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(Journalist)
– The first commercially printed Christmas card is on sale – a cheerful scene from the Victorian era that scandalized some when it appeared in 1843. The card, sold online from Friday through a consortium led by Marvin Getman, a Boston-based dealer of rare books and manuscripts, features an English family toasting the recipient with glasses of red wine. “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you,” according to the AP. The map was designed by painter and illustrator John Callcott Horsley at the suggestion of Sir Henry Cole, a British civil servant and inventor who founded the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Cole is widely credited with starting the tradition of sending greeting cards, a multi-million dollar industry today. Only 1,000 copies of the hand-colored map were printed, and experts estimate that less than 30 have survived, Getman notes.
The card is said to have gone on sale the same week in December 1843 as Charles Dickens’. A Christmas Carol the first has been published. But for teetotalers – and there were plenty of them in the 19th century – the images featured a bit too much holiday cheer: in the foreground, for example, a young girl is pictured taking a sip from a glass of a adult. That didn’t suit the Puritanical Temperance Society at the time, which sparked such a stir that it took three years before another Christmas card was produced. “They were very distressed to see that in this ‘scandalous’ picture, they had children carrying a glass of wine with the adults. They had led a campaign to censor and remove it, ”says Justin Schiller, founder of Battledore Ltd., a new York-based antique book dealer who sells the map. Christie’s London auction house is also selling one of the few cards and says it expects the item to fetch up to $ 10,800. (Read more Christmas card stories.)
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