the next decade or two privately - produced cards circulated with increasing frequency among the wealthy. Eventually, the common people got their cards, too, and by 1858

By

DERRICK ROONEY

commercially printed cards were being sold in shops.

By the 1860 s Christmas cards were widely popular, and in the 1870 s and 1880 s they reached a peak, reflecting in graphic form the Victorian lust for opulence and sentimentality.

The earliest designs showed things traditionally associated with Christmas snow (though even in Victorian Britain a “White Christmas” was not an annual event), and evergreen foliage such as holly and mistletoe. Later, the Victorians’ love of flowers spilled over from their textiles, china, and wallpapers. and joined the foliage on their Christmas cards. Rosemary, mistletoe, holly, and especially ivv were favourite Christmas evergreens. and thev were

joined, perhaps through the influence of Victoria's consort, Albert. by the familiar cherry' laurel. In Albert’s homeland, Germany, a favourite carol urged its listeners to “seek Jesus, the King, the Saviour Great, and to bring him laurel”; and in the Britain of Victoria and Albert a century ago laurel was a much-admired plant in the gloomy shrubberies favoured by the Victorians

for their flower borders. Branches of it W'ere cut at Christmas to decorate their houses and churches.

So laurel joined the holly and ivy on Christmas cards, though its proper place was in the drawing room, and not at the front door:

Holly standeth in the hall, Fair to behold;

Ivy stands without the door, She is full sore a-cold.

In the peak years of the Christmas-card fashion, the Victorians evolved an elaborate "language of flowers.” in which each flower or leaf shown in a design had a meaning, and a simple posy could carry a complex message. It was a time w’he-n garden fashion, under the influence of such famous gardeners as William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, and later Mrs Earles, was changing. The elaborate

beds of tender plants such as pelargoniums, fuchsias, and heliotropes, wintered in huge greenhouses or conservatories and planted out for the summer, were giving way to more natural plantings in which cottagy flowers like roses, peonies, dahlias, polyanthuses, and pansies were dominant.

Nearly three centuries earlier, Shakespeare's mad Ophelia had set the scene:

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts . . . There's fennel for you. and columbines; there's rue for you; and here's some for me; we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O! you must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy: I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died

To the Victorians, pansies represented sweet thoughts, and violets were “gems of truth.” An elaborate folding card popular in the 1870 s featured half a dozen flowers, each with a meaning, and a slushy verse. Convulvulus was humility (“Like thy Saviour, love, thou art/Humble. lowly, meek of heart/Fairest of the flowers of "arth/Yet

unconscious of thy worth —a symbol that may no; impress twentieth-century Kiwis with the damned stulf growing in their rosebeds. Forget ■me - nets meant true love, the bluebell tof England, not Scotland; the Scottish bluebell is a campanula known in England as harebell; all very confusing) represented constancy. and the annual China aster stood for mutual love. The common cowslip, with its nodding heads. "as "winning grace,” and its verse said: Lovely thou art, my love'y. And sorrow shared with Thee. As if magically changed, becomes A pleasure unto me. But however sentimental they were about their women, the Victorians were unashamed’y sexist in their treatment of them. Even on their cards, women had subservient roles; the girls knelt at the angel’s feel, while the boys stood, and the girls were usually shown to be busy at some thrifty or useful task, such as sewing The exciting pastimes were reserved for the boys, and even the carols had a male bias. If the favourite carol were to be revised to comply with modern requirements, it would he necessary to remind readers that God rest ye merry, gentle’’arsons,