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TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: 

Merry Christmas! 

May you never be too old to search the skies on Christmas Eve. 

…and some Literary Christmas Trivia….

The first Christmas cards were sent in 1843, the same year as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was published. They were designed by London artist John Calcott Horsley. The penny post had been introduced three years earlier, making the process of sending letters and cards through the mail easy and affordable. Of the original 1,000 cards that were printed, only 12 are still in existence – nobody seems to have foreseen the longevity of the Christmas card-giving tradition, so few of them were preserved.

 


Between 1920 and 1942, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a series of letters to his children – letters from ‘Father Christmas’. The Father Christmas Letters were published posthumously in book form in 1976, and document in a light-hearted way some of Father Christmas’s adventures – mostly what he has been up to at the North Pole since the previous year, although some letters tell a more sinister tale involving Goblins, which break into Father Christmas’s house and steal some of the presents.

 


Peter Jackson’s adaptation is not the first time Tolkien’s The Hobbit has been adapted for the screen. It was made for the small screen back in the 1970s, made by the same company that created the stop-motion ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’. You can search Youtube and watch a clip from this adaptation.

Dickens’s first published piece of writing was a short ‘sketch’ – published when he was in his early twenties – describing the perfect Christmas dinner. The piece offers an insight into what the average nineteenth-century family did at Christmas time. This was in 1835, just before Queen Victoria came to the throne and the idea of the modern Christmas would become firmly entrenched in the national consciousness – and just before Dickens’s own literary career went stratospheric.

 

Tiny Tim was not the original name for the little boy in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Originally he was going to be called ‘Little Fred’, possibly after one of Dickens’s brothers.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in just six weeks and, despite selling 6,000 copies by Christmas Eve – five days after it was published.

 


Michael Bond bought ‘Paddington Bear’ in 1956. He felt sad for the teddy bear as it was the only toy left on the shop’s shelves on Christmas Eve.

 


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