Brontë Studies

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The Brontës and Christmas

Jian Choe

To cite this article: Jian Choe (2020) The Brontës and Christmas, Brontë Studies, 45:1, 3-12, DOI:
10.1080/14748932.2020.1675398

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14748932.2020.1675398

Published online: 27 Nov 2019.

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 € STUDIES,
BRONTE Vol. 45 No. 1, January 2020, 3–12

The Bront€es and Christmas

Jian Choe

This essay considers the Bront€e sisters’ engagement with Christmas in

their lives and art and examines the extent to which they shared the con-
temporary vision of Christmas. With the invention of the modern
Christmas by the Victorian urban bourgeoisie, the mid-nineteenth century
witnessed a vast proliferation of Christmas publications and culture. The
sisters’ literary representation of the season could be regarded as a
response to the new trend. Charlotte’s depictions seem both to endorse
and to contest the dominant ideology of the Victorian Christmas. Emily
casts a nostalgic eye on the old English Christmas, harking back to the
diminishing tradition in the age of modernisation. Anne’s vision of
Christmas is characterised by its distinct moral and spiritual undertones. In
their brief lives, the sisters’ Christmas celebrations, modest and untainted,
were reflected in their writing. To explore the Bront€es’ Christmas is to
encounter Christmas untouched as yet by the needs of industrial capitalism
and its concomitant bourgeois culture, which would fundamentally trans-
form the whole fabric of modern society.

KEYWORDS Bront€e sisters, Christmas, modern society, Victorian culture

The Victorian era witnessed a reinvention of Christmas, the importance of which

had declined in the previous two centuries since the banning of the festival by the
Puritan Parliament in 1647.1 Christmas was reinstated as a religious celebration
with the Restoration in 1660, but it had lost much of its former merrymaking.2
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Christmas was ‘neither a major
event in the Christian calendar nor a popular festival’.3 But the 1840s marked a
turning point. The modern ideas of Christmas such as greetings cards, tree deco-
rations, crackers, gift-exchange and festive dinners all came into fashion in that
decade and were firmly established by the 1880s. The first contemporary
Christmas card appeared in 1843, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole and designed
by J. C. Horsley. The Christmas tree, a German custom popularised by Prince
Albert, became widespread after the Illustrated London News carried an engrav-
ing of Queen Victoria’s ‘Christmas Tree at Windsor Castle’ in December 1848.
The cracker was invented by Tom Smith, a London confectioner, in 1847.

# The Bront€e Society 2019 DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2020.1675398

4 JIAN CHOE

All these novelty items were commodified and advertised for the growing middle-
class market.
The commercialisation of Christmas was spurred by the publishing industry.
Authors were quick to exploit the renewed interest in Christmas to boost book
sales. Charles Dickens was a trendsetter. His seminal text A Christmas Carol was
published in 1843.4 He continued to produce narratives for the special Christmas
editions of periodicals like Household Words and All the Year Round. Other
writers followed suit: for example, William Thackeray, Henry Mayhew, Elizabeth
Gaskell and Catherine Gore all brought out affordable Christmas gift-books,
catering to the needs of the lucrative new market.5 The surge of Christmas books
affected the business practice of the print industry, including annual publishing
cycles. Until the early nineteenth century, spring had been the prime season in the
publishing calendar. As Simon Eliot’s archival research attests, however, by the
1840s Christmastime established itself as the peak season of book production,
with the largest number of new titles released during the three-month Christmas
season, October to December.6 The mid-nineteenth century thus saw a massive
proliferation of Christmas publications and Christmas culture. Tara
Moore recounts:
The Christmas book genre certainly swelled after Dickens’s ingenious pairing of
seasonal fiction and seasonal sales. Before A Christmas Carol, festive-themed print
for midwinter reading consisted of a handful of nonfiction Christmas books from
the 1830s, including The Book of Christmas; periodical profiles and antiquarian
articles; and periodical Christmas numbers like the one Punch initiated in 1841.
The Christmas book trend mushroomed after 1843 and the subsequent year-long
success of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. There were more than two dozen
Christmas books published in the 1840s, with the largest numbers turning out for
the 1844, 1845, and 1846 festive markets.7

The Bront€e sisters were alert to the cultural milieu in which their works were dis-
tributed.8 They may have been acquainted with the new Christmas culture, not a
little promoted by their fellow writers.9 In effect, all the first editions of the sis-
ters’ debut novels were released in the end-of-year print market where seasonal
narratives were in demand: Jane Eyre appeared in October 1847, followed by
Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey in December of the same year. The volumes,
therefore, inadvertently joined the ranks of seasonal merchandise for Christmas
consumerism. It is likely that they circulated in part as gift commodities during
the season and that the early reading audience paid particular attention to the
representation of Christmas in the novels. With this in mind, this essay is
intended to consider the sisters’ engagement with Christmas in their lives and art,
which would illuminate the extent to which they shared the prevailing vision of
Christmas in mid-Victorian society.
The details of how the Bront€es celebrated Christmas are little documented and
are, by and large, a matter of conjecture. Although biographical information on
the subject is scanty and fragmentary, a few tantalising records do suggest that
 € AND CHRISTMAS
THE BRONTES 5

they had quiet, modest celebrations at Haworth Parsonage.10 It is also worth

mentioning that they met one of the darkest patches in their lives during a festive
season. It was on Christmas Eve in 1848 that Charlotte lamented ‘life’s lone wil-
derness’ in her painfully grievous elegy for Emily, who had died on 19 December
that year.11 In sum, the Bront€es’ Christmas seems to have been a low-key affair.
It was certainly not a commercially conditioned one, free from the material
excess delineated in contemporary seasonal text and image. There are two pos-
sible reasons for this. Above all, it took time for the modern Christmas rituals to
take hold in areas at a distance from London like Haworth. The second, more
important reason is that the new invention was at odds with the Bront€es’
restrained taste and sober-minded lifestyle.
It would be useful to trace briefly what Christmas meant for the Bront€e sisters
before examining its representation in their works. As a clergyman’s daughters,
they, of course, celebrated Christmas as a religious festival. Their evangelical
Christianity meant that they had peculiarly intense family ties, which was typical
of that denomination.12 Christmas was thus a much-expected occasion of family
reunion while they were away in schools or workplaces. It was a time when they
could return home to spend precious moments together. For this singularly artis-
tic coterie, home took on added significance. It was the sphere where they could
share creative intimacy, peer support and family affection. Home accorded them
‘the liberty to be together and to be themselves, and this meant the freedom to
write’.13 Charlotte states in a letter of 9 May 1841: ‘my home is humble and
unattractive to strangers but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in
the world—profound, and intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for
each other’.14 Anne echoes her sister’s view in Agnes Grey, her autobiographical
novel of 1847, which recasts her real-life experience as a governess at Thorp
Green. The following passage registers, in a fictional guise, her anticipation for
home-coming for Christmas:
I SPARE my readers the account of my delight on coming home, my happiness
while there—enjoying a brief space of rest and liberty in that dear, familiar place,
among the loving and the loved—and my sorrow on being obliged to bid them,
once more, a long adieu.15

The Bront€e sisters seldom adopted Christmas as a central theme in their works,
nor did they consciously produce literary offerings aimed at the burgeoning
Victorian Christmas print market. Still, Christmas features in most of their major
novels, in which it is referred to at vital junctures of the plots. Overall, the
imagery of Christmas in their writing works on dual levels: literal and figurative.
In Charlotte’s novels, the joyous time tends to be associated paradoxically with
loss and bleakness, which evokes the writer’s own experience of bereavement at
Christmastime. In Villette (1853), Christmas appears in the tragic story of Miss
Marchmont, a crippled elderly lady, who offers Lucy Snowe the position of a
nurse-companion. In her youth, she was engaged to be married to her fiance, but
the expected wedding at Christmas crumbled as he breathed his last at the dawn
6 JIAN CHOE

of the very day, thrown off his horse.16 The motif of an abortive wedding is
linked with Christmas once more in Jane Eyre (1847). The heroine laments when
all her hopes have been dashed with the revelation of Rochester’s existing mar-
riage. She narrates the ill-fated turn of events with the image of a Christmas
frost, envisaging a desolate yet achingly beautiful winterscape:
A Christmas frost had come at midsummer: a white December storm had whirled
over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hay-field
and corn-field lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers,
today were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours
since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste,
wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead.17

Jane Eyre also presents scenes of Victorian Christmas-keeping. Each of them, set
in Gateshead, Thornfield and Moor House respectively, displays a secularised
vision of the festive season. First of all, Christmas at Gateshead is configured as a
time of indulgence and conviviality for an affluent middle-class family. The
Reeds’ season features the standard trappings of the Victorian Christmas: gift-
exchange, sumptuous dinner and the presence of well-groomed children. Yet it is
a festivity of their own, which a dependant-outsider like Jane is permitted to
observe but not to take part in, as voiced by her:
From every enjoyment I was, of course, excluded: my share of the gaiety consisted
in witnessing the daily apparelling of Eliza and Georgiana, and seeing them
descend to the drawing-room, dressed out in thin muslin frocks and scarlet sashes,
with hair elaborately ringletted; and afterwards, in listening to the sound of the
piano or the harp played below, to the passing to and fro of the butler and
footman, to the jingling of glass and china as refreshments were handed, to the
broken hum of conversation as the drawing-room doors opened and closed. When
tired of this occupation, I would retire from the stair-head to the solitary and silent
nursery [ … ]. (JE, p. 28)

This is far from an idyllic image of Christmas, prevalent in contemporary sea-

sonal writing, which can be, in Dickens’s terms, summarised as ‘Carol philoso-
phy, cheerful views, sharp anatomisation of humbug, jolly good temper [ … ] and
a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to
Home, and Fireside’.18 In practice, the key ideological text in the field, A
Christmas Carol, was keen to propagate the illusion of social harmony based on
Christian caritas. For instance, Scrooge’s nephew Fred hails Christmas as a time
‘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’.19 Charlotte’s realistic portrayal of Christmas above rejects such utopian-
ism. It is clear-headed enough to reveal that the Christmas spirit fails to convert
the insensitivity and selfishness of the bourgeoisie and that Christmas is a time
when a forlorn orphan feels the sense of isolation and displacement all the more
acutely owing to the air of exclusive festivity around. The passage indicates that
 € AND CHRISTMAS
THE BRONTES 7

the Christmas morality of charity, goodwill and fellowship does not magically
‘make all society one family’.20 It thus contests the Dickensian sentimental ideal
or what Louis Cazamian, in his classic study of Victorian social fiction, succinctly
called ‘the philosophy of Christmas’.21
Meanwhile, the Christmas scene set in Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s manor, where
Jane is employed as a governess, sheds light on how the traditional landed nobility
celebrated the festival. The heroine is informed by Mrs Fairfax of a former
Christmas ball and party held at the estate:
You should have seen the dining-room that day—how richly it was decorated, how
brilliantly lit up! I should think there were fifty ladies and gentlemen present—all
of the first country-families; and Miss Ingram was considered the belle of the
evening [ … ] The dining-room doors were thrown open; and, as it was Christmas-
time, the servants were allowed to assemble in the hall, to hear some of the ladies
sing and play. [ … ] I never saw a more splendid scene: the ladies were
magnificently dressed; most of them [ … ] looked handsome; but Miss Ingram was
certainly the queen. (JE, p. 159)

In the quotation above, the majestic party is reminiscent of ancien regime glam-
our. It is a grand affair, indicative of the taste, culture and class identity of polite
society. It showcases a mode of upper-class leisure, entertainment and sociability,
which the new urban bourgeoisie attempted to emulate and adapt through con-
spicuous consumption like the practices of the commercially rein-
vented Christmas.
The scene at Moor House, in which Jane spends a festive season with the Rivers
sisters, envisions Christmas as a family occasion rather than as a society event. It
evinces the ideals of Christmas such as family reunion, hearth-love and homely
food, illustrating the Victorian construction of Christmas as a ‘preeminently family
festival’.22 Jane prepares for the event by cleaning the house, tending the fires and
cooking with ‘a beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of spices, compound-
ing of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for mince-pies, and solemnizing
of other culinary rites’ (JE, p. 390). All the key elements of the contemporary
domestic ideal are present here: a clean cozy house, a warm fire, hearty food and
drink, and female industry. The narrator gives voice to the sense of domestic com-
fort and concord, which she shares with her newfound family:
It was Christmas week: we took to no settled employment, but spent it in a sort of
merry domestic dissipation. The air of the moors, the freedom of home, the dawn
of prosperity, acted on Diana and Mary’s spirits like some life-giving elixir: they
were gay from morning till noon, and from noon till night. They could always
talk; and their discourse, witty, pithy, original, had such charms for me, that I
preferred listening to, and sharing in it, to doing anything else. (JE, p. 394)

In summary, the scene exemplifies the family-centred vision of Christmas, in

which the celebration of the season is synonymous with the sanctification of the
hearth or family values.
8 JIAN CHOE

Emily Bront€e also presents a memorable delineation of Christmas in

Wuthering Heights (1847), in which the season coincides with a crucial phase of
the plot, marking the end of Cathy and Heathcliff’s blissful childhood. In chapter
VII, the housekeeper-narrator Nelly describes a Christmastime at Wuthering
Heights when Cathy returned from her five-week stay at Thrushcross Grange:
putting my cakes in the oven, and making the house and kitchen cheerful with
great fires befitting Christmas eve, I prepared to sit down and amuse myself by
singing carols, all alone [ … ] I smelt the rich scent of heating spices; and admired
the shining kitchen utensils, the polished clock, decked in holly, the silver mugs
ranged on a tray ready to be filled with mulled ale for supper; and, above all, the
speckless purity of my particular care—the scoured and well-swept floor. [ … ]
then, I remembered how old Earnshaw used to come in when all was tidied, and
call me a cant lass, and slip a shilling into my hand as a Christmas box.23

The down-to-earth domestic details as shown above, hallmarks of Nelly’s narra-

tion, bestow authenticity on this visionary novel, in which the ‘homely and famil-
iar’ counterbalance the ‘wild and extravagant’.24 Nelly’s account, profoundly
tinged with nostalgia, gives an idea of what the old-fashioned rural Christmas
was like in late eighteenth-century Yorkshire:
In the evening we had a dance [ … ] We got rid of all gloom in the excitement of
the exercise, and our pleasure was increased by the arrival of the Gimmerton band,
mustering fifteen strong; a trumpet, a trombone, clarionets, bassoons, French
horns, and a bass viol, besides singers. They go the rounds of all the respectable
houses, and receive contributions every Christmas, and we esteemed it a first-rate
treat to hear them. (WH, pp. 52–53)

It is tempting to construe the nostalgic note here revealed as the author’s reaction to
the increasingly commercialised Christmas of the day. In the novel, however,
Christmas is more than just a setting which harks back to the good old days. It
serves as a vehicle through which Heathcliff’s status as an outcast is poignantly high-
lighted. Cathy has returned home quite another person, exposed to the civilised
Lintons. She has moved into their genteel bourgeois world and Heathcliff acutely
perceives the rift between them. While all the others are indulging in merriment and
hospitality, he is locked away by Hindley in the dark attic. Nelly recalls old
Earnshaw’s fondness of Heathcliff and his fear of the lad being ill-treated after his
death. She thinks of Heathcliff’s present situation and begins to cry (WH, p. 48).
In the works of Anne Bront€e, whose Christian faith was integral to her life and
art,25 Christmas is associated with moral and spiritual values par excellence. The
festive theme made its way into her poem ‘Music on Christmas Morning’
(1843),26 which, imbued with religious sentiments, stands in the tradition of
devotional Christmas writing.27 It opens with the celebration of the bell sound
which heralds the birth of Christ:
Music I love—but never strain
Could kindle raptures so divine,
 € AND CHRISTMAS
THE BRONTES 9

So grief assuage, so conquer pain,

And rouse this pensive heart of mine—
As that we hear on Christmas morn,
Upon the wintry breezes borne.

The poem goes on to inscribe unequivocally the scriptural messages of Christ’s

sacrifice and the redemption of mankind, epitomising nineteenth-century
evangelicalism:
A sinless God, for sinful men,
Descends to suffer and to bleed;
Hell must renounce its empire then;
The price is paid, the world is freed,
And Satan’s self must now confess
That Christ has earned a Right to bless;

Now holy Peace may smile from heaven,

And heavenly Truth from earth shall spring;
The captive’s galling bonds are riven,
For our Redeemer is our king;
And He that gave his blood for men
Will lead us home to God again.

In the verse the writer meditates on the spiritual significance of the Nativity,
which was often far removed from the rituals of the secularised Victorian
Christmas. In spite of its more or less formulaic articulation of Christian doc-
trine, the poem is beautiful in its evocation of joy and peace, crystallizing Anne’s
essentially faith-based perspective on Christmas.
The view of the Christmas season as a time of belief, hope and new birth
is, if less explicitly, reiterated in her fiction, the driving force of which was
her religious morality.28 In Agnes Grey, Christmas is fleetingly mentioned as
a time when the eponymous protagonist could hope for a better prospect of
her planned school (AG, p. 140). In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), the
heroine Helen’s diary entry, written while she was in dire straits, indicates
that the season signifies hope, new life and divine blessing amidst trials and
tribulations:
DECEMBER 25th.—Last Christmas I was a bride, with a heart overflowing with
present bliss, and full of ardent hopes for the future—though not unmingled with
foreboding fears. Now I am a wife: my bliss is sobered, but not destroyed; my
hopes diminished, but not departed; my fears increased but not yet thoroughly
confirmed;—and, thank Heaven, I am a mother too. God has sent me a soul to
educate for Heaven, and given me a new and calmer bliss, and stronger hopes to
comfort me.29

Christmas resurfaces in the symbolism of the Christmas rose in the denouement

of the novel where Helen invites Gilbert to her estate and confesses her
10 JIAN CHOE

preference for him. The two souls are united at length after ordeals, sealing their
love over the flower. The Christmas rose symbolises a set of ethical values: purity,
integrity, fortitude, constancy and perseverance:
[ … ] without waiting for an answer, she turned away her glistening eye and
crimson cheek, and threw up the window and looked out, whether to calm her
own excited feelings or to relieve her embarrassment, — or only to pluck that
beautiful half-blown Christmas rose that grew upon the little shrub without, just
peeping from the snow, that had hitherto, no doubt, defended it from the frost,
and was now melting away in the sun. Pluck it however, she did, and having gently
dashed the glittering powder from its leaves, approached it to her lips and said, —
‘This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through
hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish
it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its
stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it. Look, Gilbert, it is still fresh and
blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals. — Will
you have it?’ (TWH, p. 411)

The modern Christmas was invented by the Victorian urban bourgeoisie and
reflects their ideals and preoccupations.30 It was essentially a middle-class institu-
tion and developed for the manifestation of middle-class cultural hegemony, tak-
ing up a special status in Victorian culture.31 Contemporary authors helped to
shape and promote the new institution. With the phenomenally popular A
Christmas Carol setting the trend, the mid-nineteenth-century print market was
flooded with books which tackled the themes associated with the season.
Christmas writing thus established itself as a new publishing genre, which
Thackeray called in 1847 ‘that new branch of English literature’.32 Although the
Bront€e sisters did not write specifically for the Christmas book market, the reli-
gious festival features in most of their major novels, in which it appears at some
momentous phases of the plot. Arguably, their representation of the season could
be regarded as a response to the new Christmas culture. Charlotte’s depictions
seem both to endorse and to contradict the prevailing ideology of the Victorian
Christmas. Emily presents a nostalgic view of the old English Christmas, looking
back to the fading tradition in the age of industrialisation and urbanisation.
Anne’s vision of Christmas is characterised by its distinct moral and spiritual
undertones. For her, Christmas was principally a season of religious regard, and
she used the motif to articulate immaterial values. On the whole, the Bront€es’
Christmas in life and art was far from the modern reinvention. The practices of
modern Christmas like cards, decorated trees, crackers or extravagant dinners
are largely absent in their portrayal of the season. In their brief lives, they had
modest Christmases, duly mirrored in their writing. To explore the Bront€es’
Christmas is to encounter Christmas untouched as yet by the claims of industrial
capitalism and its concomitant bourgeois culture, which would fundamentally
transform the whole fabric of modern existence.

Notes
1
Relevant studies include: J. M. Golby and A. W.
Purdue, The Making of the Modern Christmas
(Stroud: Sutton, 2000); J. A. R. Pimlott, The
Englishman’s Christmas: A Social History
(Hassocks: Harvester, 1978); John Storey, ‘The
Invention of the English Christmas’, in Christmas,
Ideology and Popular Culture, ed. by Sheila
Whiteley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2008), pp. 17–31 (p. 19).
2
Michael Harrison, The Story of Christmas
(London: Odhams, 1951), p. 146.
3
Golby and Purdue, The Making of the Modern
Christmas, p. 40.
4
The book was conceived as a business plan to
resolve his then financial trouble, as suggested
in a letter to Macvey Napier of 24 October
1843: ‘I plunged headlong into a little scheme
[ … ] set an artist [John Leech] at work upon it’.
The Letters of Charles Dickens, 12 vols, ed. by
Madeline House et al. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1965–2002), III, 585. It was followed by four
more Christmas books: The Chimes (1844); The
Cricket on the Hearth (1845); The Battle of Life
(1846); The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s
Bargain (1848).
5
W. M. Thackeray, The Christmas Books of Mr.
M. A. Titmarsh (1847); Henry Mayhew, The
Good Genius (1846); Elizabeth Cleghorn
Gaskell, The Moorland Cottage (1850);
Catherine Gore, The Inundation (1848). Gaskell
also wrote analogous short stories: ‘Christmas
Storms and Sunshine’ (1848); ‘The Old Nurse’s
Story’ (1852); ‘The Squire’s Story’ (1853).
6
Simon Eliot, ‘Some Trends in British Book
Production, 1800–1919’, in Literature in the
Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British
Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. by John
O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 19–43
(p. 34).
7 20
Tara Moore, Victorian Christmas in Print (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 18–19.
8
Linda H. Peterson, ‘The Bront€es’ Way into
Print’, in The Bront€es in Context, ed. by
Marianne Thorm€ ahlen (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), pp. 151–58 (p. 151).
9
Charlotte has commented on Gaskell’s
Christmas book, The Moorland Cottage: ‘it
finishes like a herb—a balsamic herb with
healing in its leaves. That small volume has
beauty for commencement, gathers power in
progress, and closes in pathos [ … ] The little
story is fresh, natural, religious; no more need
be said’. Letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, 22 January
€ AND CHRISTMAS
THE BRONTES 11
1851 in The Letters of Charlotte Bront€e, 3 vols,
ed. by Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon,
1995–2004), II, 560.
10
Gaskell mentions their charity, humble meals
and family reunions during the season: Elizabeth
Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bront€e [1857]
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),
pp. 453–54, passim. Barker notes that
Patrick Bront€e presented a manuscript notebook
to Charlotte at Christmas 1833: Juliet
Barker, The Bront€es (New York: Pegasus, 2013),
p. 234.
11
The third stanza of the elegy runs: ‘Nor know’st
thou what it is to lie/Looking forth with
streaming eye / On life’s lone wilderness. / ‘Weary,
weary, dark and drear, / How shall I the journey
bear, / The burden and distress?”’, Charlotte
Bront€e, ‘On the Death of Emily Jane Bront€e’
(1848) in The Broadview Anthology of
Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. by
Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle
(Peterborough: Broadview, 2005), p. 315.
12
Marianne Thorm€ ahlen, The Bront€es and
Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), p. 20.
13
Drew Lamonica Arms, ‘The Bront€es’ Sibling
Bonds’, in The Bront€es in Context, pp. 91–97
(p. 96).
14
Letter to the Revd Henry Nussey, 9 May 1841
in Letters, I, 255.
15
Anne Bront€e, Agnes Grey (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), p. 33; hereafter AG.
16
Charlotte Bront€e, Villette (New York: Harper &
Row, 1972), pp. 35–36.
17
Charlotte Bront€e, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), p. 295; hereafter JE.
18
The Letters of Charles Dickens, IV, 328.
19
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other
Christmas Writings (London: Penguin, 2003),
p. 36.
Louis James, The Victorian Novel (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006), p. 55.
21
Louis Cazamian, The Social Novel in England
1830–1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs Gaskell,
Kingsley, trans. by Martin Fido (originally
published in French in 1903; London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 126.
22
Pimlott, The Englishman’s Christmas, p. 75.
23
Emily Bront€e, Wuthering Heights (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 48;
hereafter WH.
24
Introduction in Emily Bront€e, Wuthering Heights,
ed. by David Daiches (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1985), p. 12.
12 JIAN CHOE

25
Edward Chitham, ‘Religion, Nature and
Art in the Work of Anne Bront€e’, Bront€e Society
Transactions, 24:2 (1999), 129–45.
26
The Poems of Anne Bront€e, ed. by Edward
Chitham (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 96–97.
27
For an analysis of Victorian Christmas poetry,
see Moore, ‘The Poetry of Christmas’, in
Victorian Christmas in Print, pp. 121–40.
28
The Oxford Companion to the Bront€es, ed. by
Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),
p. 426.
29
Anne Bront€e, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.
202; hereafter TWH.
30
Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, Christmas
Past (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987), p. 15.
31
Catherine Waters, ‘Dickens, Christmas and the
Family’, in Dickens and the Politics of the
Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), pp. 58–88 (pp. 58, 63).
32
William Thackeray, ‘A Grumble about the
Christmas-Books’, Fraser’s Magazine, 35
(January 1847), 111–26 (p. 111).

Notes on contributor
Jian Choe did a PhD in English at King’s College, University of London. Her
research interests are late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, urban-
ism and the visual arts. Her publications include ‘Towards Modern Aesthetics:
Charlotte Bront€e and J. M. W. Turner’ (Bront€e Studies, 2018) and ‘Haunting
the London Streets: Virginia Woolf’s Urban Travelogues Re-appraised’ (Journal
of English Language and Literature, 2009). She teaches at Kyung Hee
University, Korea.
Correspondence to: Dr Jian Choe. Email: matisse2177@yahoo.com