Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1878 novel Poganuc People depicts a young Connecticut girl’s discovery of Christmas in a small Episcopal church, and I have argued that the account is autobiographical. Today, I’ll show how that novel fits into the whole American idea of Christmas as it was emerging in these very years.
And yes, there will be reindeer.
As I have suggested, the novel’s Christmas scene is set in 1820 or 1821, and that date is significant. Much of our modern thinking about Christmas, and the associated symbolism, is quite a bit later than that, and it was imported. Dickens’s Christmas Carol is from 1843, and a few years later Prince Albert introduced the German institution of the Christmas Tree into Great Britain, and the United States followed. It was in 1854 that the fervently Anglophile HBS reported buying her first Christmas tree.
But there was another earlier work that represented a critical building block in the whole process, namely the poem “A Visit from St Nicholas,” by Clement Clark Moore, which has been called “arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American.” Trust me, you know it:
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
And you certainly know
“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!”
Do note that the last two names get spelled in various different ways, according to the source, and we even read “Dunder and Blixem”.
In effect, the poem invents (or massively popularizes) Santa Claus, not to mention his reindeer, and it dates from 1823, very close indeed to the events described by HBS.
But there is an even neater connection, namely that this poem was the work of not just an Episcopalian, but of a core member of the church at that time. Clement’s father Benjamin Moore was rector of Trinity Church in Manhattan and later Bishop of New York, as well as serving as the president of Columbia University. Clement Moore himself was a professor at New York’s General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, where he taught Oriental and Greek Literature, as well as Divinity and Biblical Learning. He was also a wildly successful property developer who owned the Chelsea neighborhood, and gave the land on which that new seminary was built.
Excuse the stereotypes, but you don’t get more Episcopalian than that.
Dickens Remembers
I note one coincidence concerning childhood memories, and particularly in the era that the action of Poganuc People was set. As I mentioned, Charles Dickens was one of the crucial influences on the mythologies of Christmas, but not until the appearance of Christmas Carol, in 1843.
But where did Dickens get those ideas? He was not shy about reporting the memories on which they were based. When he was five, in 1817, his family had taken him his sister to Rochester Cathedral at service time, and he had been overwhelmed by “the good will and atmosphere” prevailing there. He never forgot it, and that is what we are reading about many years afterwards.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, born in 1811, lovingly remembered Christmas at the Episcopal church in Litchfield, c.1820; Charles Dickens, born in 1812, fondly recalled the Anglican cathedral at Rochester in 1817.
In the years around 1820, then, new visions of Christmas were stirring, and Episcopalians and Anglicans together played a crucial role in the process. What was happening in Litchfield represented a distant echo of that larger story, and that is what we are reading in Poganuc People.
Final connection: the new Smithsonian has an interesting article by Vanessa Braganza on “A Christmas Dream,” a story that Louisa May Alcott published in 1882, a couple of years after Poganuc People. This is a child’s version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. The author stresses the huge influence that Dickens had on the whole Alcott family through their early years, when in the 1840s they launched a piece of what we would call fan fiction called The Pickwick. That episode is closely echoed in Little Women.
Sooner or later, it all comes back to Dickens.
And to all a good night.
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