Elizabeth Gaskell’s Christmas Writings
One of our most popular speakers, Anthony Burton, returns with his now traditional festive talk – grab a mince pie, get comfortable.
The runaway success of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), celebrating the ‘kindness, joviality and pathos of the season’ (Thackeray), caused many Victorian publishers to badger their authors to produce something similar. Some responded heartily, others didn’t (‘distasteful humbug’ – Trollope). Elizabeth Gaskell had mixed feelings about such seasonal writing, and produced a mixed bag of stories, described in this illustrated talk.
Anthony Burton organised a series of exhibitions, at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, 1981-97, on the history of Christmas celebrations. Later, from 2014, he supplied regular Christmas lectures for Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester, and some Christmas study days for the Victorian Society Manchester branch. In 2021, with Diane Duffy, he produced Christmas with the Gaskells, a booklet published by the Gaskell Society (see below). Anthony is also editor of the Gaskell Society Newsletter.
This talk takes place online only and will be available to ticketholders after the event via recording.
About Christmas with the Gaskells
In Victorian England the celebration of Christmas surged. Following Dickens, many authors produced heart-warming stories for the season. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote seven of these, but was not comfortable doing so, for “I could not write about virtues to order”. However, like everyone else, she participated in the merriment that went on, even in a grim industrial city like Manchester. This illustrated booklet gathers together everything we have found out about her experience of Christmas observances: carols, turkeys, Christmas trees, and family parties.
Buy the booklet (UK shipping only, sorry)
Overseas? We also have a PDF downloadable ebook.