Prince Albert is usually credited with introducing the German tradition of the Christmas tree in Britain after his marriage to the young Queen Victoria in 1840. So I was intrigued to find a short reference to a decorated tree several years earlier, in 1832, in the diary of Lady Mary Smith of Suttons in Stapleford Tawney.
Mary, born in 1800, was the daughter of wealthy banker William Gosling. She married Sir Charles Joshua Smith in 1826 and moved to the Smith family’s country seat at Suttons. They had three children in fairly quick succession but in January 1831, when the youngest was just five months old, Charles fell ill and died. He was only 30.
Like many of their class at the time, both Mary and Charles kept diaries, some of which are at the Essex Record Office. They are only pocket diaries, so entries are all too brief and factual. At least Mary’s writing is fairly legible, unlike her husband’s.
She records visits to and from other families of her class in Essex and London, her frequent worries about her children’s health and her son’s education, which clergyman preached the sermon at Tawney church, the weather, the garden, family births and deaths. National events occasionally appear, like the death of King George IV in 1830, and the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840. In February 1839 she and her sister went to the House of Lords to hear the Queen’s speech at the opening of Parliament.
But London gave Mary headaches, and she was always happier at home in Stapleford Tawney with her beloved children. On Friday November 16th 1832, Mary wrote about a treat she had planned for them:
The children had a tea party consisting of coffee and 33 dishes filled with various kinds of cakes and sweetmeats, afterwards they went into an adjoining room where there was a green tree heavy with different little presents, it made them very happy and they thoroughly enjoyed it. In the evening we went to hear the children practice singing with the organ.
As always, brief entries tend to raise further questions. Thirty-three dishes sounds far too much for three children aged from two to five, and the singing practice was unlikely to be very harmonious at their age, so older visiting children must have been present too. Fuelling them all with caffeine and sugary foods apparently caused no special problems. Giving coffee to young children is nowadays quite common in a few countries but it is interesting to see that it was a treat in England in the 1800s.
Lady Smith’s [ever]green tree laden with little presents sounds very much like a Christmas tree, despite it being mid-November. So is the story of Prince Albert a myth? Not exactly, but the tradition first came to England much earlier with ‘good Queen Charlotte’, the German wife of George III, who set up the first known English tree at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, in December 1800. Before that, she had followed the practice of her home region of bringing in a single bough of box or yew, putting it in a pot on the dining table and dressing it herself. In 1800, however, the Queen planned to hold a large Christmas party for the children of all the principal families in Windsor. As a special treat, she decided that instead of the customary yew bough, she would pot up an entire yew tree, cover it with baubles and fruit, load it with presents and stand it in the middle of the drawing-room floor at Queen’s Lodge. It caused a sensation at court, and the news soon spread.
Christmas trees then became all the rage in English upper-class circles, where they formed the focal point at countless children’s gatherings. As in Germany, any handy evergreen tree might be uprooted for the purpose; yews, box trees, pines or firs. But they were invariably candle-lit, adorned with trinkets and surrounded by piles of presents. Smaller trees or boughs placed on table tops usually also had either a Noah’s Ark or a model farm and numerous brightly-painted wooden animals set out among the presents beneath the branches to add extra child-appeal to the scene.
But the tradition was restricted to the upper classes. Middle and lower classes had the yule log and the mistletoe garland as their main Christmas decorations, as described by Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers.
There are no trees either in his Christmas Festivities (1835) or A Christmas Carol (1843). But in 1845 The Illustrated London News started to give detailed descriptions of Victoria and Albert’s family Christmas. In December 1848 they published a 16-page supplement including a woodcut entitled “Christmas Tree at Windsor Castle”. The illustration depicted Victoria, Albert, their five children and a governess gathered around a table-top evergreen, its branches cut into tiers, adorned with sweets and ornaments, illuminated by candles and topped by an angel. Unwrapped presents—dolls, mounted cavalrymen and a figure in a horse-drawn chariot—surround the base.
Once again it caused a sensation, but this time it was the ordinary public who wanted to copy the Queen. Dickens publicised the fashion in A Christmas Tree, published in 1850. From then on, Christmas trees appeared in every household and the great “British” tradition was born.
But Lady Smith never saw all this. Like her husband’s, her life was tragically short. Only ten years after the tea party treat, when the children were in their early teens, she wrote in her diary that she had a bad headache and the entries stop. On 3rd July 1842, she died, her last thoughts no doubt being for her beloved children.