You are here: Home: Leisure and culture: Local history and heritage: Glimpse of the past: Social history

Social history

Victorian Christmas

Dreaming of a white Christmas?

The images of a Victorian Christmas - snow on the ground, huge trees decorated with multi-coloured baubles, carol singing in the street - still adorn many a Christmas card, but was it really like that?

Certainly for the wealthy inhabitants of Halifax, this image is not far from the truth, as they enjoyed their good food and exchanged presents with friends and relations in their expensive mansions.

In 1869, the weather also played its part. There are reports that light snow fell on Christmas Eve.

This was followed by heavy snowfall on Christmas Day and by Boxing Day sleighs and skates were out in force! That same year the 2nd West Yorkshire Yeomanry excelled themselves by hosting a ball at the New Assembly Rooms. The Colonel of the Regiment, Sir Henry Edwards, brought his lady wife and thirty guests from their mansion at Pye Nest. The ball is reported to have finished at five in the morning.

But what of Christmas for the poor? Many of them were living in squalid conditions in and around the town centre. When Charles Dickens visited the town in 1858 he described it as "as horrible a place as I ever saw". Long hours spent in factories, working for a very small wage, meant that for many people festive food was something they could only dream about.

In 1881 James Turner who was living in Halifax with his wife and three children wrote in his diary,

"yesterday I bought the wife a Christmas box in the shape of two new aprons; the first thing I have had the pleasure of buying since we were married".

The inmates of the workhouse must have been overjoyed to discover that they were to be given a celebratory meal. There are reports of half a ton of plum pudding being prepared as well as fifty gallons of beer, twenty gallons of rum sauce and three hundred pounds of roast beef. Would you, like Oliver, have dared to ask for more?

back to top