Christmas gift-books and holiday stories:The rise and demise of lucrative markets for nineteenth-century authors

A cover of The Token and
Atlantic Souvenir: a Christmas
and New Year's present (c. 1852)
Courtesy of the Library Company

An 1895 article in The Publishers’ Weekly notes the passing of a trend that had lasted most of the century: “Sets of an authors’ works or a special work profusely and artistically illustrated have almost entirely superseded the old-fashioned Christmas gift-books so largely at one time a feature of the holiday publishing season.” Initially a British development, these “old-fashioned” Christmas annuals spread to America early during the early 1800s. Their heyday was the first half of the century, although a number of them continued to be published until the 1860s, and attempts to resuscitate them continued until the early 1900s. A century ago, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature emphasized their importance to American literary history by devoting an entire chapter to Christmas gift-books: “Almost or quite all of those published in America were literary miscellanies, the contents being original, or, in case of some of the cheaper volumes, ‘selected.’”

Most of the material published in the annuals was what we would describe as “down-market,” but, attracted by the lucrative pay, many prominent authors were featured as well. William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia H. Sigourney, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier all contributed to annuals. (In fact, many of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales first appeared in holiday gift-books.) Because the annuals were meant to be read—and sold—all year, the contents were rarely seasonal; readers didn’t buy holiday annuals for Christmas stories.

The rise of the holiday story was instead a separate, later development; as the annuals waned, seasonally themed issues of magazines provided an alternative source of income for authors. Penne L. Restad, in her book Christmas in America, puzzles over how initially these stories “appeared only sporadically and during seemingly odd times of the year. Harper’s Monthly, for example, made its first reference to Christmas in a poem, ‘The Approach of Christmas,’ in its August 1850 issue. Godey’s first literary tribute to the holiday, ‘A Christmas Hymn,’ ran in February of 1841.” Indeed, the grandfather of the American Christmas story, Washington Irving, published his famous sketches as part of the serially-published Sketch Book. His four holiday pieces—“Christmas,” “The Stage Coach,” “Christmas Eve,” and “Christmas Day”—originally appeared in January 1820—and they were not published until July in England. (In the English and subsequent American editions, the fourth piece was split into two: “Christmas Morning” and “The Christmas Dinner.”)

Eventually, however, magazines began publishing Christmas-themed stories, recipes, and illustrations in their December issues every year. By 1865 their prominence was notable enough that Mark Twain would publish a devastating parody, “The Christmas Fireside (for Good Little Boys and Girls),” in the December 23, 1863, issue of The Californian. In a study of Kate Chopin’s career, Emily Toth writes, “The market for conversion and happily-ever-after stories for Christmas and Easter was immense. It was also one of the best sources of income and recognition for professional writers.” It was a Christmas story that first brought Chopin to the attention of a national audience when it was syndicated by the American Press Association.

Like the Christmas gift-books that preceded them, magazine issues devoted to holiday stories have virtually vanished; with occasional exceptions, Christmas-themed fiction seems to have been largely relegated to the children’s literature market or, less frequently, to “regular” issues of literary magazines. When William Maxwell published a Christmas story in 1986 (“The Lily-White Boys”), it appeared in the Summer-Fall issue of The Paris Review.

With best wishes to our readers for a happy and healthy holiday season, we present three selections for Christmas from Story of the Week:

Washington Irving, “The Christmas Dinner” (1820)
Irving’s alter-ego Geoffrey Crayon is invited to Bracebridge Hall for an old-fashioned English Christmas celebration.

Mark Twain, “The Christmas Fireside (for Good Little Boys and Girls)” (1865)
An impishly wicked story about the monstrously wicked little boy to whom only good things happened.

William Maxwell, “The Lily-White Boys” (1986)
Arriving home to a ransacked townhouse after a lovely Christmas party, a married couple experiences a moment of grace.

Eudora Welty and William Maxwell: Letters formed a fifty-year friendship

In an early passage in the series of lectures later published as One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), Eudora Welty reflected on her training as a child:

You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned “Now I lay me” and the Lord’s Prayer and your father’s and mother’s name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.

That last phrase touched a nerve when she sent the lectures to her close friend and editor William Maxwell:

“In case you were lost” struck a responsive chord in my soul. I was lost, or thought I was. In Peoria. My mother was shopping in Block and Kuhl’s department store and thinking I was sufficiently absorbed with the toys I wouldn’t notice her absence, whipped up to the floor above to look at linen sheets, and when I turned around and she wasn’t there, it was as if a pit opened in front of me. What tears. There I was far from home. No mother. I sometimes wonder how I got through the remaining seventy years of my life.

Maxwell’s mother died of influenza when he was ten and, as Christopher Carduff notes in his LOA interview about Maxwell, it was “the defining event of his early life. . . In a very real sense the world stopped for him in the winter of 1918, and almost all of his best writing is a moving, literary attempt to re-create and preserve that world.” Maxwell re-examined his mother’s death in two novels, They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow.

The intimate novelistic detail in Maxwell’s letter is wonderfully typical of the exchanges in the 300 letters included in What There is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, edited by Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs and published earlier this year by Houghton Mifflin. Welty and Maxwell first met in New York when both were both in their early thirties. Welty was already a published writer and Maxwell, eager to acquire one of her pieces for The New Yorker, immediately began corresponding—and the letters between New York and Mississippi continued for more than fifty years.

Yet, it was nine years before Maxwell succeeded in convincing The New Yorker to take a Welty story. Harold Ross found “The Whole World Knows” “too arty.” The breakthrough came in 1951 with “The Bride of the Innisfallen” (I love your train story beyond all possibility of telling you”), followed quickly by “Kin” (I read “Kin” right straight through, looking for large sections that could be cut, and I couldn’t find any”) and “No Place for You, My Love” (“It’s beyond praise”). Maxwell edited all seven works Welty published in The New Yorker: five stories and two novels. By the time the correspondence reaches one of Welty’s last stories, “The Demonstrators,” more specific points of editing get addressed, as when Welty writes:

Dashes I like better than parentheses—remembering Mark Twain’s remark from somewhere, “He who would wantonly use a parenthesis would steal”—so if you agree, dash it.

Welty captured what she treasured about letter writing in her introduction to The Norton Book of Friendship:

All letters, old and new, are the still-existing parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth—or perhaps untruth, some flash of light—is just occurring. It is clamorous with the moment’s happiness or pain. To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship. What we’ve been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, still mischievous and mischief-making, arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago.

There are occasions when Maxwell draws inspiration from Welty, as when he dislikes Knopf’s jacket copy for So Long, See You Tomorrow so much he rewrites it:

At the end of two days . . . at my wit’s end, I helped myself to a sentence from your letter in order to get the bloody thing out of the house: “It has an inner force that never lets go.” And without giving you credit, since that would be the same thing as asking for a quote, which I would rather put my head on the railroad tracks in front of an incoming train than do to my friends.

In her introduction editor Marrs describes the unusual affinity the two writers had:

The keen intellect, the sense of humor, the lack of self-absorption, the embracing of experience in all its complexity, the capacity for love, the generosity of spirit, and the ability to face loss and death—these constitute the invisible signatures of Welty and Maxwell, signatures that are as powerfully present in their letters as in their fiction.

Also of interest:

• Suzanne Marrs reads 23-year-old Eudora Welty’s letter applying for a job at The New Yorker (“There’s no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down”)
• The Eudora Welty Foundation
• William Maxwell, novelist, editor, born 102 years ago, a previous Reader's Almanac post

Related LOA works: William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories (includes They Came Like Swallows): William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories (includes So Long, See You Tomorrow); Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, and Memoir (includes One Writer’s Beginnings and all five New Yorker stories)

Twenty poets celebrate the 100th birthday of Elizabeth Bishop in New York City

Last night poetry lovers filled the 900-seat Great Hall at Cooper Union to hear twenty poets celebrate the 100th birthday of Elizabeth Bishop by each reading one of her poems. As organizer Alice Quinn noted in her interview with the Best American Poetry blog before the event, the readers reflected the far-ranging influence Bishop has had on several generations of poets:

There will be poets in their 30s like Gabriele Calvocoressi and Tracy K. Smith and mid-career poets like Elizabeth Alexander, Kimiko Hahn, and Vijay Seshadri and magisterial figures like John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Mark Strand, Jean Valentine, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Marie Ponsot. So many of these poets down the years have been and are teachers, and Bishop's reputation has grown in classrooms all over the world.

The event was presented by the Poetry Society of America and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, with the Academy of American Poets, the National Book Foundation, Poets House, and the Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y. Joelle Biele, Frank Bidart, Tina Chang, James Fenton, Jonathan Galassi, David Lehman, Robert Polito, Katha Pollitt, and Tom Sleigh rounded out the stellar roster. (John Ashbery was not able to participate as planned.)

In an inventive bit of programming three additional readers took turns between poems giving voices to the correspondents responsible for the contents of the new collection, Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, edited by Joelle Biele. Paul Muldoon read letters from William Maxwell and Howard Moss, Alice Quinn read those from Katharine S. White, and Maria Tucci read as Elizabeth Bishop.

The letters frequently related to the poem about to be read. For instance, Muldoon cited this letter of May 13, 1948, from William Maxwell about “The Bight”:

Our style expert says we can’t grant two of your requests on the proof of The Bight. The italic subtitle is against the style of the magazine, and the lower case “g” in the fourth line from the end is, he says, against English and would look monstrous. I don’t know what “against English” can possibly mean, and personally, I like things that look monstrous. But these two details would, it seems, rock the foundations of the magazine, and I hope you won’t mind our leaving them the way they are.
    Cordially yours,
        William Maxwell

When Bishop included the poem in A Cold Spring she kept the upper case “G” in the line “Click. Click. Goes the dredge.” But she restored the italics for the subtitle, which fittingly for last night’s reading was “On My Birthday.”

Also of interest:

• Read “Was It in His Hand?”, a long-lost story by Elizabeth Bishop, this week’s Story of the Week
• The Poetry Society is hosting another gala reading of Bishop’s work this Thursday in Boston

Related LOA works: Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters; William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories

William Maxwell, novelist, editor, born 102 years ago

Today is the birthday of William Keepers Maxwell Jr. (1908–2000). Author of six novels and scores of short stories, he wrote his first story at 24 and continued to write and publish into his 91st year. A legendary editor at The New Yorker for more than forty years, Maxwell shaped the work and careers of writers who defined the literature of the second half of the twentieth century: Harold Brodkey, Mavis Gallant, Shirley Hazzard, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Eudora Welty, and the three Johns—Cheever, O’Hara, and Updike. In two volumes The Library of America has collected all six of his novels, 27 of his stories, several essays, and 40 of what Maxwell called “improvisations,” or literary fairy tales.

Maxwell moved from small-town Illinois to New York City when he was 25, but much of his fiction recreates his childhood world: “I had no idea then," he later wrote, "that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The look of things. The Natural History of home . . . All there, waiting for me to learn my trade and recognize instinctively what would make a story.”

As volume editor Christopher Carduff put it in one of his two LOA interviews about Maxwell, “I think Maxwell, in reaction against Spoon River and Winesburg and Zenith, wanted to bring fiction-readers the good and surprising news that one could be born, raised, and buried in a town like Lincoln, Illinois, and yet be happy and fulfilled and receptive to the best that life has to offer.”

When he was ten Maxwell’s mother died from the influenza epidemic of 1918 and this traumatic event governs the action in two of his most acclaimed novels: They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow. Recalling the experience of reading So Long, See You Tomorrow (and then wanting to read “every short story I could find”) Alice Munro wrote, “I thought: so this is how it should be done. I thought: If only I could go back and write again every single thing that I have written.”

In May 1945 Maxwell married Emily Gilman Noyes, a woman thirteen years his junior he had met eight months earlier when she interviewed for a job at The New Yorker. They deferred their honeymoon until 1948, and their four-month tour of Europe became the basis for Maxwell’s fifth novel, The Château:

I walked into our house on a country road forty miles north of New York City, put the suitcases down, and with my hat still on my head sat down to my typewriter and wrote a page of notes for a novel. I thumbtacked it to the bookcase behind me and didn’t look at it again. For the next ten years I lived in my own private France, which I tried painstakingly to make real to the reader. It was my way of not coming home.

Interweaving travelogue and history, The Château follows the adventures of a thinly disguised couple as they tour postwar France, much of the drama drawn from the Maxwells’ own late summer stay with a family in Blois. Their experiences frequently diverge from what the guidebooks promise:

He yawned. The guidebook slipped through his fingers and joined the pocket dictionary on the rug. After a minute or two he got up and stood at the window. The heavy shutters opened in, and the blackout paper was crinkled and torn and beginning to come loose. Three years after the liberation of France it was still there. No one in a burst of happiness and confidence in the future had ripped it off. Germans, he thought, standing where he stood now, with their elbows on the sill. Looking off toward the river that was there but could not be seen. Lathering their cheeks before the shaving stand . . . Did Mme Bonenfant and Mme Viénot eat with their unwelcome guests, or in the kitchen, or where?

Summing up Maxwell’s achievement in his review of the two Library of America volumes in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote:

He lived for art, its appreciation as well as its creation. In “Nearing Ninety,” he likened death to lying down for a pleasant afternoon nap and found “unbearable” only the thought that “when people are dead they don’t read books.” His shapely, lively, gently rigorous memoirs, out of the abundance of heartfelt writing he bestowed on posterity, are most like being with Bill in life, at lunch in midtown or at home in the East Eighties, as he intently listened, and listened, and then said, in his soft dry voice, exactly the right thing.

The LOA volumes include a detailed chronology written by Christopher Carduff which Updike singled out for praise: “[Carduff’s] twenty-nine pages labelled ‘Chronology’ approach the intimacy and interest of a full-length biography.”

Related LOA works: William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories; William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories