From Austen to Hardy to Trollope, With a Side of Bassoons

A Hampshire Christmas, Sutton Publishing

I found the first one of these Sutton Christmas anthologies (A Worcestershire Christmas, if you care) at a library book sale several years back. I think the coronavirus emergency made me a little crazy this year; every time I found a book from this series for less than five dollars with postage, I bought one and managed to accumulate ten (or is it eleven?). These contain short excerpts of Christmas/Christmastide passages from various British novels, memoirs, and poetry books, with the action taking place in the shire or historical era denoted in the title.

After being a bit disappointed at the book of Essex memories, this book about Hampshire is more in a festive mood. Hampshire, southwest of London and containing both big English seaports like Portsmouth and Southhampton, plus the famous New Forest, is noted for Captain Marryot's book Children of the New Forest and for its ponies, plus being known for both Trollope, Hardy, and Jane Austen. All three writers are represented in this volume, including Hardy's poem "Old Christmas Eve" and an excerpt from Austen's Emma. BBC announcer and producer John Arlott provides a detail-rich sensual memory of Hampshire Christmases in the 1920s. There are several entries about the gypsies (Romany people) who used to live in and around the New Forest and were allowed to harvest holly to sell during certain weeks of the Christmas season (the 1970s BBC series All Creatures Great and Small episode "Merry Gentlemen" features a similar plot about gypsies and mistletoe). "Christmas Be Come" and "When Christmas Passed This Way" are two pieces of verse from Norman Goodland, who provides other Hampshire-accent contributions in the volume.

Later, Charles Clark provides a portrait of his Edwardian Christmas memories, Irene Pilson chats about Christmases during the first World War, noted Victorian author Charlotte Yonge recalls holiday customs and Christmas plants, "The Man Who Lost Christmas" is an amusing tale of a Victorian gent whose wife's resentment of all the time he spends practicing his bassoon comes to a head one Christmas morning, and Christmas tree poaching and point-to-point racing customary on Boxing Day are also addressed. A good variety thereof, although the excerpts from A Christmas Carol seem out of place (the author included them because Charles Dickens was raised in Portsmouth).