Rector’s Reflections
Thursday 12th December 2024
In the Bleak Midwinter: A Victorian View of Christmas
As you may or may not be aware, the Victorians loved a good story. Victorian poems and novels often focus on the exploration of the narrative art, using either a well-known story from the historical past, or a story specially created for the occasion. Such story telling often had a moral purpose to it. The stories in the Bible were ideal for this purpose: they were well-known, and could easily be used to communicate a moral or religious message. They were also set in an interesting, long-distant past, which had the perennial allure of the East. The Victorians certainly enjoyed stories set in the past. I think this might have been in part about nostalgia: Victorian England saw huge social changes, and a massive shift of population away from the countryside and into the cities. Many found such an era of change unsettling, and stories set in times past provided a welcome retreat from the challenges of the contemporary world. They could also be given a twist, to show how bad things were in the past and how much better things were in the modern, enlightened world.
In short, the Victorians loved a story. And Victorian Christians knew that Christianity is all about telling and living a story – the greatest story ever told. The design and decoration of Churches, and the careful observance of the liturgical year, were all designed to help Christians to proclaim the story of Christ. The Victorians knew that stories seize the imagination, and that our imaginations drive so much of what we do and hope to do in our lives. They owed this insight to the Romantic Movement, a European wide cultural movement which rediscovered the importance of feelings and emotions. The Victorians knew that very few people would ever be argued into becoming Christians. Christianity was as much about the heart as it was about the head. So telling the Christian story was absolutely crucial. A good story speaks to the heart, and it is the heart that matters.
So how would a Victorian Christian go about telling the story of Christmas? This presented particular challenges, because the story was so familiar. It is hard to tell a well-known story in an interesting and engaging manner.
Christina Rossetti meets the challenge in a subtle, and unexpected , manner. She begins without any explicit reference to Christmas at all:
“In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter, long ago”.
Christina is also at pains to use language and imagery which everyone could understand. Victorian society was increasingly democratic in its values, in the sense that it became important to stress the value and responsibility of every adult. This was largely about democracy among adult males, but there were beginning to be voices arguing that adult women should also be allowed and enabled to play a full role in this new democratic society. Education and political engagement were to be no longer the preserve of the wealthy: they were for everyone. So too, religion. One of the driving forces of Victorian Christianity was the desire to widen out the membership and impact of the Churches, so that they were no longer the preserve of the Middle and Upper Classes.
But note that Christina is also aware of the need to tell a story. The first three lines of her verse have no reference to time at all. But right at the end of the final line, there is the short but pregnant phrase : “long ago”. This phrase breaks the spell of timelessness, and prompts the question: so what happened next? Is this just about something which happened long ago, or does it have relevance for us today?
We shall explore this further in tomorrow’s reflections. But before I finish, let me ask the following question. Victorian Christians, including Christina Rossetti, knew the power of stories to communicate the Christian message. They tried hard to tell the Christian story in ways which were accessible and grasped the imagination of their contemporaries. They told stories which spoke to the heart. How might we tell the story of Christ in our own culture and to our own generation? If there is a current crisis of Church membership, might this actually be a crisis in Christian story-telling? Are we no longer telling stories which speak to the heart?