Dan Snow's History Hit - Georgian Christmas

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Pantomimes, pleasure gardens, bare-knuckle boxing and political upheaval. Christmas in the 18th and early 19th centuries was a very different affair from the peaceful family celebration of the Victorian Age. Georgian Christmas was raucous and rowdy, and it was time for a bit of fun before heading back to work.In this seasonal episode, Dan delves into the festivities of London's working classes with Footprints of London tour guide Rob Smith. From an 18th-century showman who would put two joints of beef under his arms and walk into an oven - cooking them and miraculously not himself - to Joey Grimaldi, the world's first clown, Christmas in Regency London was surprising, lewd and quite extraordinary.You can book one of Rob's tours here: https://footprintsoflondon.com/live/guides/rob-smith/Produced by Mariana Des Forges and Rob Smith and edited by Max Carrey Dougal Patmore.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It is freezing cold in London town. I'm walking through the streets of London, in fact I'm walking through a very special part of London, Islington Terraced Houses, with their uniform fronts, their dark brick covering the walls of the ground floor. I was born here in Islington, and the reason I'm here is because this is a great place to talk about Christmas, Christmas in London. I've come to this part of London to talk about the 18th century. As London was exploding, people moving here in vast numbers, businesses and factories starting up, London on its way to becoming the biggest and busiest and richest city on earth but as you can imagine

that wealth was shared very unevenly and this area i'm walking through now was an interesting mix of slum dwelling new developments and open fields where cows grazed before being taken into town and slaughtered in smith mill market the georgian period is one of the, well, it's a pretty easy one to define. It begins with the arrival of King George in 1714, controversially taking the throne, leapfrogging lots of more eligible members of the family, and it ends in 1828 with the death of George IV, not very imaginatively named, the Georgian family.

George I, George II, George III and IV. To be fair, there was a Frederick in there but he died before his dad. So here we are. We're going to head back and get a sense of Georgian London and what Christmas was like in that period. My guest is Rob Smith. He's from the Footprints of London tour company. He spends his time walking the streets of London looking at every little detail and the rest of the time in the archives spends his time walking the streets of London, looking at every little detail. And the rest of the time in the archives, trying to find out the stories behind the things

that we can still see on these streets. And Christmas in the Georgian period, it turns out, it's not the wholesome family affair that the Victorians tried to pretend it was. Next time people tell you that we've forgotten the true meaning of Christmas, have a little chuckle and play them this pod. Enjoy. Rob, how's it going?

Hi Dan, how's it going? Good to see you. Good to see you. So here we are, we're tramping the mean streets of Angel Lisington. What are you going to show me? Well, today I'm going to talk about Christmas in Georgian London, but specifically the area we are today, the north side of Clerkenwell, which would have been a really working class area,

a place with lots of professions, watchmakers, furniture makers, lots of the apprentices working in those trades, but also a lot of pleasure gardens where people would have come out of London from the crowded streets of the city of London, come out for the day and enjoy themselves. So Christmas, no difference to that. So people will be here,

people who maybe aren't super familiar with London, you'll be here, but what is London? We've got the city of London itself, that's the old Roman footprint. Yeah, so that would have been in the 1700s a place of industry and business. It's very, very densely packed, but London's population is growing and growing and it's spilled outside that area. You have the West End of London, which is smarter estates, but to the north of it you've

got this area called Clerkenwell, which had been full of slums very densely packed housing housing some of it which had survived the Great Fire of London so you still got timber framed buildings there but to the north of that where we are now would have actually been open fields. So we're kind of on the edge of the countryside now we're on the very edge of London. It would have been in the 1700s there's actually a drawing by Canaletto the famous Italian artist he It would have been in the 1700s. There's actually a drawing by Canaletto, the famous Italian artist. He comes to London in the mid-1700s, and he paints the view from where we're standing now.

And you can look across the open fields towards St Paul's and all the churches of the city in this direction. It's really hard to imagine now because it's all built up. But we are on a hill, aren't we? We are on the top of a hill. I think you cycled here, so you probably noticed we are on the top of a hill. Well, I did have an electric assistant bike today, so I didn't really notice. Well, if you cycled to the top of here, you definitely know you're on a hill.

So a lot of places made advantage of that, and there were places that called themselves the Prospect House. There was a place called the Belvedere, which saw it as like a sort of Italian tower looking over the city. So people would come out to gardens like that for entertainment and a day out of the city right so Christmas has its ups and downs over the years so in the 1600s been pretty bad time where it actually officially been banned for a while famously a lot of people would say oh yeah it was Oliver Cromwell who banned Christmas

well it wasn't actually him it'd been banned before he got into a position of power but it's the sort of thing he would have probably banned if he had the chance anyway not saying that everyone followed the ban because christmas still gets celebrated but it was illegal to celebrate christmas for a while so things have gone to a pretty low ebb then and in the early 1700s there's still a lot of discussion about christmas being either a thing that discussion about Christmas being either a thing that's too papist or a thing that's too pagan it's hard to imagine something being both of them there's a newspaper called the observator in 1702 which associates Christmas with potpourri and says it's the celebrating of saints days and Christmas is a wasteful thing which encourages idleness

there is too much playing of cards, drunkenness and rioting, like in the days of old. So Christmas, not very popular to some people. So some kind of perhaps more extreme evangelical Protestants are saying this is too much Christmas. People should be hard at it. And other people are saying we've lost the spirit of Christmas. We should be getting drunk and having a good time.

Yeah. You can't win with people, can you? Christmas had gone on for a while, we complain about it starting too early, but in some parts of the country Christmas could start at the end of November and there'd be a separate drinking feast each week. So there was an accusation that these people should be getting to work in the factory or getting to work in the fields rather than spending their time on Christmas. Okay we'll go on to our next destination now so we're going to walk around to Pentonville Road which is actually a road that was built in the Georgian era. It was really like the world's first bypass so it was built all the way through the fields I've been talking about

and for a long time it still ran through the fields on either sides but it was a way of getting from the West End to the City of London without going through some of the slums around Soho area so we'll carry on this way. That's fascinating. So on this site at the top of the hill was a place called the White Conduit Fields and it was a place which had in the middle of it a place called the White Conduit House which was one of the many pleasure grounds of this part of Islington. And what's a pleasure ground? Do you just go there and hang out?

Yeah, so they were usually places where you'd come to drink tea or eat cream cakes or drink beer. It's before people can go to the seaside or go on a package holiday, you only got like half a day that you're at liberty. So you've got to go somewhere quite nearby. But this is a place where you can come. And like what happened in Islington stayed in Islington. So it's a place where you might take someone who you shouldn't be really with. And you could walk around the arbours of the gardens and not be seen by your neighbours. So you can get

this food and drinks, a few little trees, a bit of open space. Yeah often a bit of entertainment as well so they compete with each other for shows and street theatre we might call it. Yeah theatre of well some of it highbrow some of it very lowbrow. They would have sometimes small opera houses where people would perform but they even had a show at the White Conduct Fields where there was a Frenchman who had this act where he would go into a brick oven carrying a side of beef under each arm and stand in the oven. And then you would come out and you could pay money to dine with him on the roast beef. And somehow he hadn't roasted himself. I don't know how he did it. It's like the sort of Georgian equivalent of Davidid blaine perhaps it's about we've got tv these

days isn't it but they would be acts like that as well so the white conduit fields entertainment in christmas and this is a count from 1788 in a newspaper called the world which talked about what was going on there yesterday morning was fought in the cricket fields near the White Conduit House, a battle for five guineas a side. The contest lasted for 25 minutes when Malt acknowledged his adversary to be the victory. The battle was fought with fairness

and many hard blows were given on each side. Not less than 1,000 people were present. So that was Boxing Day in 1788. Bare-knuckle boxing, yeah, on Boxing Day. Now, they talk about the cricket fields. The Islington Cricket Club played there as well. But increasingly, the space becomes contested between cricketers and people who've come there for a picnic.

And it all comes to the head, eventually a riot, between cricketers and picnickers and the picnickers win and the cricketers decide to give up and their captain a man called Mr Lord goes over to Marylebone and sets up his own cricket pitch there which kind of the rest of history there so the Lord's cricket club was originally famous in world, was actually not their first choice. It wasn't their first choice, no, but a lot quieter there. How funny.

So now outside the Angel, which is famously the Angel Islington. Well yeah, because the area is, we kind of, Angel Trove Station's here, is that the name of the neighborhood? Well, it's actually the name of a building. Oh really? There's been a pub here, it's called the Angel, since at least the 1400s and

there have been various fair angels. The one we're standing outside is the most recent one built in 1900. It's beautiful, isn't it? It's sort of orangey stone, big cupola. It looks fabulous. They built it with this really lovely terracotta decoration. If you look, there are these nice cherubs at the top, which is a bit of an architectural joke to saying that the building's the Angel Inn. Oh, of course. And the Angel Inn was made famous when the Waddington's Game Company commissioned the British version of Monopoly. They're from Leeds and they don't know the streets of London very well.

So they send their man, Victor Watson, down to London with his secretary, Marjorie, and they've scooped around looking for streets in London. So if you've ever played Monopoly, you'll know some of the streets are a little bit eccentric choices. And Marjorie was getting really fed up of this long traipse around the streets. So she said, could we go into the Angel Inn, which at that time had been converted into a corner house cafe. which at that time had been converted into a corner house cafe. So she goes in there, has a cup of tea, and then they say,

can we just go back to King's Cross and get the train home now? So they agree the last square on the board will be the Angel Islington. And so that's the only square on the Monopoly board, which is a building rather than a street. That's fascinating. Do you know what, though? I don't see a pub in there anymore. I see very depressing a bank on the ground floor of that building. Yes, it's a real shame.

This is now we're heading south. We're going down the hill. I can see some of the skyscrapers and the City of London ahead. This would have been a big thoroughfare, this one here, would it? Yes. The Angel Inn is really the first stop out of London if you're heading north on the Great North Road. Oh, wow. What became the A1? Yes. The Great North Road, it's a really important route to the north. But in 1745, it was a route for danger for London

from the Jacobite army that was heading south. Oh, of course. So in 1745, there's been a rebellion in the north of England and an army has managed to make it down to Derby and seems to be heading south. So December in the run-up to Christmas of 1745 is a really scary one in London. If you read the papers there, there's a lot of talk about people mobilizing and getting

ready for London being under attack. So for instance if you owned a horse you had to register it with the army because they might have needed it as a cavalry horse. There's really xenophobic, bigoted newspaper articles about the dangers from Catholics. So they drag up stories right the way back from Queen Mary's time saying this is what the Catholics do, sort of hinting on what will happen if the Catholic army arrives in London. You could buy as a Christmas present for someone a list of all the Catholic people living in London. How threatening is that? And the army gets mobilized and sent up to a big camp further up the road here at Finchley. So you

might have seen Hogarth's painting March of the Guards to Finchley. That was painted a long time after the crisis and it was actually ended up sort of satirizing how poor an army it was facing the Jacobites. But you can see London's in a state of panic. Now it was facing the Jacobites. But you can see London's in a state of panic. Now in the end, the Jacobites turn back at Derby and don't get any further. But it is a time of panic. So there's a possibility that the Jacobites have all

been rallied by a traditional Christmas song that we all know now as, O Come All Ye Faithful. So Come All Ye Faithful was an old Catholic tune which had been around for probably about 50 years before. The tune was known as Adaste Fidelis. They get some new words written to it by a man called John Francis Wade. And John Francis Wade is a follower of the Jacobites

and joins up with their army. And in the book that he publishes with the lyrics of O Come Ye All Ye Faithful, it features flowers which were the symbol of Bonnie Prince Charlie. So was this a code word that if you start hearing O Come All Ye Faithful are you to come and join this big army that's coming to London? So what we think of as a traditional Christmas tune might have been a tune which threatened London. What a great, that's great, I didn't know that.

So we just turned off onto a side street now, away from the Great North Road, past the funeral directors. Looks like it's been there for a few hundred years. So we're going into one of the lovely squares of Islington. It's one of the largest of them, Middleton Square. And these squares were built in the late Georgian period to replace all the fields which had surrounded this area. So this was built on a field called Butcher's Mantles.

And Butcher's Mantles was like a sort of car park for cows on their way to Smithfield Market. Oh, of course, right. Yeah, yeah. Cows would be driven huge distances, some of them coming from North Wales. And on the way, they would probably get a bit skinny. And you were selling your beef by the weight, so you wanted the animals to get a bit of weight on them.

So you'd park them here in butcher's mantles for a couple of months, feed them up, and then sell them on. So this was a field, even when people were coming out to go to the pleasure gardens like the white conduits fields they'd have passed a load of cows here. Well there's no refrigeration they say so you've got to take the fresh food to the people. Yeah absolutely yeah but eventually the landowners here then realized there's far more money

to be made renting out their land for housing than there is renting out to farmers so we get lovely squares like this one. I've never been to this square this is a very very grand square you associate perhaps with other parts of west London wouldn't you but it's it's the jewel and developer's crown wouldn't it? Absolutely I love squares like this because they're kind of like those squares in Belgravia. Yeah, definitely. They're miniature and they're made for the upper middle classes, not like the super rich of Belgravia. It's trying to do the same thing. There's also a lot of health benefits supposed by squares like this. So people would have moved out the crowded streets of the city of London up to the top of the hill.

It was thought like the top of the hill had rarefied air. And each of the houses has a nice garden at the back of it. So you've got some private green space but they've also had a communal square in the middle of it. Someone's plonked a church in the middle to look after their souls. Yes, there is also the fear that people are going to be cut off from their spiritual needs. So a lot of the squares also have a church in the middle of them. cut off from their spiritual needs. A lot of the squares also have a church in the middle of them. We'll be back with more Christmas history after this. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. So we've walked along round the square.

We're at number seven. Yes, so this was the home of a man called Thomas Dibden. He was the first person to live in this house. And Thomas Dibden was the manager of Sadler's Wells Theatre and he was someone who was interested in the new form of theatre which was becoming popular during the Georgian period pantomime so pantomime it's an idea that came from Italy and there are a lot of people who really don't like it. If you read about Alexander Pope's writings a bit earlier than Dibden was around, he says this is the final dumbing down of the theatre and having these plays with these idiotic plots where anything can happen

which is totally against the natural world is just the end of theatre as we know it. But they're very, very popular. In fact, pantomime would go on all year. We think of it as a Christmas thing, but they would be all year round. So slapstick, currents. Slapstick, audience participation. Yeah, interesting.

One thing that I really like reading in the accounts is the amazing set changes and costume changes which just seem absolutely dazzling and dibden was really good at doing these so he was a pantomime writer and one of the ones that he came up with was mother goose now dibden he'd been the theater manager at sadler's wells for a long time and he talked about coming back from Sadler's Wells across this field when it was butcher's mantles one night in the middle of a storm and it was so dark and he couldn't see his way and he tripped over a cow.

He later recalled that the house that he lived in was probably where the cow had been. And it was strange sort of that they'd gone from countryside to his house. So we're now in a street called Merlin Street and this was the site of a pub called the Merlin's Cave. A very popular pub which was on the edge of a place called Spa Fields. So Spa Fields was another of these places

which was a pleasure ground for people to come to for their spare time. It was thought that the water in the well on Sparfields was very similar chemical composition to that at Tunbridge Wells so you could have all the benefits that rich people going to Tunbridge Wells had of drinking the health-giving waters in the spars of Islington. So that makes them very popular for a while. Well anyway, Sparfields in 1816 is the site of a big meeting which is an attempt to try and kick off a revolution like happened in France. So in December 1816 they have the Sparfields demonstration here which... Terrible time, post-war depression, the really tough years. Exactly. People thinking that, well, the war is over now, surely things should be getting better for us. But for the people of Clerkenwell here, they're going through

a lot of economic hardship. They're still paying heavy taxes. They're facing increasing competition from the Industrial Revolution. All the things that the craftsmen did here are suddenly being made cheaper in the factories in the north of England. There's a lot of political repression still. So there have been laws passed during the Napoleonic War which banned people meeting, which banned books like Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, which had got people put in prison for their

political views. There were laws put in which says that it's illegal to publish pamphlets which are critical of the king. It's a very repressive time. So in November of 1816, there are two activists called Thistlewood and Preston who think we want to captivate this anger and try and kick off an event which will spark a revolution in Britain. Well to start a revolution you need a big crowd of people and to get a big crowd of people you need a top named speaker. So they invite a man called Henry Hunt to come to speak here. Now Hunt is known as Orator Hunt and he's been able to speak to big crowds of people. He was supposed to have spoken to a crowd of 50,000 people in Leeds. I can't help feeling it was a little bit like the film Life of Brian,

where no one could really hear what was being said at the back. And, you know, they were in Life of Brian, they say, oh, blessed are the cheesemakers. I think that's what he said. But nonetheless, Hunt has this reputation of being able to speak to a big crowd. So they invite him here to get the crowd. So there's a meeting held in November when Hunt talks to the crowd and he starts off really pleasing his audience by saying well isn't there great poverty amongst the people in places like Clerkenwell and these are really hard times. Is it because you are lazy and drunk? No. British worker is the finest in the whole of Europe and does twice as much work as a European.

It's all because of the taxes you have to pay. And why do you have to pay taxes? Because of maintaining this huge army in France and maintaining an army in Britain. And did you vote for this war? I didn't vote for it. You didn't vote for it. None of us have

a chance to vote and even if we did our views would just be totally ignored and he may have a point at that point because Clerkenwell at that time was in a constituency which was the whole of Middlesex so that was virtually all of London outside the city and Westminster which had one MP the hamlet of Newtown on the Isle of Wight, 15 people lived there and they had two MPs. So Newtown could outvote Middlesex, even if the people of Middlesex had a vote, which most of them didn't. Their interests of the landowners on the Isle of Wight

were always going to outvote the MPs who represented built-up areas. So it wasn't a very fair political system. And Hunt says the only way to get equality for workers is for political reform. So they go away with signing a petition, which they'll present to George IV. And, well, predictably, he's not really very interested

in changing the political system. So they agree to come back in December 1816, just before Christmas. And there's a huge demonstration here, but Thistlewood and Preston decide to waylay Hunt so he can't turn up to speak to the audience. They then say, oh, well, Hunt hasn't come, so perhaps all this talking needs to end and we need action.

Get the crowd to meet outside the Sparfield cake shop and we can talk revolution. I really like the idea of a revolution that starts in a cake shop. So Preston he jumps up onto a cart which is outside the cake shop and waves the tricolour, the three-coloured flag of the French revolution and says who's with me and once you've got a crowd together and do that sort of thing you're always going to get someone to follow you. So they then march to a nearby pub where a lot of pikes have been secured so pikes big spikes on long poles a rudimentary weapon you can use so the crowd are armed with pikes they then attack a gun shop on snow hill and steal some guns from there and in the process the man in the gun shop is shot and later dies

and then they head towards the tower of london part of the crowd decide on the way they're going to rob the Royal Exchange and when they get there they get into a protracted gun battle with the people who are guarding the Royal Exchange and this rather detracts the crowd where eventually they get people down to the Tower of London hoping that all the soldiers who are headquartered in the Tower of London will then join this revolution but unfortunately they're not actually interested in joining this revolt and then tell them to go away. So the crowd then starts to dissipate and just gets involved as smashing the windows in Somerset House. So the Sparfields riot it

could have been the spark that started a revolution, but in the end it peters out by the end of the day. Now, you would think that everyone involved in organising this would be in big trouble and they were arrested and brought to trial for treason. But as it happened, in the time between November and December, the authorities had put an argent provocateur into the group, a man by the name of Castle. had put an argent provocateur into the group, a man by the name of Castle. And Castle in the trial says, yes, I agreed to stir up trouble. And the court then say, well, it was all Castle's fault, so Thistlewood and Preston get off. But that isn't the end of them.

Thistlewood later on then tries another attempt to kill the government in a plot which is called the Cato Street plot. And that is foiled, and then Thistlewood's lock run out and he's executed. So maybe just a little cul-de-sac in the history of British democracy but it was an attempt to try and get political reform and all happened in the run up to Christmas 1816. Wow very cool, I didn't know that story. So we're going to go this way next so Cool. I didn't know that story. So we're going to go this way next. So we're going to get to see where Jerry Grimaldi lived in Exmouth Market. Oh, the pantomime legend.

More Georgian Christmas debauchery after this quick break. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, that's Grimaldi.

Clown. Look at that. That's so funny. Yeah, so we're in a street called Exmouth Market now, which is a really great street restaurant and it's got a street market here in the morning. It's funny, even in the time I've known Islington, it's changed from being an ordinary street market with a few scruffy shops to quite a smart street of restaurants. But you can see opposite a nice Georgian house with a plaque to say it's the home of Joey Grimaldi. So Joey Grimaldi is often credited as being the first modern day clown

and he was one of the first to paint his face white with a red nose but he was so much more than a clown. He was theatre manager at Sadler's Wells and at Drury Lane as well and was often working on the set designs for the plays and the amazing costumes. He was a great artist for changing costumes and doing acrobatics. In fact, when he started, he was only a young boy. His father had been in the stage and he did an act where he had Joey dressed as a monkey on a chain. And then he would spin Joey around on his head on the chain as a stunt.

One day the train smashed and Joey went flying into the audience and landed on someone's lap. That is how you make an entrance into the world of the theatre. So Joey would perform amazing stunts in his shows, but he would also do some incredible costume changes. And I really like the theatre directions for some of his plays. And it says, Joey Grimaldi enters dressed as a pugilistic carrot, which you can't imagine really many plays require that sort of thing. So lots of great performances with him in.

I'm going to read another review. This is from a pantomime in 1816. So the pantomime of Harlequin and Fortunio, in all these respects, we think deserves high praise. It had, if we remember right, about 20 scenes, and some of them were extremely brilliant and even magnificent, particularly the cascade, the plane of the city and the fountain of the seven lions in China, a view of Brighton and the field of Waterloo. We believe there are a few of the tricks which we've not seen before,

such as the advance of living queens of cards from behind the painted representation on the wall, a beautiful Arabian horse, two zebras and a monkey acted conspicuous parts and gave great entertainment. These are amazing shows, I would really love to see this sort of thing performed. Reenacting the Battle of Waterloo and some crazy scene out of China all in one evening. And switching from one to the other with using lighting and scenery. So it's really interesting talking to you about kind of Georgian working people's Christmas because we're not talking about kind of curated domestic experiences

and turkey on the table and menus. We're talking about it just being a public holiday. People going out, taking in shows, drinking, eating, kissing in the public space. There wasn't a kind of domestic Christmas like you might expect us to have today or Dickens. I think there's a reinvention of Christmas by the Victorians as a more sober family affair. A time of bringing everyone together in the house and of celebrating quietly.

Being a more religious ceremony, a more religious celebration. And also a time of charities where you do charitable acts where there's perhaps a little bit more leisure time for Victorians. It's still not talking very much for Victorian working class people but there's a little bit more leisure time, a little bit more money to spend and so they want to celebrate that by having a Christmas at home whereas yes I think Georgia and Christmas it's more of a public affair.'re out on the streets you're grabbing a few hours of R&R before heading back into the yeah before back into work again yeah so um just wanted to finish off with talking about some of the entertainments you might have had at home and Dick Merriman he in his pamphlet he talks about some of the games that

are played and he says oh there's the game Hoop and Hide, in which parties hide around the house, and even if it be in bed, it ends up in kissing. And then you might sing... That escalated quickly. Hang on, wait, this is a party game? Yeah, I'm thinking this is one that's going to get you into trouble if you try it now. So you all run around the house hiding and then actually end up kissing. You hide in the bed and then go, oh, well, where have we ended up?

Gosh, you found me. And then there's blind man's buff, where he says it's lawful to set anything in the way for folks to tumble over. Perhaps they suggested that the game was invented by a country bone setter to try and drum up custom. Crikey, these games are pretty hardcore. And then it says another game called Puss in the Corner, where a man chases a woman and if he catches her,

he may kiss her until her ears crack, which again, I wouldn't really recommend trying at a party these days. Until her ears crack so there's a lot of room for abuse going on in another book which is a poem that's written by a woman called mary robinson so mary robinson she'd been an actress on the stage and she'd agreed to have an affair with george for a payment of £20,000, which was a huge sum of money. I would, yeah.

You'd be tempted, wouldn't you? And the affair goes ahead and then George IV refuses to cough up. What? So she then has her reputation ruined. So it was pretty tough going on Mary Robinson. But she becomes this writer, writing poems about themes about women's power and women's property rights but also about domestic abuse and she writes a poem about kissing under the mistletoe and it's quite a long poem but I'll read a bit of it because it talks about how

kissing under the mistletoe could be abused by people. It happened that, some sports a show, the ceiling held a mistletoe, a magic bow and well designed to prove the coyest maiden kind. A magic bow which druids old in sacred mysteries enrolled. And which of gossip fame a liar still warms the soul with vivid fire. Still promises celestial bliss while bigots snatch their idols kiss the mistletoe was doomed to be the talisman of destiny first marjorie smiled and gave her lover a kiss then thanked her stars was over next kate with reluctant pace was led towards this mystic place then sue a merry laughing jade a dimple yielding blush displayed while joan her chastity

to show wished she held knaves would serve her so she teach the rogues full wanton play and well she could she knew the way so it's interesting it's all about sometimes women getting kissed under the mistletoe who don't want to be kissed but it's also about women who want to kiss men under the mistletoe and are going to take their pick thank you very much so it's a bit about abuse and a bit about empowerment under the mistletoe so it's interesting bit of writing so Mary Robinson was part of these women who were writing about politics at that time she was friends with the Duchess of Devonshire who gets involved in politics at that times and contemporary as well of Mary Wollstonecraft who was writing in Islington. So it strikes me that as we've been walking these streets whenever people are telling us to return to traditional

values of Christmas less shopping less boozing and go back to a simple focus on family. Well that's not traditional Christmas at all. Christmas was rowdy, Christmas was on the streets, Christmas was just a big day out. Christmas has been lots of things over the time. It's very hard to say what's a traditional Christmas because Christmas has been redefined many times but Victorians did really try and take ownership of Christmas and define it as a religious time of family. But it hasn't always been that way. Well, thank you for stripping back that Victorian wallpaper and showing us the more rugged Georgian masonry beneath.

Oh, thanks for coming. Thank you. When Queen Victoria took up residence in Buckingham Palace with her husband Albert in the late 1830s, it sort of ushered in a new era for Britain and a new set of Christmas traditions. Celebrations moved from the streets into the home. An emphasis was put on family gatherings instead of the large, raucous parties of the Georgian era. Christmas trees were set up in the front room. Although Prince Albert is wrongly credited with bringing this tradition to Britain,

it was actually Queen Charlotte, another German consort, who introduced the Christmas tree in the late 18th century. Although it was a yew tree instead of a fir tree. Victorian Christmas, well, among other things, they gave us Christmas cards. Their kids were rather different from the cute little robins and snowy scenes we recognise today.

Victorian cards had very bizarre illustrations. You've got to check these things out. Like a mouse riding a lobster as if it were a horse or prawns having afternoon tea. There's one famous one, bugs with human faces wearing top hats. And I say, bring back that Christmas energy. The Victorians also moved gift-giving from New Year's Day to Christmas Day. Christmas crackers became a household staple after they were invented by a

confectioner named Tom Smith in the 1840s. Now there's some disagreement within the history of tea about whether Americans pull crackers. And I had many Christmas in Canada when I was a kid and we had crackers, but my grandma had been born in Wales. So maybe we got that tradition from her, but I'm sure Americans pull Christmas crackers. But if you don't, we basically have strange bow tie-like shapes made of paper with ribbon around them, two handles where you both pull at a handle in different directions. You rip this paper in half. There's a little snap, a little bang, thanks to a small chemical reaction that takes place, long story, and then a pointless trinket or toy falls out. You argue about it and then put it somewhere and

forget about it for the rest of your entire life. Glad we're up to speed there, folks. When the Industrial Revolution dawned in the 19th century, we end up in an era of mass-produced decorations and toys, and that made celebrations more affordable for normal people. And in this period of changing Christmas traditions, one man really stands out. He's been described as the man who invented Christmas, and that, of course, is the author,

Charles Dickens. Because despite the glowing lights and the parlour games, Victorian London was a harsh place, particularly in winter, and especially if you were poor. It was Dickens' Christmas Carol that has really captured the harshness of Victorian life, and the need to channel goodwill to those less fortunate than yourself at Christmas. The runaway success of the story transformed attitudes towards the holiday as a time for charity and kindness. So join me next Wednesday on Christmas Day as it happens, when you might need to take a little breather from the festivities and I'll be following the footsteps of Scrooge and the Three Ghosts of Christmas. I'll be exploring the streets that inspired Dickens' festive works.

We'll search for the old debtor's prison that the Dickens family once called home, a place that haunted him for the rest of his life. And we'll be telling tales of Victorian coaching inns, which was where all the action happened, Thames scavengers, and the life in the counting houses and lanes that inspired A Christmas Carol. This is my Origins of Christmas series. Make sure to hit follow on your podcast player to get the final episode next Wednesday

and you can find the rest of this series in this feed. Just keep scrolling down until you see the special artwork. Bye-bye. © transcript Emily Beynon you