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A Victorian Christmas in St. Neots
from Cambs December 2022
by Villager Mag
By Peter Ibbett
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Our Victorian ancestors would have marvelled at our 21st century world. They would have enjoyed all the fun of the 2011 Christmas fair that took over the High Street in St. Neots, and would have been amazed at the quality and quality of goods on sale. But in their day there were no large power companies charging an arm and two legs for keeping you warm or a charitable government subsidising the cost of living. The good hearted townsfolk survived winter cold with only the aid of thick clothes and a few logs of wood and lumps of coal to keep the tentacles of Jack Frost at bay. Charles Dickens noted the Christmas of his era in one of his articles:- “Lavish profusion is in the shops: particularly in the articles of currants, raisins, spices, candied peel, and moist sugar. An unusual air of gallantry and dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch of mistletoe hanging in the greengrocer’s shop doorway, and a poor little Twelfth Cake, culminating in the figure of a Harlequin – such a very poor little Twelfth Cake, that one would rather call it a TwentyFourth Cake or a Forty-Eighth Cake – to be raffled for at the pastry cook’s, terms one shilling per member”. For those not so fortunate in the poor quality buildings on the fringe of town or in the back streets of Eynesbury there was no oven to cook a Christmas meal. Dickens takes Scrooge into the streets of the ordinary worker and his family:“Spirit,” said Scrooge submissively, “conduct me where you will.” They stood in the city streets on Christmas morning. There emerged from scores of bye-streets, innumerable people, carrying their dinners to the baker’s shops … the thawed blotch of wet above each baker’s oven where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.
Do visit St. Neots museum to meet Santa in his warm grotto and to enjoy the Craft Fair and gifts of all sorts in the shop.