Interesting indeed

[mme_hardy]

This 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.

Comments

[legionseagle]

There's a difference, also, between white Christmases in the UK and bad winters; here's a summary of cold weather during the relevant period. One of the features of winter in the UK is that the period of mid-January to late Feb is the worst for snow, and Christmas is just too early for it.

1814, of course, was the year which gave rise to the story of Manchester's Ice Maiden, Lavinia Robinson, a schoolteacher engaged to a doctor. On December 17 they quarrelled (he having leapt to the conclusion that she was Seeing Someone Else, when in fact she was being pestered and harassed by said someone else) and the doctor hit her or pushed her away violently while they were on a snowy walk over New Bailey Street Bridge. He then (allegedly)abandoned her in the street to make her own way home. She does appear to have got home, since she left a note on her dressing table asserting her innocence of the claims of unchastity he'd thrown at her, but then vanished.

The frost continued. She did not reappear. Descriptions were circulated, rewards were offered, and when the thaw finally occurred on 7 February Lavinia's body emerged three miles downstream from the bridge, "reclining on a sandbank, environed by masses of ice and with icicles gemming her hair in the place of orange blossoms."

Somewhat callously, the doctor waited until the inquest had shown the corpse to be virgo intacta before apologising for the suspicions he'd held but the people of Manchester decided to give him rough music anyway, and he had to leave town and may have committed suicide.

[mme_hardy]

You do have the best Gothic tragedies.

"One of the features of winter in the UK is that the period of mid-January to late Feb is the worst for snow, and Christmas is just too early for it."

My husband and I were agreeing that this described the snowable places we'd lived as well. The sustained cold doesn't really get going until January.

[legionseagle]

Manchester does that; the people here are born with a natural sense of the dramatic (and, in many cases, impeccable comic timing).

[malkingrey]

Up here in far northern New England, in most years by the time we get to mid-January it's too bitterly cold to snow -- if we're going to get heavy snowfalls, they mostly come in late December and early March.

You know you've lived up here too long when you hear yourself describing a 32°F day,without irony, as "balmy and springlike."

[http://users.livejournal.com/tesserae_/]

So interesting... We don't think of snowy London Christmases now but Dickens certainly would have had those memories.

I was reading something a while back that theorized that the "Dark Ages" were another time when the weather was largely cold and unpredictable, leading to poor harvests & famines; with overall warming starting around the 1100s (?), harvests improved, which led to the accumulation of wealth & general Europe-wide prosperity which in turn made the developments of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance possible.