The Upper-middle-class Family's Christmas Dinner

Christmas issue cover

1860

Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization

The design of the cover of Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization for Saturday, 29 December, 1861, evokes the title-pages of such Dickens novels as A Tale of Two Cities and The Haunted Man, the Christmas vignettes perhaps functioning as visual allusions to the magazine's current serialization of Great Expectations, which had started in November. [Commentary continued below]

Image scan, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham.

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Dickensian features include the Christmas party, upper left, reminiscent of Mr. Fezziwig's ball in A Christmas Carol, the children gathered around "that pretty German toy" as Dickens in a Christmas essay had termed the decorated fir (upper right), and the family of modest income (the "Poor Man's Christmas" in contrast to the affluent upper-middle class family whose "Christmas Dinner," centre, dominates the entire page) gathered around the hearth as did the Cratchits in Dickens's first Christmas Book, and as Trotty, Meggy, Will Fern, and Lilian had in the second Christmas Book, The Chimes. (1844). However, certain aspects of the cover's design seem distinctly rooted in the New York celebration of Christmas: inept boys and much more adept young men take to the ice (presumably in Central Park), lower right; centre right, a girl is "Hanging up the Stocking" at the mantelpiece; centre left, an elf carrying a sack begins to fill the stocking — we note that he is called "Saint Claus" rather than "Father Christmas"; finally, the five diners at the well-laid table are not British aristocrats, but well-off, middle-class Americans emulating the style and taste of European aristocracy, but situated in an American dining-room of decidedly unaristocratic proportions. although the seven illustrations acknowledge that there is poverty, the overall effect is one of middle-class comfort and wealth. Christmas, implies the illustrator, is for the enjoyment of all ages, classes, and degrees; it is a time for children and adolescents, but most of all a time for the family, surrounded by a Christmas wreath; as this male-dominated groupingw begins its dinner, we note the exclusion of children from the table in contradiction to the Cratchits' Christmas feast.

A curious element in the Harper's Weekly page commemorating the Christmas of 1860 just past is the matter of gender: for example, while the "poor Man's Christmas" depicts three females (the mature woman, left, presumably the mother, has just returned from shopping) and a lone male, the skating scene which depicts pursuits of the leisured class ("Christmas in the Park") has one female participant and five males. Males again outnumber the females in "Christmas Tree." In "Christmas Party," the numbers are roughly equal, as is appropriate to a societally-sanctioned courting ceremony. although females outnumber males in "Christmas Dinner" (the central, dominating scene drawn in much larger scale than the other six), only two are at the table, the child being marginalized, and the last of four females being the servant bringing in the piping hot turkey, surrounded by clouds of steam. The vignettes acknowledge the connection between Christmas and childhood, for children appear or are implied ("Saint Claus") in each, but the enjoyment of the day seems very much a male privilege.

Last modified 13 August 2005