Victorian Christmas week: part six - Boxing Day

Today is, of course, Boxing Day - the day when Britons wake up with severe indigestion and/or hangovers, as they have been doing for centuries. The origins of the term 'Boxing Day' can certainly be traced back much further than the Victorians, although we are not sure exactly when it came about. One explanation connects Boxing Day to the Roman festival of Saturnalia, when presents were exchanged (sound familiar?), and servants rewarded for their year's work. Alternately, parallels can be drawn with the breaking open of church alms boxes on 26th December and the distribution of their contents to poor parishioners. Or perhaps the latter was influenced by the former. In any case, the idea of Boxing Day appears to have grown up around the idea of charity and giving.

In the Victorian era, household servants, having spent Christmas Day working particularly hard to make their employer family's Xmas go without a hitch, would get a little perk of their own in the form of a gift of money - a Christmas bonus of sorts - although there are reports of particularly stingy people who, instead of money, gave their servants...a new work uniform to be worn in the next year. Wow, thanks. For me?

A maid lighting the fire

People in other professions, such as chimney sweeps, crossing sweepers (who swept the dusts from the roads to prevent the trailing hems of middle- and upper-class women's dresses from being dirtied as they crossed), dustmen and lamplighters (the men who lit each gas-powered streetlamp individually as dusk fell) were also rewarded with bonuses on Boxing Day.

A lamplighter. Some, like this guy, climbed a ladder to light each streetlamp, while others had a long pole to reach up.

Chambers Dictionary said of the practice of Boxing Day tipping:

Christmas-boxes are still regularly expected by the postman, the lamplighter, the dustman, and generally by all those functionaries who render services to the public at large...the 26th of December being the customary day for the claimants of Christmas-boxes going their rounds...has received popularly the designation of Boxing-day.

A pair of dustmen with their cart

Naturally, the satirical magazine Punch took a rather different view, attacking the issue with its typically bitter humour:

The Christmas Box system is, in fact, a piece of horribly internecine strife between cooks and butchers' boys, lamplighters, beadles and all classes of society, tugging at each other's pockets for the sake of what can be got under the pretext of seasonal benevolence.

Easily said if you could afford to buy (or were even able to read) Punch, I suppose.

Boxing Day also marked the beginning of pantomime season in Victorian theatres. This once again contradicts the idea of the Victorians as a dour and humourless people who never did anything to enjoy themselves: granted, the standard of comedy offered at a Victorian panto, being about the same as one can find in the same setting today, was not high; but all the same, the Victorians seem to have enjoyed themselves. At least, those who attended them did. The cheesy humour didn't appeal to everyone, any more than it does today, and there are scathing accounts of pantomime acting and jokes dating from the period. But still the panto persisted, and as Boxing Day approached Victorian newspapers would carry advertisements for forthcoming productions. Mercifully, there don't appear to have been any has-been celebrities involved, which is more than can be said today.

Illustration from a newspaper advertisement for a production of The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe