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- [00:01]
American Express
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- [00:32]
Genevieve Manion
Hello and welcome to My Victorian Nightmare. I'm your host Genevieve Manion, and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories, and otherwise spooky events from the Victorian era. Because to me there's just something especially intriguing, creepy, and oddly comforting about horror and mayhem from the 19th century.
- [00:59]
Melena
So listener discretion is advised. Hello friends, and welcome to this, my 22nd episode.
- [01:15]
Genevieve Manion
I have some weird, wonderful, and downright irresponsible Victorian Christmas traditions for you today that I think you will very much enjoy. And I'm feeling considerably less gross than I was last week, thank you very much for asking. I was honestly shocked that I was able to get that episode done in time. Apart from barely being able to breathe, my Brooklyn building pipes are going insane. It's like someone taking a monkey wrench to them all hours of the day and night. So trying to record myself between clanks is hilarious. I think I recorded the line grab yourself a hot chocolate or lovely cup of tea about 700 times, but mostly because I couldn't stop laughing that I couldn't get that line out without sounding like a sick toddler. And even if I could, my apartment just sounded like a monkey wrench murder scene. It's my limitations, you see, that challenge me to bring you the very best nightmare fuel for your Monday morning commute. And I do hope that I am successful in this endeavor. But before we begin, a little haunted housekeeping. As always, thank you thank you for rating the podcast on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I'm at 2.6005 stars on Spotify. If I get to 3005 stars, I'm just going to cry my eyes out. If you rate the podcast on Spotify and tell me in the comments that you did, I will personally thank you. You can only comment in the app on your phone. By the way. I won't just like your comment, I like every comment that you guys send me. But those ratings are really extra special and they mean a lot to me because they help my show grow. So again, thank you if you have already done so and thank you in advance if you had yet to and speaking of comments, thank you for your comments. I very much appreciated the support that I received for my neurodivergent diagnosis that I mentioned on last week's episode. Thank you for that. I love that someone was like what's your favorite number and letter and what are their colors? It's one, by the way. It's the most lovely golden yellow. It is so nice to connect with you fellow weirdos. So please leave me comments on Spotify episodes on Instagram at myvictorianightmare. Email me@myvictorianightmaremail.com grab yourself some lovely merch at the merch store@myvictorianightmare.com where you will also find a link to my Patreon if if you want to support the show and receive it ad free. Thank you everyone that joined this week. That means so much to me. And oh my God, I discovered literally today that I guess Patreon asks why you support the show and it hides those comments in like a place that where I would never think to look like insights or something. I looked today and my heart thank you Mossy Peggy T. Who signed up a whole month ago and I didn't even see your kind note until now. Thank you David, who signed up six days.
- [04:20]
Melena
Melena.
- [04:21]
Genevieve Manion
I think that's how you pronounce it. Melaina M. From Gothenburg. She spelled it with all caps. Gothenburg, Sweden. And Jennifer B. From a full three weeks ago. All of your reasons that you wrote for supporting the show literally made me cry. So thank you so, so much. Okay, before we get to the Victorian Christmas terror, something occurred to me recently. Folks often tell me that they find the sound of my voice soothing and comforting, and those are always the loveliest comments. Although I personally think I sound like Rick Moranis. I don't know if it's like a voice dysmorphia thing or what, but I think there may be something else going on here. The other day, someone compared my voice to Glinda, the Good Witch of the north. And I think, if only on a deeply psychological level, what you may be hearing when I speak to you are some shimmering notes that indeed belonged to my dear great cousin Billy Burke. Glinda, the Good Witch of the north, was my great grandmother's first cousin, and she's been making headlines lately. I'm sure the Wicked movie is contributing to that, but Billy Burke, who was born in 1884, not many people realize she was 55 when the wizard of Oz was made, is being rumored, and it's important to mention that this is just a rumor to have had an affair with Dorothy Asner. She was a trailblazing, openly gay director of silent films in the 30s. She directed Ms. Burke in a 1933 romantic drama called Christopher Strong, and they even began living together in 1936. Again, resources for this info, apart from the fact that they did indeed live together, are a bit murky, but it would be nice to think an icon that has been so beloved by the gay community may have been gay herself. Or somewhat, as it were. She was married to Florence Ziegfeld Jr. For almost 20 years until his death in 1932. He and Billy Burke are actually buried beside one another in the Conesco Cemetery in New York. I should take a trip there to say hello. Anyway, I just thought I would confirm that you may indeed be hearing vocal fragments of a very familiar and kindly Victorian born ghost when you listen to this podcast. My main references for today's episode are a history.com article from Elizabeth Yugo, a historycollection.com article, and a BBC.com article by Bethan Bell. All of these in my other references can be found in the show Notes let's begin. As mentioned, today is all about Victorian Christmas traditions, but more specifically I'm going to be focusing primarily on English Victorian traditions, which were way more violent and spooky than American Victorian Christmas traditions. And I'll also talk about why, although it won't be all Christmas cards with boiling children on them or fire torture Christmas games, we'll discuss some really lovely and charming traditions as well. The Victorian age, that being the years during Queen Victoria's reign, 1837 to 1901 saw the birth of Christmas as we know it today. More or less a joyous time for giving gifts, Christmas trees, hanging parasitic greenery like mistletoe, and enjoying large bird centered dinners with family and friends. Unlike today's more modern traditions of say, sending family photos to hang on refrigerators, dressing our dogs in Christmas sweaters, photocopying your bare bottom at your office Christmas party, and watching Die Hard. Many Victorian traditions were far more focused on death, chaos and scaring the wits out of each other. In the episode before last, I kept with Victorian tradition and read you a spooky ghost story called the Signal man by Charles Dickens. It was a long standing tradition to tell your family and friends spooky ghost stories around dark fireplaces at Christmas, and until the end of the year in January, it's difficult to trace the exact time or even reason why this became A tradition. But that's likely because the practice predated written history. It was likely an oral tradition that began in pre Christian Europe. The season of the winter solstice was always a season of change, reflection. A dark time where the veil between the living and the dead was considered most thin. Not to mention, it gave folks something to do on long cold winter's nights where you didn't want to roam too far from the fire where everyone was gathered. It was specifically in the Victorian era that telling ghost stories during the Christmas season went from a humble tradition to big business. Thanks to the steam powered printing press now available thanks to the industrial revolution, ghost stories by beloved authors and like not just your Uncle Jimmy became widely available. More folks were becoming literate, the cost of printing was cheap, and newspapers could easily fill their pages with creepy little tales for Christmas Eve. Fantastic writers like Elizabeth Gaskell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens worked busily all through the fall to cook up spooky tales just in time to print for Christmas. And certainly the horror of day to day living as a Victorian person also helped to drive interest in these stor. Victorians lived with death in ways that we simply cannot imagine. Rampant tuberculosis, syphilis, cholera, smallpox, typhoid, dying from childbirth, poisoning from arsenic filled cosmetics, just to name a very, very few ways that people commonly perished in this era. It's really beautiful to me that rather than resist and try to ignore this reality, they very much leaned into it in virtually all aspects of society. And Christmas traditions were no exception. Many believed that the spirits of their many dead neighbors, friends and family members were all around them. So this ghost story tradition had much less to do with the birth of Christ than a more ancient but very relevant tradition of celebrating the dead. Ghost storytelling was supposed to make you laugh and warm your heart just as much as give you night terrors. And I find that just enchanting. And it wasn't just one particular class of folks who would practice this tradition. Christmas ghost storytelling transcended class. The stories could be purchased cheaply in periodicals or in beautiful expensive books that would be shown off on coffee tables decorated with holly. A broad audience was represented in these stories, from poor Bob Cratchit to stories of haunted manor houses. Often stories were about class divides. Like the most famous example, A Christmas Carol. There's a fun short film on shudder that's part of a series called the Haunted Season. The first episode is called to fire you, come at Last. It wasn't written in the Victorian era, but it's written in A similar style. It's about four men carrying a wealthy man's son's coffin to a burial site. One of the four men is that wealthy father, one man is a drunken beggar, and the two others are more middle class. But the interactions between them as they carry this coffin all through the night trying to avoid a murderous ghost on the road, is very reminiscent of common Christmas ghost stories of the 19th century. But this multi class ghost story theme was very much popularized by Dickens, who was arguably the most famous writer in the world after A Christmas Carol, which was incredibly popular in both Victorian England and all around the world. So writers were keen to use that framework for their own stories, including his themes of forgiveness and family reunions at Christmas time. Even still, stories that aren't even about ghosts, like Home Alone, are very much centered in these themes. I never not cry when the old man who lives next door is seen reuniting with his son as he waves to McCullochle. I can't even talk about it. Okay, I'm gonna go get myself a cup of coffee and just pull it together. Be back in a second. Even though A Christmas Carol was very popular in the United States, Christmas ghost storytelling never really caught on. This was due to American resistance of old World superstitions and attitudes towards magic. This was a time of great migration to the States from countries all over, especially Europe, and there was a tendency to want to leave old world traditions behind, especially ones that seemed like part of the past and to create new ones in the spirit of forging a new American identity. That being said, Americans certainly didn't reject all supernatural traditions. They very much embraced Halloween as the spooky season thanks to the Irish and Scottish, who brought their fabulous spirit centric pagan traditions to our shores and had a much easier time solidifying them into our culture in this era. Why did we embrace these autumn spooky traditions instead of winter ones? It's tough to say, other than pumpkin carving and dressing like a bat is really fun and hard to resist. Okay, let's talk about a few other interesting Victorian Christmas traditions. It was the Victorians who popularized Christmas card sending. This was due to the fact that Victorians loved postcards just in general. Formal written invitations, ornate funeral cards, cabinet cards with naughty photos on them, for example. And a parliamentary act passed in 1840 that fixed the price of all postal correspondence to one penny. So it was very affordable to send a well wish or a very disturbing, bizarre and inappropriate Christmas card to a loved one. And I will certainly add some of these to today's episodes post on Instagram. Not all Christmas cards were insane, though. Some were lovely, picturesque winter scenes. Happy children around Christmas trees, cherubs nativ. But some included, for example, children being force fed wine, children being boiled alive in teapots, frogs murdering other frogs with knives. There's one that's literally just a dead robin with an inscription that says, but peaceful was the night where in the Prince of Light his reign of peace upon the earth began. It also has an inscription that says sweet messages of calm, decay and peace divine comme decay. That would make a great band name. Bird imagery in general was a big part of Victorian Christmases. Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, was originally called Wren Day in Ireland and the Isle of Man. They would hunt and kill these little birds, tie them to a stick and parade them around the streets, as it was believed this would bring people good luck. I also read that some would also bury them in tiny little coffins after killing them, which is very sweet. Luckily, this actually largely stopped in the 19th century, but the dead bird imagery remained. They also loved using insects, onions on their Christmas card designs, specifically insects fighting, playing games or dancing, sometimes with frogs. Onions were used in the designs of like, onion people delivering season's greetings. Lots of dogs. Dogs with guns. I mean, literally, the dogs are holding guns. Monkeys painting dogs. There's a weird one I'll put on the Instagram of a monkey painting a dog that's like modeling for him while another monkey menacingly looks on from the background. The caption on that one is compliments of the season. Many are just eerily menacing. One that looks like maybe a Christmas pudding with a happy face with knives stuck in it, balancing a glass of milk on its head, and also has legs made of wine bottles. Why were these so insane looking? Well, most of them were just meant to be funny. And Victorians had notoriously black senses of humor. I found some Victorian jokes from a newspaper. Most of them were terrible, but a lot of them sounded like this one. Why is a dog like a tree? Because they both lose their bark once they're dead. Jesus. Okay, terrible. There was also not, like we have today, a homogenizing force like mass media to code exactly what Christmas should look like for society as a whole. The first Christmas card in England was sent in 1843, and literally from then till the Edwardian era, anything went. Sometimes Santa would be dressed as a monk or an elf or a pagan forest spirit. Sometimes he'd be holding presents, sometimes he'd just look like a psychopath shoving children into bags. But There were other themes, the ones I listed before that had absolutely nothing to do with Christmas themes of any kind and would include goats frightening children, bloody battles between ants, haunted churchyards, and choir boys with tuberculosis. Part of this was because from 1860 to 1900 there was a printing boom and new technology that could create beautiful colors and detailed designs. With die cutting and chromiolithography offering a massive scope of shapes and colors. These really fun looking little pieces of art were easy and cheap to create. This wild creativity actually kind of reminds me of the 80s and the early 90s where artists at MTV and Nickelodeon and like Paul Rubens had free creative reign to do whatever they wanted. With all of the quickly developing visual technology and the birth of nonlinear editing and computer animation which made everything go wild. I used to work with an old MTV guy and he said those days were full of pounds of blow and nobody saying no. These Christmas card artists may not have had the pounds of blow, but they certainly had nobody saying no. And a lot of people said yes to some designs that will make your skin crawl. And it really does make sense. It really does. Why these were so over the top. In an era where folks loved the macabre in every aspect of their lives, you probably had to be extra over the top to really stand out. A few other strange or just different traditions. Last week I mentioned how it was entirely untrue that Victorian era prisoners were served so much lobster that laws had to be passed to limit the amount that they were forced to eat. This never happened. However, the poor ate some seafood that nowadays is considered quite fancy. Oysters were a common Christmas dinner for the poor who couldn't afford a goose or the extra fancy beef or turkey. They were so popular mostly with the poor of London and the south of England, so much so that they were coined the poor man's protein. The lower to middle class maybe could afford a bit of beef, but they would often bake beef and oyster pies with just more oysters than beef. For a fairly poor family like that of Bob Cratchitz, he would likely have to set aside a whole week's wages to afford the goose, potatoes, oranges, dried fruit, ingredients for pudding, chestnuts, and the fancy little cocktail that he mixes up for the whole family on Christmas day. It was also common for the poor to not have an oven big enough for a goose or not even an oven at all. So they would bring their Christmas birds to be cooked at nearby bakeries and cart them home through the cold and snow. Be grateful that your Christmas meals are Served hot. Many were not in the Victorian era, especially for the poor. Some Victorian recipes served on Christmas also sounded really wacky, like turtle soup, calf's feet jelly, and something called potato snow. That doesn't sound bad. I just couldn't find out exactly what that was. I see recipes for potato snow online, which is essentially like grated cooked potatoes. Maybe Victorian potato snow was boiled potatoes pushed through like a sieve instead of mashed. Um, yeah, it's a little unclear. So how about this? Let's go find out. Come this way. I want to show you what a very fancy Victorian dinner spread entailed. We have been invited to dinner at the home of Lady Harriet Mordaunt, Scottish wife of an English baronet in Warwickshire. This is a 72 bedroom home that looks like Hogwarts. It's gorgeous. And not that I like to gossip, but she's currently having an affair with both Viscount Laurie Cole and Queen Victoria's son, Albert, the Prince of Wales. She will later be sent to an asylum because she will suffer from hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. But because of her wealth, she will at least be able to receive private asylum care in a lovely facility. All that said, look at this table. We see a white lace tablecloth, holly decorated fine china, A gorgeous, gorgeous centerpiece made with greenery, holly and sugar plums. They've even strung some fresh ivy across the large candelabras. Okay, have a seat. But wait, don't. The gentleman's gonna pull your seat out for you there. There you go. Thank you, sir. Okay, just remember, it's from the outside in when it comes to silverware. And this is what they're bringing out. Rich brown soup. This is a hearty soup made with beef broth, root vegetables and Madeira wine. Rich white soup. This is a creamy chicken based soup which includes almonds. Ah, look. Yep, there's the potato snow. So, yeah, it is. It just sort of looks like a fluffy, grated cooked potato. Okay, I see two dishes of sheepshead fish. This is a fish that has like a full mouth of what looks like sheep's teeth. Google it, you'll laugh out loud. Trout and cream of trout. There's a roasted ham, smoked tongue. A few. You roast ducks with cranberry jelly. Sweetbreads with oysters. Sweetbreads, by the way, are neither sweet nor bread. It's a lamb pancreas, white fricassee, brown fricassee. This is a chicken fricassee with a white wine sauce and another with a brown gravy. And for dessert, they will bring us Colombian Pudding, orange tarts, lemon tarts, charlotte polonaise. This is a cake using ladyfingers as the base with a cream anglaise. They'll have gooseberry water ice, current water ice, almond ice cream, and calves feet jelly, which is essentially jello made by boiling calves feet and extracting the gelatin. Okay. While we wait for everything to be placed.
- [23:01]
American Express
Champagne, madame?
- [23:02]
Genevieve Manion
Oh, yes, thank you. Thank you very much. Let me tell you a little something about some of the treacherous Christmas parlor games that we will likely be expected to engage in in about an hour or so. It can be argued that families Christmas time is a lot less intimate today than in days of yore with distracting smartphones, addictive lifetime Christmas movies, video games, and commercialization just in general. Victorian togetherness seems so much more lovely until you find out what they were doing with each other. They were often playing life threatening games, or at least ones that could result in a broken ankle or scorched fingers. For example, a popular Christmas party parlor game was called Snapdragon. You would fill a shallow bowl with raisins, cover them with brandy, and then light them on fire. You'd wait for the flame to be reduced to a lovely blue, and you and your friends and family would all encircle the bowl, allowing the light of the flames to eerily underlight your faces, making you appear as spooky demons or dragons. Then you'd take turns grabbing a flaming raisin as fast as you could and eating it before it could incinerate your fingers or your tongue. Sounds like a great time. They would also play a game called Blind Man's Bluff. This game predates the Victorian era by about 2, 300 years. Simply, one person is blindfolded, then expected to blindly catch scrambling party guests in the room. It was often common for people to throw things in the way to trip this person. And in the Middle Ages when this game was played, it was also common to clothesline them or bash them over the head with something to escape their capture. If you caught someone and lived to tell the tale, that person would now have to wear the blindfold and potentially break their necks trying to catch someone else. Not all Victorian Christmas parlor games were violent, though. Charades and Truth or Dare were also common ones. But Victorians were perhaps more inventive about the penalties in these games. For example, if you lost at charades, you may have to stand still and allow the guests to pose your limbs in an embarrassing pose and hold it for a certain amount of time. You may also have to come up with a dozen compliments for ladies in the room without using the letter L, Cute things like that, or probably also terrifying. I just couldn't find more examples. Another fun Christmas tradition was finding the Christmas pickle. This was a green glass Christmas ornament that would be hidden in a Christmas tree and if you were lucky enough to find it, you would be treated to something like a special present or you would be allowed to open your presents first. The origin of this tradition has been described as everything from a medieval story about two Spanish boys coming upon an insane person who stuffs them in pickle barrels, but who gets saved by St Nicholas himself, to a captured starving German soldier who begged a guard for a pickle on Christmas Eve, and because the guard was so merciful, he gave him the pickle and he survived, thereby starting the tradition of hanging a pickle from his Christmas tree after he was released. There's an even darker iteration of the Spanish boy story, which is actually about three Spanish boys who for some reason lived in St. Nicholas's hometown of Turkey, where they were kidnapped by a local storekeeper who chops them up into pieces with an axe and stores their body parts in a pickle barrel. When St. Nicholas finds out about this, with the power of prayer, he miraculously revives the chopped up boys in pickle barrels and they escape fully intact, but no doubt stinking of dill and vinegar. Which one of these stories is true? Probably none. It's most likely that a salesman at the Woolworths store in the 1800s cooked up the story to promote German glass ornaments. Regardless, I kind of love it. I gotta get one of those pickles. Okay, here's a few more fun traditions. A schoolboy Christmas tradition was of course throwing snowballs at passersby, but also shooting peas at them. Young men returning home from long semesters for Christmas would fire peas out of their carriages as folks passed by little goobers. Farmers would salute their apple trees and pour the traditionally festive apple based alcoholic punch called wassail over the roots of trees to encourage a good harvest year and to ward off evil spirits, if any. This was referred to as wassailing and you may be familiar with the Christmas song Here We Come a Wassailing. The lyrics are Here we come a wassailing among the leaves so green Here we come a wandering so far to be seen Love and joy come to you and to you your wassail too and God bless you and send you a happy new year, you know, etc. There are a number of other lyrics, but don't those just sound nice? It was Also common to attend a Christmas Day cattle show. The Smithfield Club Cattle show in London, which began as far back as 1799, was a delightful tradition for many Victorians, who loved to admire the enormous bulls and oxen at the show. And finally, it was also common to attend a Christmas Day scientific lecture. Scientist Michael Faraday inaugurated this tradition in 1825 that still continues to this day. In the Victorian period, these lectures were not tedious, boring lectures, but were fantastical and spectacular. For example, the Adelaide Gallery paired performances with Handel's Messiah with electrical displays, giant projections of microscopic organisms, and even demonstrations of laughing gas for some humorous entertainment. Before they wheel out dessert, I thought I would read to you a sweet.
- [28:44]
Melena
Spooky little ghost poem to give you some yuletide goosebumps. This one is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and it is called Haunted Houses. All houses where men have lived and died are haunted houses. Through the open doors the harmless phantoms on their errands glide with feet that make no sound upon the floors. We meet them at the doorway, on the stair, along the passages they come and go, Impalpable impressions on the air, a sense of something moving to and fro. There are more guests at the table than hosts invited. The illuminated hall is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts, as silent as the pictures on the wall. The stranger at my fireside cannot see the forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear, but he perceives what is while unto me all that has been is visible and clear. We have no title deeds to house or lands. Owners and occupants of earlier dates, from graves forgotten, stretch their dusty hands and hold in mortem still their old states. The spirit world around this world of sense floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere wafts through these earthly mists and vapors dense a vital breath of more ethereal air. Our little lives are held in equipoise by opposite attractions and desires. The struggle of the instinct that enjoys and the more noble instinct that aspires. These perturbations, this perpetual jar of earthly wants and aspir aspirations high, come from the influence of an unseen star, an undiscovered planet in our sky. And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud throws o'er the sea a floating bridge of light, across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd into the realm of mystery and night, so from the world of spirits there descend a bridge of light, connecting it with this or whose unsteady floor that sways and bends wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.
- [31:16]
Genevieve Manion
Oh, I hope you enjoy that. Okay, they're bringing the dessert out, so let's enjoy some of that calf's feet jelly and keep the Yuletide gay. If you enjoy this podcast and would like to hear more, please rate the podcast in Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and share the show with your spooky friends.
- [31:37]
Melena
Be kind to yourselves and I will.
- [31:41]
Genevieve Manion
See you in your nightmares.