In the Scotsman on Boxing Day 1867, the following article detailed an outsider’s account of strange goings-on the previous day in the fleshpots of London.
The Scottish journalist, like many others since at this time of year, found little to report.
He is sniffy about the English celebration of Christmas, widespread antisocial behaviour, and drunken disruption of midnight services; and concerned at possible, misplaced public reaction to an act of terrorism (the Clerkenwell Outrage) committed a fortnight earlier.
Once again, it is all surprisingly familiar.
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(BY SPECIAL WIRE AND ORDINARY
EXPRESS.)
CHRISTMAS IN LONDON
(From our Special Correspondent.)
LONDON, Wednesday evening.
It would be difficult to imagine anything duller and more dreary than to-night here for any one who like myself is a picker up of unconsidered trifles of news. No evening papers are published. The police and law courts are closed. The Stock Exchange is barred against all comes, if there were any; and the city is as near being a howling wilderness as anything in and about London can be anterior to the arrival of that pet New Zealander who is so often brought out of Macaulay’s famous essay. Literally, as I write, there is scarcely an atom of news. Fenianism has not had much influence, as it seems to me, in the way of depressing the people here. Last night was certainly noisier than I ever remember to have heard a Christmas Eve in London or anywhere else. All through the small hours, the streets were paraded by bands of young roughs, quarrelling and fighting and yelling at each other, making night hideous with their tipsy snatches from music-hall comic songs. Here and there in the suburbs you came upon bands of men and women singing carols very loudly. I can only say of their performances, being myself a great admirer of carols well sung, that distance lent enchantment to the sound—the further you got away from them, the more you liked them.
To-night, as far as I am able to judge, promises again to be very drunken. The streets are getting fuller and fuller of men and women more or less intoxicated. The public-houses close on Christmas Day here, as on Sundays, at eleven o’clock; and as they turned out their reeling boisterous customers, it was not very safe in some districts for unprotected females to be near. This morning, of course, the churches were all open for divine service, and were largely attended. The Roman Catholic churches, too, had overflowing congregations at the different masses. The heads of the Catholic Church in London, as you are aware, prohibited this year the usual midnight mass. The reason was, that those service have not been devoid of scandal hitherto; but this year it was feared that the excitement in the public mind as to Fenianism might lead even to grave disturbances. They were, therefore, prohibited. Archbishop Manning, I am informed, preached at the eleven o’clock mass at Moorfields Cathedral, and in the course of his sermon gave some very good advice to his hearers as to avoiding Fenianism , and all similar conspiracies.
[Image: Wikimedia Commons.]
