Christmas scenes: awful judge-y about Xmas stockings

 Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford

published 1932

 [Excerpt]

[A Christmas house party at Compton Bobbin, a country house in the Cotswolds]

Christmas stockings, in thickest worsted, bought specially for the occasion, were handed to the guests just before bedtime on Christmas Eve, with instructions that they were to be hung up on their bedposts. Lady Bobbin and her confederate Lord Leamington Spa…. sallied forth together [later], clasping a large basket full of suitable presents, upon a stealthy noctambulation, during the course of which every stocking was neatly filled. The objects thus distributed were exactly the same every year, a curious and wonderful assortment including a pocket handkerchief, Old Moore’s Almanack, a balloon not yet blown up, a  mouth organ, a ball of string, a penknife, an instrument for taking stones out of horses’ shoes, a book of jokes, a puzzle, and a chocolate baby…

Alas! Most of Lady Bobbin’s guests felt they would willingly have foregone these delightful and inexpensive objects in return for the night’s sleep of which they were thus deprived. Forewarned though they were, the shadowy and terrifying appearance of Lord Leamington Sp fumbling about the foot of their beds in the light of a flickering candle gave most of them such a a fearful start that all thoughts of sleep were banished for many hours to come

 

comments: This seems somewhat ungracious and ungrateful – although Lady Bobbin is a figure of fun, and not supposed to be particularly nice, at least she is trying to give her guests a treat.

There’s a sharp dividing line in the works of Nancy Mitford: she wrote four novels between 1931 and 1940, and then another four between 1945 and 1960. The first four are light-hearted but sometimes heavy-handed, forgettable, and only of any interest because of who wrote them. The second tranche contains substantial works of genius which will live forever, and one dud.

I wrote about the dud, The Blessing, here, describing the whole situation:

Three of Nancy Mitford’s post-war books – The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, and Don’t Tell Alfred are among my favourite novels of all time, and I have read them many times. The pre-war ‘comedies’ are fairly awful, and I usually file The Blessing along with them.

Christmas Pudding may be the best of her second-rankers, helped by the fact that its main downside is that she was writing too much like her great friend Evelyn Waugh, and there are worse ways to fail. He had produced Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies by the time Christmas Pudding appeared, and the influence of Decline, in particular, is clear. One of Mitford’s main characters is called Paul Fotheringay, where the hero of Decline and Fall is Paul Pennyfeather, and each Paul works as tutor to a young man. Much of the dialogue is very Waugh-esque. In Christmas Pudding, there is a discussion of school sports days: one character says that at his school 

‘we had a most handy little cemetery for the fathers, just behind the cricket pav. But of course we had a fathers’ three-legged race which used to finish them off in shoals. I have even known them die at the prize-giving, from shock, I suppose, if their boys got prizes.’

This could have come straight out of Decline and Fall (remember Captain Grimes and the starting gun?) – but it is also one of the more entertaining moments in the book.

The plot – such as it is – features two country houses in the Cotswolds, both assembling house parties for Christmas. There are various romances and intrigues, and also a trip (sadly offstage) to a New Year’s Eve fancy dress ball in the Albert Hall. There is a blogpost on this rather niche subject here, based on a book by Robert Irwin – I love a fancy dress ball, one at New Year is even better, and I have assembled some rather wonderful pictures of such events… do take a look. But then - when I wrote about the Irwin book, staunch blogfriend Roger Allen recommended this website for pictures of the Chelsea Arts Club event, and they are truly marvellous. Here’s a taster:

- just in case you didn’t already think it a pity Mitford didn’t feature the Ball more.

However there are very good brief descriptions of debutante life, balls in private houses, and the dreaded ‘girls’ lunches’ during the all-important social season – Mitford had done this some years before: she was 28 when this book was published. And also a funny mercenary discussion weighing up how much money a boring man would have to have to make him eligible. ‘I fixed a definite price at which I was willing to overlook boringness…. £25,000 a year.’

Paul, tutor at the grand house, is tempted to go hunting when his hostess/employer, Lady Bobbin, a woman of firm opinions, voices her bitter criticisms of the younger women, who – according to her – wear too much make-up and wear over-elaborate clothes. Paul ‘hoping to see some painted sirens’ goes along, but sees only ‘hard, weather-beaten faces devoid of artificial aids to beauty, no ‘satin stocks and pretty painted faces’. (Lady Bobbin in fact has some of the seeds of the immortal Uncle Matthew from Mitford’s later books.) There were a few moments like this that I found entertaining and original. But on the whole, the book is for Mitford completists, a group that would always include me.

Waugh and Mitford were friends their whole adult lives, and their collected correspondence would be one of my Desert Island books, along with Mitford’s trio of great novels. There’s a list of books about the Mitfords at the end of this blogpost, and there are many, many blogposts on all aspects of Mitford-ry. And quite a few about Evelyn Waugh.

See also recent updating of Nancy Mitford by India Knight.

Picture of Christmas stocking from the NYPL.

Picture of a debutante – in this case an Australian young woman – from the State Library of Queensland

Woman dressed for riding from the Library of Congress.