Christmas Cards - the first card

The Lord of Misrule's Christmas Guide
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

The First Christmas Card
Cole and Horsley, 1843

The First Christmas Card - Cole and Horsley, 1843

This is the very first commercially produced Christmas card drawn in 1843 by John Calcott Horsley of Torquay, England at the request of Sir Henry Cole.

The card depicts a family toasting Christmas flanked on one side by poor people being fed, and on the other side by poor people being clothed: the moral being that at a time of celebration and rejoicing, the affluent should remember their follow men and help to provide them with common wants and needs.

The card bore the inscription: “A Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year To You” – words which have become commonplace on cards today.

THE CARD'S MORAL:

The moral of the card (about helping the poor and needy) is reflected in this extract from Dickens' novel 'A Christmas Carol, written in the same year that Calcott's card was drawn. Calcott had apparently read the novel and was inspired by it. Here, speaking to the second of the spirits, the ghost of Christmas present, Scrooge spies that the spirit is harbouring two 'creatures' beneath its coat:

'Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,' said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, 'but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?'

'It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,' was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. 'Look here.'

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

'Oh, Man! look here! Look, look, down here!' exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

'Spirit, are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. 'Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And abide the end!'

This same sentiment is repeated by Scrooge's nephew in his declamation of Christmas:

'There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,' returned the nephew. 'Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round ... as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!'