In his 1992 column on Victorian Christmases…
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_014.html
Cecil mentions “Clement Clarke Moore’s poem ‘A Visit from Saint Nicholas’”
It now seems that Moore’s authorship of this poem is in doubt and that Henry Livingston is now thought to be the author.
cite:
http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Exhibitions/Christmas/twas.htm
Cecil, which author are you backing?
they got nostalgic for a pre-Industrial Age rural idyll, of the type often depicted in idealised paintings of the time, free of the dirt, smoke, bustle and urban poverty of the cities which the 19th century had called into being (forgetting that rural poverty could be just as grinding and that pre-Industrial Age Britain suffered from frequent famines and economic stagnation)
Other researchers believe that the urban Victorians were nostalgic for the country Christmases of the past, whether they had the word “nostalgia” or not.
“…by the beginning of the nineteenth century the old ceremonies and festivities had become obsolete because, as the poet Robert Southey remarked in 1807, ‘In large towns the population is continually shifting; a new settler neither continues the customs of his own province in a place where they would be strange, nor adopts those which he finds, because they are strange to him, and thus all local differences are wearing out.’ Both Sir Walter Scott in 1808 and Washington Irving in 1820 had likewise lamented the passing of the old ‘country’ Christmas of twelve days of jollity and misrule. By the beginning of the Railway Age in the 1840s many people approaching middle age (as Dickens then was) began to look back nostalgically to the good, old days of coaches and hospitable inns, manorial feasts, and blazing yule-logs.”
Nostalgia, like Rice Chex, antacid tablets, and Dan Rather, is a product of modern urban industrial society, which is continually assaulted by change (AKA progress, for the optimists among us) and where most people have lost their sense of connection to the land.
What about the way the philosophers of the Renaissance idealised the ancient Greeks etc? Wasn’t that nostalgia?
Cecil’s answer has me baffled. People didn’t idealize the past until the 19th century? What was the Renaissance all about, if not the idealization of Antiquity? Even the Romans, or perhaps especially the Romans, were apt to be maudlin about their own past, not to mention that of the Greeks, and even of the Etruscans.
Everyone, at any time, thinks the past was a better place than their own time; it’s a fundamental human trait/delusion. Every civilization creates monuments and histories and poetry and so forth to honour and idealize the past, and every civilization dreams of partaking in ancient battles alongside ancient heroes.
Does Cecil also think conservatism is a 19th-century invention?
And Hesiod (roughly contemporary with Homer) writes of the Golden Age.
And we have our Renaissance faires, but the middle ages had “Round Tables”, and the Romans had Trojan re-enactments.
Nevertheless, the strength of the specific early-Victorian nostalgia anent Christmas, which became a positive program for Dickens – “A Christmas Carol” is only the first in a series – is the reason that we have inherited their traditions, many of which were their own ideas of reinstituting older traditions.
Of course people have always idealized the past. My point is that the folks in the early 19th century were (arguably) the first to idealize a simpler past. Previous generations had idealized a more complex one, namely that of the ancients. I don’t claim this is an airtight thesis - Rousseau had argued for the noble savage in the previous century. But I’d still say nostalgia as a widespread cultural phenomenon is a product of industrialization.
Well hello stranger…I was afraid you’d died. Good to see ya up and around. 