Old High Christmas cheer: or, why the Oxford Movement did not save Christmas

Dec. 25 ... I read Prayers and administered the Holy Sacrament this morning at Weston, being Christmas Day. My Squire and Lady both at Church and at the Sacrament. This being Christmas Day, the following old poor men dined at my House, and I gave each of them a shilling to carry home to their wives - Richard Bates, Richard Buck, Thos. Dicker, Thos. Cary, Thos. Cushion, Thos. Carr, and my Clerk Js Smith - in all gave them 0.7.0. I had a prodigious fine surloin of Beef rosted with quantities of plumb-Puddings. We also began on Mince Pies today at dinner - entry for Christmas Day 1780 in the diary of Parson Woodforde.

Good Parson Woodforde would be rather bemused by an article in First Things, published over the Christmas season: 'How the Oxford Movement Saved Christmas'. Leave aside for the moment the good Parson being very confused by the views of the Oxford Movement. He would be wondering - as he enjoyed his plumb puddings and mince pies - why on earth this Movement had to 'save' Christmas. 

According to the article, "The Oxford Movement played a significant role in restoring Christmas to a central place in nineteenth-century British religious life". Such an assertion does not bare even modest scrutiny. Those with any knowledge of Christmas observance in Georgian England will be no less bemused than Parson Woodforde by such a claim. Behind the odd claim made by the article is an unfortunately familiar assumption regarding 18th century Anglicanism, an assumption which has been robustly disproven by decades of historical study. In the article we are informed, by means of the distinctly unreliable Lytton Strachey, that, prior to the Oxford Movement, "taking the Christian religion seriously 'had not been done in England for centuries'". It is, of course, an absurdly silly claim, seemingly entirely ignorant of the very significant research over many decades on the Church of England in the 'long 18th century'.

The article goes on to claim that "Revitalizing the observation of Christmas helped to mark it for the Victorians as a time deserving of particular reverence and celebration". Contrast this with the words of Henry Handley Norris, a leading light of the Hackney Phalanx, in his 1815 A Manual for the Parish Priest, he stated: 

The nativity of the Redeemer, with all the circumstances and effects attending it, will furnish matter for discourses during the season of Christmas. Not only may the accounts given by the Evangelists, of the birth of Jesus, compared with the predictions of the prophets, be brought forward to prove that our Blessed Lord was the promised Deliverer, but the joyful results of these glad tidings maybe enlarged upon.

Here we have evidence of a "particular reverence" for Christmas in the pre-1833 Church of England, never mind the wider cultural observance. Alongside this, Parson Woodforde demonstrates the liturgical and sacramental observance of Christmas, together with communal and cultural festivity. To this we can also add a Christmas sermon by William Jacobson, an Old High figure who was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1848 and Bishop of Chester in 1865. In a collection of sermons published in 1840, we read a sermon he preached in the parish of Iffley, Oxford, in the days before Christmas Day 1839 - a mere six years after the beginning of the Movement of 1833:

Christmas always has been and always must be so much a season of rejoicing, that we all of us run a great risk of thinking more of those pleasures which the festival brings, than of the exceeding goodness of the great God our Saviour, which the season is intended to commemorate. Joy is innocent indeed, is proper and becoming at Christmas; but it should be joy called forth by that wonderful work of the Lord which was done as at this time, joy arising out of the thought of the operation of His hands in bringing about the birth of our Blessed Redeemer.

This quite clearly indicates that Christmas festivity and celebration were well-known in 1839, something which cannot seriously be attributed to the influence of the Oxford Movement. What is more, Jacobson's 1839 sermon also indicates the seriousness with which Christmas was observed in terms of divine service:

Do not suffer your rejoicings, or your preparation for your rejoicings, to keep you away from the services of the Church, either in the morning or afternoon ... Take care that you bear your part in the Services of the day, not as a mere matter of form, not as men-pleasers; but let your attendance at church be indeed a fruit of faith, let your prayers and praises be offered from your hearts fervently; and think not of gaining the goodwill of your fellow-creatures , but of doing the will of your Saviour. Pray with the spirit, and pray with the understanding also: sing with the spirit, and sing with the understanding also ... Bear your part in the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. This is your highest privilege as Christians; and no time can be more proper for availing yourselves of it than the day of your Saviour's birth. 

In other words, a serious and joyful observance of Christmas was very evident in the Georgian Church of England and in post-1833 non-Tractarian Old High tradition. It was this pre-Tractarian celebration of the festive season which Washington Irving evoked in his 1819 essay 'Christmas':

Of all the old festivals, however, that of Christmas awakens the strongest and most heartfelt associations. There is a tone of solemn and sacred feeling that blends with our conviviality, and lifts the spirit to a state of hallowed and elevated enjoyment. The services of the church about this season are extremely tender and inspiring. They dwell on the beautiful story of the origin of our faith, and the pastoral scenes that accompanied its announcement. They gradually increase in fervour and pathos during the season of Advent, until they break forth in full jubilee on the morning that brought peace and good-will to men ... It is a beautiful arrangement, also, derived from days of yore, that this festival, which commemorates the announcement of the religion of peace and love, has been made the season for gathering together of family connections, and drawing closer again those bands of kindred hearts which the cares and pleasures and sorrows of the world are continually operating to cast loose; of calling back the children of a family who have launched forth in life, and wandered widely asunder, once more to assemble about the paternal hearth, that rallying-place of the affections, there to grow young and loving again among the endearing mementoes of childhood.

It is significant that Irving's description of Christmas is echoed in that offered by surely the most significant and endearing Tractarian, John Keble. In a collection of Christmas sermons printed in 1875, we read of Keble referring to a well-established tradition of Christmas celebrations, with no sense whatsoever of the observance having changed in the life-time of his congregation due to Tractarian influences:

... the earthly comforts and refreshments which the time commonly brings with it; but it will be a fearful word bye and bye, if in looking back to past years, we shall have to confess, that we have kept so many of Christ's Birthdays, with hardly one serious thought of Christ, that we have enjoyed the carols, the holidays, the good cheer, the merry meetings, but never applied ourselves to repenting of our sins, nor to serious thoughts how we may learn to love Him, Who hath so freely and wonderfully loved us.

In another Christmas sermon in the collection, he likewise acknowledges how the festive season has been celebrated "as long as ever we can remember", and does so in terms which are almost indistinguishable from Irving's 1819 description:

Think of the sights and sounds, which were all around us last evening and this morning; the Christmas carols, sung in the darkness or the moonlight; the Christmas bells, ringing the very same peal, which perhaps we were used to listen to, as long as ever we can remember; the Christmas boughs decking the Church, and making it so different to the eye from all ordinary times; the peculiar joyous feeling with which families. assemble, perhaps after long separations; the way in which all seem to feel, that it is right, for the time, to forget all one's cares and sorrows, and give oneself to innocent and thankful gladness. Thus, the holy and happy hours in which our Lord graciously permits us to celebrate His Sacred Birth, have power more or less, to call up youthful and childlike feelings in every heart which is able to feel them at all. When Christmas comes, men return to the days of their youth.

What characterised the post-1833 Victorian celebration of Christmas was not a rupture brought about by the Tractarians supposedly 'saving' Christmas from the doldrums of Georgian Anglicanism. As it developed, the Victorian Christmas did, of course, see changes. These, however, owed very much more to the influence of Charles Dickens and Prince Albert, rather than to the Tractarians. What is more, the new customs were added to a vibrant existing tradition: they did not create a new cultural celebration of Christmas. The Oxford Movement did not 'save Christmas' precisely because Christmas was hale and hearty in the pre-1833 Church of England: Christmas did not need saving.

(The first illustration is of Mr Fezziwig's Ball, from the original 1843 edition of  Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The second is of Old Stephen's Church, Whitby - a beautiful Georgian church - decked in Christmas greenery, in Georgian fashion.)