World’s first Christmas card goes on display at Dickens Museum

One of only 21 surviving examples of the first commercial Christmas card has gone on display at London’s Charles Dickens Museum. On loan from a San Francisco book dealer, the card is part of a new exhibition dedicated to the dawn of Christmas as marketing and commerce bonanza ushered in by the publication of A Christmas Carol.

The card was created by Sir Henry Cole, a British civil servant who would gain renown as the organizer of the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851 and the founder of the V&A Museum. He was also one of the most dedicated advocates of postal reform. He was secretary of the reform committee, editor of their newsletter, the Post Circular, and from 1837 to 1840, the assistant of the leader of the post office reform movement, educator Rowland Hill. The Uniform Penny Post was introduced throughout the UK on January 10th, 1840.

In 1843, the same year Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol thus inadvertently (and to his later regret) launching the modern commodified Christmas we all know and love to hate, Henry Cole commissioned his friend narrative painter and illustrator John Calcott Horsley to design a convivial Christmas card he could send to family, friends and acquaintances alike. Horsley designed a triptych: the center panel depicting a family raising beverages of a spirituous nature, two side panels of charitable distribution of clothing and food to the poor. The joyous family noel was captioned “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.” The images were lithographed on cardstock and the center panel was hand-colored.

Horsley printed a lot of 1,000 of them and the ones Cole didn’t use went on sale to the public for a shilling apiece (a week’s pay for the average working man) in Old Bond Street, London. They were expensive for regular folks and the idea didn’t take hold right away, hence the small number of surviving originals. One of them set a new record price for a card when it sold at auction in 2001 for £22,500. It was sent by Cole to his grandmother and aunt and bears his signature, hence the record.

Five years would pass before the second commercially printed Christmas card would hit the market, but after that there was no stopping it. As happened with Valentines, the practice of sending preprinted commercial Christmas cards exploded in Britain in the second half of the 19th century. The lithography printing process made increasingly colorful cards affordable for everyone and the penny post made sending them cheap, fast and reliable.

The United States was a slow adopter of the Christmas card. Cole’s family scene involved a little too much of the demon liquor — check out that baby hitting the wine glass in the center front — for American bourgeois sensibilities. The first commercial Christmas card published in the US for general purchase (as opposed to business promotional cards) was created by Louis Prang in Boston in 1874. At first he was selling them in England where cards were firmly established as a hit; then he introduced them to the US market He hit the ground running. Using the chromolithography process which allowed him to use up to 30 different colors on a single print with fine details creating realistic illustrations of hair and mistletoe and textile patterns and roaring fires, by 1881 he was selling five million Prang’s Christmas Cards a year. His fortunes would ebb at the turn of the century when German postcard makers would flood the US market with much cheaper imitations. Prang refused to cut corners and continued to use the highest quality stock and inks. In 1897 L. Prang & Company merged with an art company and got out of the Christmas card business. Cheap German cards would dominate the US market until World War I.

Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas runs through the season, ending April 19th, 2020.

Elizabeth I’s translation of Tacitus found

A manuscript translation of Tacitus’ Annales has been discovered to be the work of Queen Elizabeth I. The manuscript was identified by University of East Anglia researcher Dr John-Mark Philo who was looking for translations of Tacitus in the Lambeth Palace Library. It is a limp vellum binding of 17 folio pages whose title page (likely added at a later date and corrected even later) reads “An Essay of the Translation of Livy Tacitus 1st Booke of the Annals.” The manuscript wasn’t lost, but it was neglected, academically speaking. Even though it’s one of only four known early modern manuscript translations of Tacitus, it has never until now been subject of scholarship.

Dr Philo, who was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow when he made the discovery in January this year, said: “The manuscript features a very specific kind of paper stock, which gained special prominence among the Elizabethan secretariat in the 1590s. There was, however, only one translator at the Tudor court to whom a translation of Tacitus was ascribed by a contemporary and who was using the same paper in her translations and private correspondence: the queen herself.

“The corrections made to the translation are a match for Elizabeth’s late hand, which was, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic. The higher you are in the social hierarchy of Tudor England, the messier you can let your handwriting become. For the queen, comprehension is somebody else’s problem.

“The translation itself has been copied out in an elegant scribal hand, which is itself a match for one of Elizabeth’s secretaries, but the author’s changes and additions are in an extremely distinctive, disjointed hand – Elizabeth’s. Her late handwriting is usefully messy – there really is nothing like it – and the idiosyncratic flourishes serve as diagnostic tools.”

Some of those known idiosyncrasies found in the corrections are the the top stroke of the ‘e’, an unusually horizontal ‘m’ and the broken stem of her ‘d’. The paper stock is characterized by a watermark of a lion rampant to the initial “G.B.” and a crossbow. This stock is found in many of the papers of Robert Cecil, son of Lord Burghley, Secretary of State and Lord Privy Seal of Queen Elizabeth I, whose secretaries used it for everything from letters to arrest warrants.

The manuscript is short, translating only the first book of the Annales which, after a brief introduction about the end of the Republic, covers the final acts of Augustus, his death in 14 A.D. and the first two years of Tiberius’ reign. In the late 16th century, Tacitus’ account of tyranny, torture, betrayal and depravity at the courts of the early emperors were held up as political cautionary tales, negative examples for any righteous and moral monarch to take to heart. One translator of the Annales, Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius, included extensive quotations from the ancient author in his very popular Politica. Published in 1589, Politica was a defense of strong centralized monarchy. Tacitus’ chronicles were used to illustrate how an enlightened modern ruler, unlike the ones Tacitus was dealing with, should behave.

The timing of the translation ties it to this trend in scholarship. Elizabeth could well have translated the Annales to absorb the lessons from some of history’s choicest tyrants. She could also have had an interest in some of the other personages depicted. Dr. Philo muses:

“It is hard not to wonder what Elizabeth made of Agrippina, ‘who’, as Elizabeth translates it, being a woman of a great courage, ‘tooke upon hir some daies the office of a Captaine’ and is able to rouse the troops successfully. It is not unreasonable to assume that Agrippina may have appealed to the same queen who addressed the soldiers at Tilbury, and who had deliberately represented herself as placing the importance of addressing her troops in person above her personal safety.”

Or she could have done it purely for her own intellectual enjoyment. Poet and historian John Clapham wrote in Certain Observations Concerning the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth in 1603:

She took pleasure in reading of the best and wisest histories, and some part of Tacitus’ Annals she herself turned into English for her private exercise. She also translated Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, and a treatise of Plutarch, De Curiositate, with diverse others.

That Boethius translation, btw, was also written on the rampant lion-GB-crossbow stock.

The provenance of the manuscript links it to the Tudor court as well. It is catalogued as part of the collection of Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury (1636–1715), who had a significant number of documents from the court of Elizabeth I. He bequeathed his book collection to his successors, which is how it entered the library of Lambeth Palace, official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The manuscript has been fully digitized and can be perused here. Dr. John-Mark Philo’s study of the manuscript has been published in the The Review of English Studies and can be read here.

Rare box-shaped Viking brooch found in Estonia

A rare early Viking brooch has been found in the village of Varja, northeastern Estonia. The box-shaped brooch is one of only two of its kind ever discovered in Estonia, and the other one has not been handed in to heritage authorities yet. The other one is also of later date.

The Varja brooch was made of bronze cast in a single piece. It is in excellent condition, intact with only minor damage to the surface, likely from agricultural activity disturbing it when it was underground, and its steel pin missing.

The decoration is of the Broa or Oseberg style, characterized by sinuous animal figures and “gripping beast” motifs (creatures grasping the borders around them in their paws, usually their own serpentine bodies or another animal). The Boa style dates the brooch to between the late 8th century and the mid-9th.

The brooch was unearthed at the site of an ancient wetland which is believed to have had a single farm during the Viking era.

Kiudsoo explained that the village of Varja is situated in the northeastern part of the ancient parish of Askälä, and that this region on Estonia’s northern coast, between Purtse River and the present-day city of Kohtla-Järve, stands out for its exceptionally rich archaeological find material. The Eastern Route, an important Viking-era trade route, ran along Estonia’s northern coast.

The archaeologist said that he believes that the brooch found at Varja belonged to a woman born on the island of Gotland, who took up residence in the Viru region of Estonia later in her life. Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that similar decorative items were in widespread use in Gotland during the Viking era, but are not common elsewhere. Kiudsoo said that hundreds of box-shaped brooches like the one recently found in Estonia have been found in Gotland.

5,000-year-old group burial chamber found in France

Archaeologists have discovered a Neolithic hypogeum, an underground tomb with a corridor leading to the burial chamber, in Saint-Memmie, a town in the Marne department of northeastern France. It dates to 3500-3000 B.C. and contains the skeletal remains of at least 50 individuals, plus grave goods including limestone beads from a necklace, perforated animal canines used as pendants and flint tools.

First bones emerge in hypogeum excavation. Photo courtesy INRAP.The Marne region has a particular concentration of hypogea due to its chalk subsoil which makes digging under the ground or in the sides of cliffs comparatively easy. While 160 of them have been found in Marne over the centuries, only five of them have been scientifically documented. The rest were dug up and emptied out without archaeological investigation. The Saint-Memmie excavation, therefore, is a unique opportunity to use the latest and greatest methods and technology to reveal new information about this funerary practice.

The hypogeum consists of an entrance opening on to a sloping corridor 12.5 feet long. It widens out to an antechamber that tightens again, leaving just wide enough a doorway for a man to pass through. This design is typical of the hypogea in the Marne region, but it does have one unusual feature: the entrance was accessible from ground level when it was built.

The chamber is 65 square feet in area and contains multiple layers of bones. They are densely packed in the space, interlocked with each other, and some of them have been burned. There are remains of adult men and women, adolescents, young children and infants. More than 2,000 bones and 50 skulls have been unearthed thus far.

The excavation will continue for a month and the bones will be painstakingly recorded before removal to allow archaeologists to unravel the threads of how the bodies were deposited and when, how the bones were rearranged both by natural means when the tissues decomposed and artificially when the remains were reorganized during later deposits. Laboratory analysis of the bones will hopefully give a more precise idea of the number of people buried here, their age at time of death, sex, health, any familial relationships and the date range of when the hypogeum was in use.

Roman silver coin hoard found in Switzerland

A hoard of 293 silver denarii in excellent condition has been unearthed near Pratteln in northwestern Switzerland. There is no surviving container, but the coins were all found in a small hole together, so they had to have been buried in one event. The coins date from the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D., mostly the latter. The oldest denarius in the hoard was minted under the reign of the Emperor Nero, the youngest in Rome under Commodus in 181/182 A.D. The dates of the most recent coins suggest the hoard was cached at the end of the second century.

The total value of the coins at that time would have been significant. Almost 300 silver denarii is the equivalent of half the annual salary of a legionary. It is the second largest assemblage of pure Roman silver ever found in Switzerland, after the treasure of Augusta Raurica (Kaiseraugst) which, while far richer in total weight (58 kilos vs. one kilo) and status pieces (tableware, candelabra, silver bars), its complement of coins was a mere 187. Hoards of thousands of Roman coins have been found, but they are a hundred years younger than the Pratteln coins and the currency was so debased their silver content was practically nil. The denarii of the 1st and 2nd century were 100% silver. The ones of the third century were less than 3% silver.

The hoard of silver denarii was discovered by Archäologie Baselland volunteer Sacha Schneider while on a metal detecting investigation of the slopes of Mount Adlerberg. It was in a wooded area with no conspicuous features that you might expect to mark the spot of buried treasure, but perhaps there was something notable there in the second century A.D. when the hoard was hidden. Archaeologists would never have found it on their own. They’re primarily engaged in salvage excavations in advance of construction or in exploring known sites, so for the past decade they have enlisted volunteers like Schneider to explore the wider landscape and report anything they find. She alerted archaeologists in the Canton capital of Liestal and they excavated the hoard.

Today a suburb of Basel, the whole village of Pratteln is on the Federal Inventory of Swiss Heritage Sites and is one of the earliest known areas in the country to have been settled. The oldest artifact ever discovered in Switzerland, a 100,000-year-old hand axe, was found there in 1974. While the village as it is today was built around a monastery and castle in the 11th or 12th century, archaeological remains from the Neolithic, Celtic Iron Age and Roman Empire are evidence of that the area was occupied for millennia.

One of Pratteln’s Roman villas, the rural estate of Kästeli, was one of the largest country homes in the vicinity of Augusta Raurica. The Church of Saint Leodegar at the epicenter of Pratteln’s old town was built in the 13th century over the remains of a Roman villa. That villa would have had a clear view of the Adlerberg slope were the treasure was buried.