The Battle for Christmas (65 page)

58.
Ibid., 43.

59.
Ibid., 39.

60.
Ibid., 43.

61.
Mrs. G. “The Christmas Tree,” in
The Pearl; or, Affection’s Gift: A Christmas and New Years Present for 1837
(Philadelphia, 1837 [c. 1836]), 179–189.

62.
Ibid., 179.

63.
Ibid., 180.

64.
Ibid., 180, 183.

65.
Ibid., 183–185.

66.
This point constitutes further evidence that Christmas trees were used by prosperous families, families who could afford to live in houses that contained enough rooms to do this job—and who were up-to-date enough for these rooms to be “specialized” to the extent that at least one of them was off-limits to the children.

67.
Ibid., 180. The same custom is implied in Catharine Sedgwick’s 1836 story “New Year’s Day.” There the children “waked [Lizzy Percival, the heroine] at dawn with … cries of ‘Happy New Year’;” and the servants “besieged her door with their earnest taps and their heart-felt good wishes, and each received a gift and a kind word to grace it.” (Sedgwick, “New Year’s Day,” 17.)

68.
Mrs. G., “The Christmas Tree,” ibid., 186.

69.
For example: [Christophe von Schmid,]
The Christmas Eve: A Tale from the German
(Boston, 1842, etc.; apparently translated by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody); Theodore Parker,
Two Christmas Celebrations
(Boston, 1859); Lydia Maria Child, “The Christ-Child and the Poor Children,” in her
Flowers for Children
(Boston, 1861), 9–48; L. D. Nicholas, “Willy Ely’s Christmas Tree,”
Our Young Folks 2
(1866), 737–740; Louisa May Alcott, “Tilly’s Christmas,” in
her Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag
(Boston, 1872), 122–133.

70. Louisa May Alcott,
Little Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy
(Boston,
1869)
, ch. 3.

71.
The best book about Fuller is Charles Capper’s analytic biography
Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic Life: The Private Years
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), the first of two projected volumes, taking Fuller’s career only up to 1841.

72.
New York Tribune
, Dec. 25, 1844. I ascertained the authorship of this essay from Charles Capper. For another “German” legend, printed in an American newspaper in the mid-1830s—complete with suffering child, a vision of the infant Jesus, and a Christmas tree—see “The Forlorn Child’s Christmas Eve, a translation from the German of Ruckert,” in the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
, Dec. 24, 1836.

73.
New York Tribune
, Dec. 28,
1844
.

74.
Ibid., Jan. 3, 1845.

1.
Charles Loring Brace,
Home-Life in Germany
(New York, 1853), 225.

2.
Ibid.,
122–124
.

3.
Ibid., 221–222. Brace was staying at a lodging-house near the Lindenstrasse (ibid.,
121)
.

4.
A Christmas Carol
never even shows us the poor, even though the book opens by evoking a general vision of a society riven by vast economic and social divisions. But the book provides hardly a glimpse of poverty, and none at all of discontent. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes us back into the time of Scrooge’s childhood, a time portrayed as if it antedates capitalism altogether. The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge on a tour of England, but the only workers he chooses to show us are miners (a happy family, singing Christmas songs) and, even more briefly, a group of sailors at sea. Real poverty does make one appearance on this tour—but only in the form of a pair of allegorical figures labeled “Want” and “Ignorance.” And these figures, who do not move or speak, take the innocent form of a pair of young
children
. In any case, even this brief excursion into the industrial hinterlands of “Christmas Present” is fictionally framed on either side by two lengthy and richly detailed stops at which we witness Christmas dinner with the families of a pair of characters who are already familiar to us: The first is at the house of Scrooge’s merry nephew Fred; the second is at the Cratchits’. Because these two scenes are portrayed so vividly, they end up satisfying us emotionally. But both Fred’s Christmas dinner and (as we have seen) the Cratchits’ are bourgeois events—even though the Cratchits’ dinner has all the pathos (without any of the accompanying resentment) of a proletarian meal.

5.
New York Times
, Dec. 25, 1893. See also ibid., Dec. 25,
1876:
“Should the weather prove fine there seems to be no reason why everybody, including all the possible Bob Cratchits and Tiny Tims in the great Metropolis, should not to-day have the happiest of ‘Merry Christmases.’ The times are hard, it is said, but the charitable institutions are all bountifully supplied with substantial food, and with an abundance of toys and fruit and candy for the children…. In the markets the dealers say that never before were there so many purchases by employers who desired to reward faithful employees, and to make their gifts in the shape of poultry.”

6.
Susan Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick II, Jan. 2, 1838, in Sedgwick Family Papers II (Massachusetts Historical Society), Box 8.15. Sedgwick assured her husband that “It would have just suited you—sufficiently republican, yet in excellent taste.” She went on to note that “We came away at half past 8, & reached home in time to get seasonably soust[?!]”

7.
New York Tribune
, Jan. 3, 1844. See also ibid., Dec. 24, 1845: “Who can devote even one day to hilarity and social enjoyment until he shall have at least devoted as much of his worldly substance as that day’s enjoyment will cost him to the relief of the misery so imminent and appalling.”

8. Ibid., Dec. 30, 1853.

9.
Ibid., Dec. 22, 1854.

10.
Ibid.

11.
Ibid., Jan. 1, 1848. Greeley went on to insist on the need to attack poverty as a systemic problem.

12.
New York Times
, Dec. 26 and 27, 1855.

13.
“How to Help the Poor,”
New York Times
, Dec. 25, 1854.

14.
Ibid., Dec. 26, 1866. See also ibid., Dec. 25, 1868 (“The evils of individual, which is, as a general rule, indiscriminate, charity, are almost equal to its benefits; and the truly charitable will wisely give what they can to the organized societies”) and Dec. 23, 1871 (“A dollar given to an institution like this [the Children’s Aid Society] is sure to be more fruitful than twenty bestowed in undiscriminating alms”).

15.
Ibid., Dec. 25, 1893.

16.
For the cloakmakers, see ibid., Dec. 26, 1894.

17.
For the Five Points, see Paul Boyer,
Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 68–69, 81. For the missions: Marilyn Irvin Holt,
The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America
(Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 98–102. See also Peter C. Holloran,
Bostons Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1830–1930
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994); and Luc Sante,
Low Life: Lures and Snares of New York
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), esp. pp. 305–312.

18.
[Emma Brace,]
The Life of Charles Loring Brace, Chiefly Told in His Own Letters
(London, 1894), 75–76.

19.
Charles Loring Brace,
Short Sermons to Newsboys
(New York, 1866), 13. For Brace, see Boyer,
Urban Masses
, 97–107; Holt,
The Orphan Trains
, 41–79, 120–155. See also Christine Stansell,
City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860
(New York: Knopf, 1986); Thomas Bender,
Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America
(Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1975).

20.
New York Times
, Dec. 25, 1855. A recent examination of New York’s orphan children is Bruce Bellingham, “Waifs and Strays: Child Abandonment, Foster Care, and Families in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York,” in Peter Mandler, ed.,
The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 123–160.

21.
Boyer,
Urban Masses
, 98. For a history of the movement, see Holt,
The Orphan Trains
, passim.

22.
Boyer,
Urban Masses
, 99 (“excursion to Hoboken” quotation); Brace,
The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them
(New York, 1872), 114.

23.
Boyer,
Urban Masses
, 100.

24.
Charles Loring Brace,
Gesta Christi; or, A History of Humane Progress Under Christianity
(New York, 1882), 95, 414.

25.
Bender,
Towards an Urban Vision
, 147–149.

26.
Brace,
Sermons to Newsboys
, 38. The most sympathetic and perceptive modern treatment of newsboy culture is David Nasaw,
Children of the City: At Work and at Play
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 62–87 and 149–166. Nasaw’s study deals with the period 1900–20, when newsboy culture had changed (for example, most early-twentieth-century newsboys lived with their own families).

27.
New York Times
, Dec. 26, 1867.

28.
Brace,
Sermons to Newsboys
, 108, 112, 117.

29. Ibid., 26.

30.
Kevin Gilbert, “Friends or Dependents: Christmas Charity Dinners and Changing Images of the Poor in New York City, 1897–1915” (unpublished seminar paper, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1993). On the newsboys’ code of honor, see Brace,
Dangerous Classes
, 98–99.

31.
Boyer,
Urban Masses
, 98.

32.
New York Times
, Dec. 26, 1871; Dec. 26, 1872; and Dec. 26, 1873. Roosevelt was present once again in 1884 (ibid., Dec. 26, 1884).

33.
New York Times
, Dec. 26, 1890. “This compilation does not make any allowance for the turkey bones, but, on the other hand, the weight of the newsboys before beginning the repast is placed rather high.”

34.
Ibid.

35.
Boyer,
Urban Masses
, 98.

36.
Brace,
Dangerous Classes
, 395.

37.
Horatio Alger, Jr.,
Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York
(Boston, 1868). Most of the other books about newsboys were anonymously authored. These include
John El-lard, The Newsboy
(Philadelphia, 1860), a nonfiction account of the “Newsboys’ Aid Society,” founded in Philadelphia in 1858;
Tom Brice, the News-boy
(New York, 1862);
Willie Wilson, the Newsboy
(New York, 1865), a moralistic tale of a good boy;
Luke Darrell, the Chicago Newsboy
(Chicago, 1866); and [Thomas March Clark,]
John Whopper the Newsboy
(Boston, 1871), a fantasy adventure story of a newsboy’s trip to China.

38.
Elizabeth Oakes Smith,
The Newsboy
(New York, 1854; reprinted 1870), 17–18. Robert says later, “‘I never had any father; I was sea-born.’” (156).

39.
Ibid., 17 (“agin my natur”), 374 (“miracle of goodness”).

40.
E.H.C., “The Sufferer,”
Child’s Friend
, Apr., 1844, 19–22.

41.
Louise Chandler Moulton, “Just a Little Bit of Christmas,”
Youth’s Companion
, Dec. 21, 1865, 200. For other examples of poor children who do not ask for anything, see “Nelly’s Christmas Gift,” ibid., Dec. 20, 1877, 434–435 (in this story the little heroine is black); and also the two stories to be discussed below.

42.
Annie Fraust, “Christmas for Rich and Poor,”
Godey’s Lady’s Book
57 (Dec. 1858), 513–516. See also Frank Lee Benedict, “The Orphan’s New-Year’s Eve,”
Peterson’s Magazine
31 (Jan. 1864), 27–34, in which an impoverished orphan turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of the rich heroine’s closest friend.

43.
This story is also about the conflict between older notions of family structure, which gave fathers veto power over their children’s marriage partners, and emerging notions which accorded children free choice. From still another angle, the daughter’s “elopement”—and her subsequent banishment from the family—can be read as a symbolic way of touching on the issue of premarital sex and illegitimacy. Ironically, from this angle such stories do deal with social class, after all—in the form of the risk of downward mobility posed by sexual misconduct. (For a discussion of this question in a male context, see the story of young Robert Hamlin in Eliza Leslie’s story “Snow-Balling,” discussed in
Chapter 3
.)

44.
Susan Warner,
Carl Krinken: His Christmas Stocking
(New York, 1854), 14, 22. This point follows out the implication of scenes about consumerism from
The Wide, Wide World
(discussed in
Chapter 4
).

45.
William Dean Howells, “Christmas Every Day,” in
Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told for Children
(New York, 1893), 3–22.

46.
Edmund Alton, “The Children’s Christmas Club of Washington City,”
St. Nicholas
15 (1887), 146–149.

47.
New York Tribune
, Dec. 26, 1851; ibid., Dec. 29, 1852. For 1853, see ibid., Dec. 27, 1853.

48.
The
Tribune
of Dec. 26, 1853, published an extensive list of the charitable agencies that had held open house the previous day—twenty in all.

49.
Ibid., Dec. 27, 1853. For a similar story about a Boston institution, see “Christmas Eve at the Orphan Asylum,”
Child’s Friend
(Jan., 1856), 77–79.

50.
There were three other reports of charity visitations in that same number of the
Tribune
. All three took place at institutions for children: Randalls Island, the New York Juvenile Asylum (the children there were served a dinner “which they enjoyed in a manner that would have made many a street vagrant envious”), and the Girls’ Industrial School.