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Interesting indeed
Dec. 29th, 2012 09:44 amThis came up on QI a couple of weeks ago, and I've been turning it over ever since. QI had details; I have only an imprecise memory of the story.
It turns out that there were very few years in 19th-century England with white Christmases. The Little Ice Age was ending. The final big cold spell was in the 'teens. The last Frost Fair, when the Thames froze so hard you could hold a party on it, was in 1814. (The Thames Embankment and the new London Bridge had a lot to do with this.) Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death, the Year without a Summer caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora, was in 1816. In all, there were seven consecutive years in the teens with white Christmases... and nearly none thereafter.
Why is the popular image of Victorian Christmas full of snow snow, when in fact snow on Christmas was rare? Because Charles Dickens, born 1812, was a little boy in the teens. His childhood Christmases were white, and so were the Christmas annuals he wrote in the mid-1800s, when the snows had gone.
It turns out that there were very few years in 19th-century England with white Christmases. The Little Ice Age was ending. The final big cold spell was in the 'teens. The last Frost Fair, when the Thames froze so hard you could hold a party on it, was in 1814. (The Thames Embankment and the new London Bridge had a lot to do with this.) Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death, the Year without a Summer caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora, was in 1816. In all, there were seven consecutive years in the teens with white Christmases... and nearly none thereafter.
Why is the popular image of Victorian Christmas full of snow snow, when in fact snow on Christmas was rare? Because Charles Dickens, born 1812, was a little boy in the teens. His childhood Christmases were white, and so were the Christmas annuals he wrote in the mid-1800s, when the snows had gone.
