Victorians! discussion

Please use this thread to post any background and resources. Links are encouraged.

I know I'm probably opening this a bit early but I'm nervous about being late. :o

Renee wrote: "Please use this thread to post any background and resources. Links are encouraged.

I know I'm probably opening this a bit early but I'm nervous about being late. :o"

You are just fine :). I always like to post the schedule and background threads ahead of time to give everybody time to plan.

December 1st!!
I'll open the story threads as soon as I can get to a real computer. :)

I read somewhere that Trollope had a problem with Christmas at Thompson Hall because he was expected to come up with a Christmas story but had no ideas he thought he could use.

Christmas stories were very big in Victorian times. Many authors, including Dickens and Trollope to mention only two of many, put out Christmas stories.

In The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction John Sutherland has an entry on Christmas Books, pointing out that "The 'Annual' and Christmas 'Giftbook' industries were started up in the 1820s...By the 1860s, publishers like Routledge were releasing a whole range of fiction for the Christmas reader. And in his journals Household Words and All the Year Round Dickens pioneered special Christmas issues featuring self-contained tales..."

That's really interesting. I guessed that there was a reason for so many holiday themed stories from the later 1800s. The pressure must have been pretty steep to produce Christmas stories every year.

I guess the modern equivalent would be mass market paperbacks in the mystery and romance genres. They often seem to have holiday themed collections for December and February.