The Victorian art of correspondence - by guest author Alison D Stegert with resources

 

Mobile phones, FaceTime, WhatsApp, social media… It’s hard to imagine the world without instant communications, but if you ask any older person, they will tell you that staying in touch has not always been as easy as it is today.

The Dawn of Modern Communication

Let’s go back 150 years to the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria. The 1800s was a century of change and innovation. Industry, transportation, commerce, and medicine all saw rapid advances, and so did communications. How did people stay in touch in the late 1800s?

A new communication system was Samuel Morse’s telegraph, a system of electrical pulses sent along a wire. The pulses – dots and dashes – formed an alphabet called Morse code. A specially trained telegraphist tapped the message onto the wire and, at the other end of the wire seconds later, another telegraphist transcribed the message. The number of words determined the price of the telegram, so they were often abruptly short. Delivery of the message cost an additional fee. People found telegrams expensive and inconvenient, so they didn’t take off as a common means of staying in touch in the 1800s.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s freshly patented telephone entered the communications scene. This new-fangled device allowed for instant, real-time, person-to-person communication across a distance, but it took another fifty years for telephones to become common in homes, changing forever how people communicated.

 

Sample of Copperplate By George Bickham - The Universal Penman,
published by Dover Publications, Inc., New York, Public Domain

The Heyday of Handwritten Letters

So how did nineteenth century people stay connected? They sent handwritten letters through the post. What we call “snail mail” today was then surprisingly quick – more like “hare mail.” Mid-century reforms enhanced the British postal system, making it cheap, fast, and very convenient.

Up until the late 1830s, a letter was paid for by the person it was addressed to, and the pricing wasn’t easy to calculate. In 1840, a teacher named Rowland Hill suggested big changes to the postal system: the pricing should be simplified, and the sender of the letter should pay. He invented prepaid, adhesive postal stamps called Penny Blacks, which cost one penny for a letter under half an ounce sent anywhere in the United Kingdom. Pillar boxes were introduced, making letter sending very convenient, and trains shortened delivery time across distances. From 1897, mail was delivered to houses, not just to local post offices.

 

Penny Black sheet of six (wikipedia public domain image) 

These reforms started a correspondence craze. By the turn of the twentieth century, the General Post Office handled an estimated 2,740 million pieces of mail – a ginormous increase from the 76 million pieces of mail sent back when Penny Blacks were first introduced.

The mail was delivered between six and twelve times a day in big cities like London. That’s a lot of postie visits! It meant someone could post a letter to someone across town, and they could receive it about two hours a later. There was enough time for them to post a reply, and have it delivered in the same day. It’s not instant messaging, but it’s pretty good!

International mail was a different story back then. For example, letters sent to India or Australia in the early 1800s could take months. Imagine getting important news from home – like a job offer, a birth or a death – late by a few months!

This Victorian love of letter-writing spawned things like illustrated greeting cards, post cards, and Christmas cards. Beautiful handwriting was prized, and a lovely, loopy script called Copperplate was popular. Victorian pens were fitted with metal nibs that were dipped in bottled ink.

Queen of the Handwritten Word

Queen among the letter writers of the Victorian Era is Queen Victoria herself. No one knows exactly how many letters she wrote in her lifetime, but some of her surviving correspondence has been bound into over sixty volumes (books). Between her mountain of mail and her daily journaling, it is estimated that she wrote an average of 2,500 words a day – or approximately 60 million words in her time as queen. That’s a lot of letter paper and ink!

 

Queen Victoria Writing with Abdul Arim (Wikipedia. Public domain)

Queen Victoria is the HM in Her Majesty’s League of Remarkable Young Ladies, a book set in 1889 London and starring Winifred Weatherby, a 14-year-old wannabe inventor. The story includes lots of different forms of correspondence: calling cards, letters, telegrams, Morse code, news articles, and something called a telautogram.

 

Telautograph (National Museum of American History;
Smithsonian Institution, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Telautograph was an extraordinary but forgotten Victorian invention that reproduced and transmitted copies of handwriting and line drawings across telegraph wires. Invented in 1889, Elisha Gray’s Telautograph was an early forerunner of the 1980s fax machine. Read the book to discover if this amazing invention helped or hindered Winifred in her role as gadget maker for Queen Victoria’s league of young lady spies.

Writing Challenge 1: Snail Mail

Snail mail is super fun! The best way to increase your chances of GETTING a letter is SENDING a letter.

Your challenge is to write a real letter to post to someone you know. It’s a good idea to pick someone who is likely to reply. (Hint: Grandparents and older people are usually thrilled to receive a letter and to write back.)

The only rules are:

Write your letter by hand. It doesn’t have to be long!

Use traditional letter writing conventions:

A traditional salutation: Dear _____, / My dearest ____, / etc.

A message (Ideas: something about you, questions about them, something you’re proud of, etc.)

A traditional closing: Yours truly, / Your loving (grandchild), / Warm regards, / etc.

Your signature: Can you do a Copperplate style signature with lots of lovely loops? Have a go!

Address the envelope and affix a stamp. You might have to ask for help if you don’t know the address. And you might need to ask for a stamp from your parent or carer. Don’t forget to write your return address on the envelope!

Post it in a Royal Mail pillar box and smile because your letter will brighten someone’s day!

Challenge Two 2: Code Cracking

(International Morse Code alphabet (Wikipedia: Public domain)

Can you decode this Morse code message?

.. - / .. ... / ..-. ..- -. / - --- / .-- .-. .. - . / .-.. . - - . .-. ...

I  T    /    I  S   /

[It is fun to write letters]

Try writing your name in Morse code.

Alison D. Stegert has worked as an innovative school counsellor, a bumbling waitress, and an intrepid English (EFL) teacher, but writing kids’ books is her dream-come-true job.

Her latest book, Her Majesty’s League of Remarkable Young Ladies, was published in the UK in July 2023 and released in Australia by Scholastic in 2024. The book is the result of Alison’s 2021 win of the international competition The Times | Chicken House | IET 150 Prize.

Aussimerican Alison is a long-term resident of Queensland, where she serves as state director of the Queensland branch of  SCBWI Australia East and the chief scribe at the Sunny Coast Writers’ Roundtable.

Instagram & Threads: @alison_stegert_kidlit

X: @Alison Stegert

website: ali-stegert.com

The Victorian Can-Do Spirit

 

What a can-do bunch the Victorians were!

Queen Victoria

I decided to return to the Victorian age in my latest book Rivet Boy for a whole lot of reasons. It was the age of reason, of invention, of engineering, of science and arguably, the age of the novel, too. Imagine a world without Dickens or Darwin, Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, John Ruskin, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Gustave Eiffel, The Bronte sisters, Florence Nightingale, Ada Lovelace, Alexander Graham Bell…. And that’s just off the top off my head.

I have been privileged to indulge my love of all things Victorian in my latest book, Rivet Boy. As the daughter of an engineer, I have been around machinery all my life. While my father never worked in construction, I am well used to asking myself the questions: how does that work? How did they do that? We visited the iconic Forth Bridge when I was a child in the early eighties.

Barbara with her sister, brother-in-law and mother, visiting the Forth Bridge as a child. 

While browsing through a photography book of Victorian Scotland, I came across a chapter on the building of the iconic Forth Bridge. I was staggered by the images. How did that work? How did they do that? I was interested in the architects and engineers who built the structure, yes – but I was even more interested in the blurred faces of the people who worked on the site, day in and day out. I looked for a book on the subject (my usual go-to next step if something captures my interest) and bingo! The Briggers, written by Elspeth Wills with a team of South Queensferry-based researchers features details and often even images of the long-forgotten workers who helped to achieve one of the greatest engineering feats in history. These jobs were dangerous!

 For many years the figure of deaths quoted was 57 nameless casualties. However, more recent research has revealed the figure to be considerably greater: 73 confirmed – with more than 30 other related deaths. Not exactly a cheering basis for a children’s book. And then I struck gold: A newspaper article:

Here was a 12-year-old boy who survived.

He was to form the basis for my main character. With the help of local researchers I was able to find out where he lived – around the corner of the brand-new Carnegie Library in Dunfermline – the very first in the world. How could I not include it as a setting to contrast with the noise and danger of the building site. In my book, John is a rivet boy, heating and throwing rivets which his team will insert and hammer into place on the giant steel structure. It was skilled and dangerous work, often at great height and without much safety equipment.

A Forth Bridge rivet, with my hand for scale. It's HEAVY!

John may have been one of thousands of ‘Briggers’, but in my book he takes centre stage, alongside his friend Cora, who longs to become an engineer herself. John is at best ambivalent, and often terrified of the structure, but when the Crown Prince’s life is in danger he does not hesitate: knowing the structure like the back of his hand enables him to overcome his fear at the very moment when courage is needed most.

The Victorians loved engineering, and they were exceedingly good at it. William Arrol, in charge of the Forth Bridge construction, went on to build Tower Bridge in London – as far as they were concerned, the sky was the limit. In my opinion, there are not nearly enough books celebrating science and engineering.

We’d do well to channel our inner Victorians, don’t you think?

You can buy Rivet Boy at https://www.cranachanpublishing.co.uk/product/rivet-boy-by-barbara-henderson/

Catching the Post by Catherine Randall

One of the things I used to associate with those quiet days after Christmas was having to write thank you letters. Before computers and smart phones, it was the only way to thank all the relatives and friends that I didn’t actually see at Christmas for the presents they’d kindly given me. Making a quick phone call to thank them was not an acceptable option in my family! Anyway, I quite enjoyed writing letters, which I suppose is not surprising given that I am now a writer. 

Of course, nowadays, most people will have expressed their thanks in an email or a text message. I wonder how many actual physical thank you letters are written and put in the post these days? 

One of the fun things about writing historical fiction is getting to discover how people did ordinary things in the past. In both my novel, The White Phoenix, and the novel I am currently working on, set in Victorian London, I’ve had to work out how my characters would communicate with each other without being able to pick up a phone, or send a text message or email. It got me thinking about how communicating has changed over the past 500 years.

To find out more, I visited the Postal Museum in London (on a rather windy day!)

From my research for The White Phoenix, I knew that the Royal Mail already existed in 1666, and that the General Letter Office in central London had burned down during the Great Fire with the loss of a huge number of letters. It was called the Royal Mail because it used the distribution system already in place for royal and government documents. This system had been put in place originally by Henry VIII (who else? He always gets involved!) and then in 1635 King Charles I made it legal to use the royal post to send private letters. The General Post Office, the state postal system, was formally and legally established in 1660 with post offices throughout the country connected by regular routes.

But, as I learnt at the Postal Museum, post in those days did not necessarily remain private. Staff at the General Letter Office would open letters to check that no one was plotting against the King or the government, so if you wanted to make sure your letter was truly private, you needed to find another way to send it.

Luckily, people could also send letters by the carriers who plied between towns, taking people and goods, or by giving it to a friend travelling to the right town, or – if you had money – you could use a private messenger. In The White Phoenix, letters are often sent by carrier.

When the Post Office was first established, the mail was distributed by post boys travelling on foot. But post boys were slow and sometimes unreliable, and – unluckily for them – they were also vulnerable to highwaymen and pressgangs trying to forcibly recruit men for the army and navy. In 1784 smart new mail coaches replaced the post boys along many major routes which really speeded up mail delivery.

A mail coach on display in the Postal Museum in London

The next great innovation came in 1840 with the introduction of the Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp. Until then, the cost of sending a letter depended on the number of sheets of paper included and the distance the letter had travelled and it was the recipient of the letter who paid for its delivery. You could choose not to pay, but then you didn’t receive the letter. I will never forget a story I once heard about two old and poverty-stricken friends who sent each other a blank sheet of paper every 6 months– they never accepted the ‘letter’ so they couldn’t pass on any news, but at least they knew that they were both still alive! 

 A Penny Black stamp, featuring the head of a young Queen Victoria

After the arrival of the Penny Black, it cost just one penny to send a letter weighing up to 14g (half an ounce) anywhere in the United Kingdom. This made the whole postal system cheaper to use and more efficient, and letter writing flourished. 

However, it wasn’t until 15 years later that post boxes were introduced - before that you had to take your letter to the nearest post office. The first post boxes were green, not the red we are used to today. 

An early post box at the Postal Museum

I was very happy to discover that post boxes began to appear on the streets of London at around the time my new novel is set – it made it so much easier for my main character to sneak out and post a letter! In a nice literary link, the famous Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope is credited with introducing the post box when he worked for the Post Office. The first post boxes in the UK were in the Channel Islands. 

Post boxes have changed in colour and size and design since the mid-nineteenth century, but they are still instantly recognisable, whatever their age. The post box where I live has been painted gold since 2012, in honour of Mo Farah’s gold medal at the 2012 Olympics. 

We might marvel at how much slower Victorian communications were than ours are today, but in Victorian London, you could expect to receive 12 deliveries of post a day – that’s one an hour! – and it was possible to send a letter by post and receive an answer the same day. Imagine that happening nowadays!

Of course, the fascinating displays in the Postal Museum cover the story of the Post Office right up to the present day, including such things as the introduction of the postcode, and the role post boxes played in the Second World War. If my next historical novel is set in the twentieth century, I will certainly be paying another visit, so that I can add authentic historical detail to my story. After all, people will always need to communicate with one another, and there’s nothing like an unexpected letter or a mysterious parcel to move a plot along!

Watch Catherine's YouTube video on Catching the Post by clicking here

The White Phoenix by Catherine Randall is an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London, 1666. It was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021.

Published by the Book Guild, it is available from bookshops and online retailers.

For more information, go to Catherine’s website: www.catherinerandall.com

The Chestnut Roaster: History and Make-Believe - the Perfect Recipe by Eve McDonnell

Hands up: who enjoys history class in school? Truth be told, I loved history lessons, but I found it all a little bit hard. I was focusing so hard on all those dates and names that I missed something special – something hidden between the pages and beyond the facts! With a bit of digging, I discovered wild adventures that were rarely told. I found little triumphs and forgotten struggles, coincidences, intriguing inventions and strange fashions. I also learned about the personal lives of the stars of our history books (how did 18-year-old Victoria spend that one lonesome hour she’d requested when she was first told she was Queen?). 

Over time, I found myself seeking out the stories behind the stories, and I found what I was looking for in several places: in a fiction book with a hint of history; in a fact-filled documentary on TV; in a brilliantly re-imagined moment of history at the movies; in dug-up treasures; in paintings. I soon realised that any mash-up of history and make-believe grabbed and held my fullest attention. The perfect recipe!

Cover design and illustration by Holly Ovenden

And this is why being an author is fun – we have the freedom to dig deep into our history books and pluck out tantalising facts before adding a splash of magic, a dash of peril, a big scoop of make-believe with a sprinkle of truth (or the other way around!) Stone-age girls might time-travel, Vikings might find a fascinating island covered in gold, and Charles Darwin might fly if he touches a toucan’s tail feather. In my first book, Elsetime, an 1800s mudlarker (someone who searches for treasure along the muddy shores of a river) would find himself saving people from a flood that really did happen sixty-four years into his future. So, what about my second book, The Chestnut Roaster? Is there a mash-up of history and make-believe in there too?

Of course there is! The history bit goes as follows: the story is set in Paris 1888, one year before they hosted a spectacular World Fair known as the Exposition Universelle. Great minds of the world marvelled at the fair’s mind-blowing exhibits, and visitors feasted their eyes on intriguing inventions. Even before arrival at the Exposition, visitors were greeted by something extraordinary – the newly built grand entrance to the exhibits: the Eiffel Tower. 

And that is where I added make-believe to history: when I found a series of photographs showing the growing Eiffel Tower, I tried to imagine how everyone felt on seeing such a giant rise slowly before their eyes. How would the people of Paris have reacted if they went to sleep one day in 1888 when the tower was only small, and woke up forgetting the whole of the last year? To them, the tower would have grown into a monster overnight, from the first image in the row of towers shown above, to the fifth! 

The Eiffel Tower was not the only historical Parisian marvel I included in the book. Paris is the location of possibly the best place in all the world for a game of hide and seek: its underground maze of tunnels, some barely big enough to wriggle through. These underground quarries were the birthplace of the stone used to build many of the great buildings of Paris. Though the existence of the underground city comes as some surprise to The Chestnut Roaster’s main character, Piaf, the estimated nearly 200 miles of tunnels made their presence known throughout Parisian history. 

In the 1770s, a deadly sinkhole known as the ‘Mouth of Hell’ swallowed houses at Rue d’Enfer. A few years on, the hidden chambers were used as burial sites during the French Revolution, and later, during World War II, the French Resistance fighters used the dark and deep tunnels as hideouts while other chambers were converted into bunkers by German soldiers. Secret parties and concerts were held underground, explorers explored, and artists left their mark with wild and wonderful murals. 

To add a dash of fiction, I added several wondrous underground spots for Piaf and her brother to explore: a Museum of Objects, Tagine Pot Hollow, and the Apothecary, to name a few. 

You can visit one small section known as the Catacombs today, and it has some very strange inhabitants indeed – the bones of six million people! At the end of the 18th century, Paris’s cemeteries were overflowing. The streets held the stench of corpses, bones collapsed into neighbouring buildings. By cover of night, the corpses were carried by horse and black cloth-covered wagons to the Catacombs where workers fashioned impressive displays out of the bones themselves. As odd as that may seem, you can see for yourself that the bones are not make-believe! They had to star in Piaf’s story! 

Illustration from The Chestnut Roaster, copyright Ewa Beniak-Haremska

But sometimes the mash-up of history and make-believe is not so clear: Piaf and her brother were never alone on their adventures, for the ghost of poor Philibert Aspairt, a man said to have disappeared underground, is said to roam the darkest routes (and also the pages of The Chestnut Roaster!) If that is history or make-believe, we have yet to tell!

So, as you can see, history provided so much inspiration for The Chestnut Roaster – it is indeed one big mash-up of history and make-believe! I wonder, if you picked a page from your history book today, what stories could you imagine when you read between the lines?

Perhaps you can create your own?

Cover designs and illustrations by Holly Ovenden

You can watch Eve's video on how she came to write The Chestnut Roaster here.

Author photo: copyright Brownes Photography

Eve McDonnell is a children’s author and artist who lives in Co Wexford with her husband, twins, a dog and three cats. Having recognised the similarities between a blank canvas and a blank page, her writing career kicked off following a visit to a fortune-teller who told her to Write! Write! Write! Eve provides creative writing and crafting workshops to libraries, schools, writing clubs and festivals. Find out more about Eve and her books on www.evemcdonnell.com, or say hello via Twitter @Eve_Mc_Donnell or Instagram @Eve_Mc_Donnell.

Buying link: uk.bookshop.org

Memorials and Memory by Matthew Wainwright

On a chilly morning in early autumn, a funeral procession moves through the silent streets of London. The coffin has come from the grand surroundings of Westminster Abbey, and it is headed for a smaller church in the countryside, where its occupant will be laid to rest alongside their family.

Crowds of mourners line the way, their heads bowed in sadness and respect. They have gathered to say goodbye to a person whom most of them never met, but who had a deep and lasting impact on their lives. 

This is a scene you might be familiar with. Maybe you watched it, in person, online or on the TV, on 19th September 2022, the day of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. But did you know that the same scene took place almost exactly 137 years before, at a funeral for another very important person – an earl, no less – who was loved just as deeply by the poorest and lowest people in society?

Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury

That person was a man named Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (which is rather a mouthful, so we shall call him Lord Shaftesbury). His funeral took place on 8th October 1885, and it was one of the grandest funerals of the time.

As Lord Shaftesbury’s coffin left the funeral, a poor labourer standing nearby said: ‘Our earl’s gone! God Almighty knows he loved us, and we loved him. We shan’t see his like again!’

Why was this man so loved by so many? Why was his funeral attended, not just by MPs and bishops, royalty and nobility, but by labourers, factory hands, flower girls and the poor and destitute from every corner of London?

To answer this question, we need to understand the work he did.

A life of charity

Lord Shaftesbury was a politician, which meant he spent a lot of time in the Houses of Parliament, making speeches and trying to persuade the government to pass good laws. Those laws were usually about the working conditions of poor people, mostly women and children, who more often than not were condemned to a life of grinding labour for little money.

What set Lord Shaftesbury apart from other politicians of the time was that he also spent many hours visiting the poorest people in London, as well as people with mental illness who had been locked away in ‘hospitals’ that were no better than prisons. He wanted to really understand people’s lives, their suffering and their hopes. As a committed Christian, he believed that the lowest flower girl was just as important as Queen Victoria herself and should be treated with the same dignity and respect.

Lord Shaftesbury gave his whole life to charitable work like this and his influence is still being felt today. Now children don’t have to go to work from as young as four or five years old, slaving away in grimy factories or choking chimneys. Instead, they can go to school, have a good education and find a job when they are grown up. This is largely thanks to Lord Shaftesbury’s work.

Let’s look quickly at some of the laws that Lord Shaftesbury helped to pass.

Lunacy Laws

Twelfth Night entertainment at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum. Wealthy patrons would visit asylums on special occasions to inspect the patients

In Victorian times, people with mental illnesses and learning difficulties were called ‘lunatics’. They were often locked away in places which were called ‘hospitals’, but which were more like prisons. Often the staff treated them little better than animals.

Lord Shaftesbury helped to pass laws that made these hospitals better places to stay in, and helped doctors make more of an effort to understand the treatment and help that people really needed.

Child Labour Laws

A girl drags a coal cart through a passage in a mine. Boys and girls as young as six could be left alone in the pitch dark for up to twelve hours a day

We’ve all heard of the terrible jobs that Victorian children had to do: sent down mines in pitch blackness; forced to work in noisy, dangerous factories beside spinning machines with no safety equipment; sent up chimneys just thirty centimetres wide with nothing but a brush.

Lord Shaftesbury changed all of that. It took a long time, and many people opposed him, but he eventually brought in laws that limited the number of hours children could be made to work, and the age they could start working.

He also supported the ‘Ragged School Movement’, which set up schools for poor children all over the country, and Sunday Schools, which were run by churches so that children could have at least one day a week in a classroom.

* * *

In the middle of Piccadilly Circus, right in the heart of London, stands a statue: a winged man holding a bow, standing on one leg with the other leg stretched out behind him. The man is Anteros, a Greek god of love, and the statue is called the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain. It was put up in 1892 to remember the work of Lord Shaftesbury.

Statue of Lord Shaftesbury in Westminster Abbey

There are other memorials to Lord Shaftesbury: a statue of him stands in Westminster Abbey, for example. There are also memorials all over the place, for all kinds of different people: people who died in wars, kings and queens, and others who did great things. Here and there you might see a bench with a small metal plate on it, giving the name of a well-loved local person and remembering something they said or did.

History is all about remembering: often we remember the deeds of kings and queens, soldiers and fighters, famous names from the history books. But as a historical author I also love to find out about the lives of the people who often aren’t remembered: the ordinary, everyday people like you and me. Their lives are just as fascinating and just as worth remembering as people like Lord Shaftesbury.

So next time you are out and about, look out for memorials, big or small. And think about what you might be remembered for in a hundred years’ time!

Watch Matthew Wainwright's YouTube video on Memorials by clicking here

Matthew Wainwright is an author of historical fiction for young people. His first book, Out of the Smoke, is based on the life and work of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury and is published by Wakeman Trust. He works with schools and libraries to promote literacy and creative writing, and to help students develop an understanding of history. He lives in Greenwich, London, with his wife and four lively girls.

Website: https://matthewwainwright.co.uk/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattwauthor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattwauthor
Buy link: https://www.waterstones.com/book/out-of-the-smoke/matthew-wainwright/9781913133108

A Victorian Christmas Tree

 

I’ll say this for Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha: He was an enthusiast. Steam Power, engineering, plumbing, Scotland, Christmas trees… Queen Victoria's husband could get excited about everything, and more.

Prince Albert

Wait, Christmas trees?

Yes – Christmas trees. Even if he wasn’t the first person in these isles to bring a fir tree inside and decorate it with lights, he most certainly popularised the tradition here – his homeland, Germany, had already embraced it.

Long before Christianity arrived on these shores, evergreen trees and plants were held sacred in winter. Some people developed beliefs that evergreen branches of fir, spruce or pine over their doors could keep away witches and ghosts, for example. Martin Luther, the German reformer, features in one particular legend – wandering through a snowy wood, he is said to have been struck by the beauty of the starlight twinkling through frosted evergreen branches of the fir trees. He decided to recreate the experience at home by bringing a tree inside and decorating it with candles.

Martin Luther

I have a particular affinity with fir trees, and I too am an enthusiast by nature, and hail from Germany. My parents owned a house atop a very steep slope. The grassy piece of land wasn’t much use for anything, but my ever-enterprising father took a trip to the local tree nursery and returned with 200 noble fir saplings, no bigger than a small pot plant each. Planting them all was back-breaking work. I was young – it is one of my earliest memories. I recall asking – when can we play hide-and-seek in these?’

Barbara (8) in the forest-heavy area of Germany where she grew up

‘Probably when you’re about fifteen,’ he answered, mopping sweat from his brow. I pouted. Being fifteen seemed an eternity away.

By the time the trees grew into hide and seek, I had grown out of it. Every winter, however, teenage me became more adept with a saw. Neighbours and friends came first – then the street and the next. One by one they chose their Christmas tree. I tied a label to it and, when the time came, dropped to my knees and worked my upper arms. I carried Christmas trees hither and thither and pocketed my modest share of the cash – it wasn’t the worst of seasonal jobs.

And every Christmas, my father, who had grown up surrounded by dense woodland on three sides, brought our own Christmas tree into the house – never earlier than Christmas Eve, NEVER. It was decorated with baubles, straw stars and lametta (sort of spaghetti made from foil, and a particular favourite of my dad’s) before fixing on the candles – yes, my father could never quite make friends with fairy lights.

My favourite moment of every year of my childhood was the moment when the little bell rang, inviting us children into the room. The first time we saw the Christmas tree, aglow with flickering candlelight, and presents in neat piles by each seat.

When I was researching my Victorian novel, Punch, I really wanted to capture some of the excitement of this new custom. My Highland-raised orphan Phineas has never seen a Christmas tree before – Christmas was not much celebrated so far north. Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year, was a much bigger occasion. My hero is travelling with Professor Merriweather Moffat’s Circus. Here is the moment he and his gruff fellow Highlander Mr Robertson are first confronted with a Christmas tree:

Punch, Barbara's Victorian adventure, features a Victorian Christmas

Through the windows, I spot flickering candles in fir trees, brought inside after the fashion of the late Prince Albert. It looks so very odd to me. I am doubly surprised when I open the door to a snow-clad Professor Moffat one night before Christmas and he has brought just such a tree. A real, green, living tree.

‘Phineas, would you be so kind as to fetch Mr Robertson, please? I would appreciate a helping hand.’

Even Mr Robertson groans and puffs, but the tree soon stands upright in the good front room, wedged into a bucket of wet sawdust and sand to keep it fresh.

‘What is it?’ Mr Robertson’s forehead is so furrowed, I can’t help laughing.

‘It’s a Christmas tree. Watch, gentlemen!’

‘Christmas tree,’ mutters Mr Robertson, shaking his head.

Merriweather Moffat reveals a small paper parcel and carefully unfolds it: inside is a strange collection of metal clips. ‘Like this!’ he announces as if he had invented the custom himself. ‘Clip it on, Phineas, so the round part faces upward.’

Ah, I see how it is meant to work. I fix my first clip on.

‘Very good – now, distribute them evenly, that’s right. Do you see, Mr Robertson? Alice, don’t you love it?’

Mrs Moffat stands in the corner of the room, clutching a pack of wax candles. ‘I do love it, dear. Who would not?’

‘Then place the candles in! No time like the present! Professor Moffat’s cheeks glow with excitement.

The street lamps outside are lit by the time we finish. Mr Moffat strikes a match and lights the first candle.

I am not sure what I expected. But maybe not the pleasant scent of a woodland, right in our home. The light of thirty candles, dancing and reflecting in the windowpane, casting ever-changing shadows against the wall, the furniture, and our faces, too.

‘Extinguish the candles now,’ Mr Moffat says suddenly, for all of us have sunk into an awed silence. ‘We must save on the wax. We will light it on Christmas Eve. They say the Queen knows how to make merry at Christmas, and after a year like ours, so shall we!’ He reaches into his coat and brandishes a book.

‘What’s that?’ Mr Robertson asks again. He is wary of books.

‘It’s a story. A ghost story called A Christmas Carol, by Mr Charles Dickens. And those of us who can read, shall read it to the others at night. And on Christmas, we will go to church, and we shall have a goose! Isn’t that right dear?’

I receive my first ever Christmas present. When my parents were alive, I might get a small present at Hogmanay, but never at Christmas. All these new ways. They are not the Highland ways.

But I find that I bear them very cheerfully.

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Barbara Henderson