A Jane Austen Christmas

by Carlo DeVito

October 13, 2015 · Cider Mill Press

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Every single year I see some shiny book at Barnes and Noble that looks historical and Christmassy and I pounce on it, deluded by the glossy stuff on the cover, only to find that it will not actually make me an expert on Customs of Christmases Past. This years’ epic fail is A Jane Austen Christmas: Celebrating the Season of Romance, Ribbons, and Mistletoe by Carlo Devito. It has a great concept, but not much actual content. The embossing is a trap, people.

This book has two huge problems that turned me into a raging hulk monster from hell. Here they are:

1. There’s actually not that much about Christmas. The majority of the book talks about Austen’s life. The framing of the book is potentially interesting (it explores the Christmas season in different years of Austen’s life) but also misleading (it’s about two-thirds biography, one-third Regency Christmas customs).

2. For a book that includes so much history, it’s very superficial. Obviously, Devito did research. There’s an extensive bibliography and a lot of quotes from various sources. But so many things involve gross speculation or things taken out of context that it’s difficult to believe any part of it.

Here’s an example of something taken out of context. From what I’ve heard, Austen was quite fond of her family, particularly when she was growing up. It’s plausible that the holiday season at the Stevenson Rectory was a loud but happy time. Here’s how Devito describes the atmosphere:

With everyone home for the holidays, the Stevenson Rectory must have been a bustling household. By all accounts, the home, with several ad hoc additions and wings, was a beehive of activity and chatter.

One can almost see it, as Jane later described in Mansfield Park, “Here, everybody was noisy, every voice was loud (excepting, perhaps, her mother’s, which resembled the soft monotony of Lady Bertram’s, only worn into fretfulness). Whatever was wanted was hallooed for, and the servants hallooed out their excuses from the kitchen. The doors were in constant banging, the stairs were never at rest, nothing was done without a clatter, nobody sat still, and nobody could command attention when they spoke.”

Look, I believe that the Rectory was probably pretty loud and chaotic when the entire Austen family was in it (Jane had seven siblings, after all). But the passage that Devito quotes is not one that describes a happy home. It’s from a moment in Mansfield Park in which Fanny visits her birth family and finds the home to be a shithole in which people are mean to each other. No one can hear anything because everyone interrupts everybody else, not out of cheerful enthusiasm but because of lack of consideration for the feelings of others. Even taking into account the fact that Fanny is an enormous prig, the home she’s describing is still one in which everyone – servants, kids, and parents – dislikes and is actively vile to everyone else. To suggest that this passage describes what life would have been like during a happy Austen Christmas means taking the quote completely out of context. I’m sorry, but if you are going to abuse Mansfield Park like that we can’t be friends.

The other problem is rampant speculation. Austen’s life has a “fill in the blanks” quality. Her letters are such that instances such as her romance with Tom Lefroy can be reasonably interpreted as a mad and tragic love affair or a mild crush that Austen wasn’t too torn up about (she certainly liked Lefroy, but in the same letter in which she tells her sister that the romance is over, she talks about housekeeping and the weather). Devito likes drama. If there’s even the slightest opportunity for him to describe a melodramatic emotion, he’s all over it, even if he has to make it up. Apparently many other biographers feel the same.

In ‘Part Four: 1802’, Devito describes Austen’s acceptance of a marriage proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither and her decision to revoke her acceptance the next morning. It’s plausible, in fact probable, that Jane spent an uncomfortable night coming to this decision, one that had a serious impact on the rest of her family. It’s probable that there was some drama. But I’m not sure we can make a flying leap from the bare facts to this:

But in her bed that night, Jane replayed the events of the day. Her head was spinning. What had she done? She loved Manydown, and Alethea and Catherine, but she did not love Harris.

“The night went by, and Jane stayed awake, like a heroine in a novel who cannot sleep because too many emotions are pressing in on her: ‘the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine’s portion…a pillow strewn with thorns and wet with tears,’ as she had written mockingly about herself,” wrote Tomalin.

“Presumably a night of agonized reflection had brought home the enormity of what she had done,” wrote McDonagh. Frightening “pictures of married life with Harris which sprang to mind, as the thought through the actualities, during the course of her eternal debate.”

It goes on like this for some time, with various experts discussing Jane’s presumed “tossing and turning” and agonized emotions. The people quoted here are Claire Tomalin and Oliver MacDonagh. They are reputable scholars, but that is just too much speculation (and melodrama) for me for a single page. We don’t know why Jane turned Harris down and we don’t know how she felt about it. The quote about the sleepless couch isn’t directly Austen making fun of herself. It’s from Northanger Abbey, although maybe Austen indicated somewhere that the quote refers or was inspired by her own emotions. I have a huge pet peeve regarding biographers who say a person “must have thought” something, and this entire chapter is basically Devito taking my pet peeve and feeding it until it grows to Hulk size and stomps the shit out of the entire Biography section of the bookstore.

The parts of the book that are actually about Christmas are interesting but so sparse. Here’s the gist:

Regency people loved Christmas (specifically, they loved the Twelve Days of Christmas, which involved a lot of partying). The festivities included bringing greenery into the house (but not Christmas trees) and eating a ton. The description of Yorkshire Pie is certainly edifying: it’s essentially turducken, with roasted mammals on the side, in an enormous piecrust. Then, as now, it was a time when everyone at boarding school was on vacation, and it involved a lot of visiting between friends and family members. People played a lot of games, like charades and snapdragon. I’m especially fond of a game called Bullet Pudding.

I know I’ve been harsh in this review, but I almost (and the operative word in this sentence is ‘almost’) feel the book was worth the cover price just so I could hear about bullet pudding. This description comes from a letter from Jane Austen’s niece, dated 1804:

I was surprised to hear that you did not know what a Bullet Pudding is, but as you don’t I will endeavor to describe it as follows:

You must have a large pewter dish filled with flour which you must pile up into a sort of a pudding with a peek at the top. You must then lay a bullet at top and everybody cuts a slice of it, and the person that is cutting it when it falls must poke about with their noses and chins till they find it and then take it out with their mouths of which makes them strange figures all covered with flour but the worst is that you must not laugh for fear of the flour getting up your nose and mouth and choking you. You must not use your hands in taking the bullet out.

It’s not any weirder than paint ball, I guess.

Here’s what was not ‘in’ during the Regency:

• Santa Claus
• Christmas Trees
• Christmas Cards
• Giving lots and lots of presents (the kids might get one or two as might the head of the house, but it wasn’t a gift-giving occasion on the Victorian scale).
• Celebrating Christmas Day as the highlight of the season.

The biggest celebration would have been on Twelfth Night (Epiphany). According to Devito, there was some disagreement about whether one should count so that Epiphany fell on January 5th or January 6th, but either way, that was a bigger deal than December 25th.

I like the concept behind this book. The idea of taking a number of important Christmases in Austen’s life, and structuring the exploration of Christmas traditions around those events, is a great idea. But I’m not sold on this as a reliable source of biography or history. I also don’t feel like I know much more about Regency Christmases than I did before I picked the book up. Granted I did come to the book as someone who knows a little Regency history, and I think this book is aimed at people who are just starting to dip a toe into these waters. But still, for a book that cost $16.99 with a member discount at Barnes and Noble, there’s not a ton of Christmas stuff in here.