Mary Elizabeth Braddon and her Christmas Novel

Our wonderful Bolton published Mary Elizabeth Braddon who also ‘authored Christmas pieces that showcase literary reactions to the developing issues of hunger [during the Victorian era]’ (Moore, 2008). So why isn’t her work on the subject as noted as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and his depiction of starvation and poverty?

Firstly, Dickens’ work for A Christmas Carol was a spectacular clash of ‘indulgence and poverty’ (Moore, 2008) in which the reader was encouraged to feel guilty about their own indulgence and lack of thought for the impoverished during the Christmas period. Whereas, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s text, The Christmas Hirelings, written in 1893, ‘revise[d] the well-known blend of starvation and Christmas Fare’ (Moore, 2008). Originally published in the Lady’s Pictorial, it was well received and surprisingly regarded ‘as one of the best pieces of work she has done’ in The Review of Reviews (1893, p.673). Writing for a middle-class market, Braddon herself described the text as ‘a story about children, which should be interesting for grown-up people’ (The Sensation Press, 2023), while it was also considered ‘a pretty story for children’ by The Saturday Review (1894, p. 646). It could be argued that Dickens’s work was far more accessible and interesting to the wider socially-conscious Victorian reader, whereas Braddon’s was more focused on appealing to a specific adult, bourgeois female readership. Perhaps, it was due to the flooding of the literary market of texts so similar that Braddon’s work became background noise for the Victorian reader, or perhaps the idea of hiring impoverished children over the Christmas period to ‘help’ them, didn’t give readers as much hope or faith as Dickens achieved in Scrooge’s volte-face on Christmas and the poorly ‘Tiny Tim’.

If you are interested in finding out more, why not read Braddon’s The Christmas Hirelings, below: