This illustration from A Snow Baby: merry rhymes for pleasant times by G. Clifton Bingham (published by Ernest Nister, 1889) is of a small snow figure made out of actual snow, but snow babies, as solid figurines that wouldn’t melt, evolved out of early 19th century German cake decorations made from flour, sugar and gum, called tannenbaumkanfekt, used to decorate cakes and Christmas trees. The most popular were zuckerpuppes, or sugar dolls, which people used to create snow scenes underneath their Christmas trees, along with figurines of polar bears and igloos. Later on confectioners introduced versions made of marzipan.

The oldest snow babies were made in Germany in the 1890s out of bisque porcelain, white unglazed porcelain with a matte, textured finish. The little figurines sported all-in-one snowsuits with a roughened texture made to resemble snowflakes, and painted faces. They were popular with mothers of the time because they were reusable cake decorations, but were probably less favoured by children than the sugar variety!

The appearance of these bisque snow baby dolls in the 1890s coincided with a story that captured the public imagination – that of the baby girl born in Greenland in 1893 while her father, Admiral Robert Peary, was on an expedition to the Arctic. She was the first non-indigenous baby to be born that far north, and was called a snow baby by the local indigenous Inuit. There is a book about this by Katherine Kirkpatrick called The Snow Baby: The Arctic Childhood of Robert E. Peary’s Daring Daughter.  

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Away they went, helter-skelter! Tom and Joe, Bob and Dick, and Harry Price from Blackberry Farm, and Bessie, the lodge-keeper’s little daughter, shouting and laughing, past the mill and over the turnip-field, for school had broken up, and they had a whole month’s holiday to look forward to.

From In the Holidays by Graham Clifton Bingham, v. 1 in The Daisy Chain Library published in London by Ernest Nister & in New York by E.P. Dutton & Co., 1891.

Presumably this picture is of “Bessie, the lodge-keeper’s little daughter” clad in her gorgeous, deep red fur-trimmed coat, with ice skates strapped to her boots. Unfortunately there is no attribution for the illustrator.

However, the author of the verses is credited. Graham Clifton Bingham (1859-1913) was a composer, musician, lyricist and children’s book author. He contributed verses for several children’s picture books published by the German publisher and printer, Ernest Nister.

Perhaps he is best known for writing the lyrics for the Victorian parlour song Love’s Old Sweet Song (music by Irish composer James Lynam Molloy, 1837-1909), published in 1884. Hugely popular in the 1890s, the song was sometimes mistakenly known as Just a Song at Twilight, which was the first line of the song’s chorus. This is the title I remember, from when my grandmother used to sing it.

It was said at the time of Molloy’s death that every British home which had a piano had a copy of Love’s Old Sweet Song. The song’s popularity continued into the twentieth century, immortalised by Molly Bloom singing it in one of that century’s most famous books, James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922 in Paris by Sylvia Beach, of the famous bookshop Shakespeare & Company.

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Twice ten are twenty,
We shall all have plenty,
Each a slice, how very nice!

From ‘Oh Dear Oh Look at the Snow’ by Jack Frost, published in London by Dean & Son, 1884

Another delightful illustration by E.B., whose tiny initials you can see at the bottom left hand corner, against the border of the picture.

This gigantic plum pudding has a benign bearing, with a serene smile on its comfortable face. However, I’ve been looking into the portrayal of Christmas puddings in Victorian literature (as you do, if you’re a bit of a nerdy librarian) and have discovered that they were regularly depicted as far from benign in satirical periodicals. An amusing example of this is the cover of Judy’s Christmas Annual for 1895, which shows a young man awoken in terror by a snarling plum pudding sitting on his chest like an incubus. This witty illustration, which plays on Fuseli’s frightening painting The Nightmare of 1871, transforms an evil-looking incubus into a Christmas pudding, complete with a sprig of holly stuck in its head at a rakish angle, and provides a cautionary reminder to readers of the sleep-disrupting power of indigestion.

There is a long cultural history of linking indigestion with nightmares, and there are so many references to this in nineteenth century literature that we can only assume the Victorian diet must have been particularly indigestible. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Scrooge interprets the vision of Marley’s ghost as the hallucinatory consequence of indigestion: “you may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

All this pudding research put me in mind of a favourite book from my own childhood, and one which delighted my sons in their turn – the Australian classic The Magic Pudding, written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay, first published in 1918 and reprinted in the 1950s. The eponymous pudding, Albert, is the most bad tempered, spiteful pudding you could possibly imagine. I’ve included a couple of illustrations of him so you can see what I mean. However Albert, unlike his Victorian predecessors, is not in the least indigestible, in fact he is so delicious that he is under constant threat of being stolen from his rightful owners by nefarious puddin’ thieves. Philip Pullman thinks it’s the funniest children’s book ever written. The Magic Pudding deserves a post devoted solely to its brilliance …

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Keep on rolling as fast as you can go !
The further you push it,
the more you’ll have to show.
See! it’s getting larger !
Push with all your might !
Wait a little longer, –
Won’t it be a sight !

From ‘Oh Dear Oh Look at the Snow’ by Jack Frost, published in London by Dean & Son, 1884

Jack Frost is a pseudonym of course, and I don’t know who the real author was of this book of children’s poetry. The illustrations are signed E.B. I don’t know who E.B. was either. I remember the frustration, while working on the Tower Project, of not being able to track down authors and artists, particularly if I liked their work. We used actual reference books in the impressive Reading Room to try to solve knotty problems like this. Real bibliographic sleuthing!

These children playing in the snow are very fancily dressed – look at the boy at the back, leaning on the snowball, in his natty check outfit with lace collar. In fact all the boys have lace collars! And the little girl in a frilly bonnet and sash is carrying an umbrella as big as she is. Would she have called it a gamp? Gamp was a slang term for umbrella, thought to derive from Sarah (Sairey) Gamp in Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit, who always carried  a large umbrella.

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From “Father Christmas’ ABC” published by F. Warne & Co., 1894, illustrated by Alfred J. Johnson.