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The first commercially printed Christmas card is for sale, a joyous Victorian-era scene that shocked some when it first appeared in 1843.
The card, which is sold online through a consortium led by Marvin Getman, a Boston-based rare book and manuscript dealer, shows an English family toasting the recipient with glasses of red wine.
“Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you,” it reads. But for teetotalers, and there were many in the 19th century, the images included too much Christmas cheer: In the foreground, a girl is shown taking a sip from an adult’s glass.
That did not sit well with the puritanical Temperance Society at the time, which caused so much uproar that it took three years before another Christmas card was produced.
“They were quite distressed that in this scandalous image they had children toasting a glass of wine with the adults. They had a campaign to censor and suppress it, ”said Justin Schiller, founder and president of Battledore, a Kingston, New York-based antique book dealer that sells the card.
Getman said the hand-colored lithograph is believed to have been a sample from a seller. Only 1,000 copies were printed and sold for a shilling each, and experts believe fewer than 30 have survived, he said.
The card, intended to serve as a Christmas and New Year greeting, 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 and Albert Museum in London.
Cole is credited with starting the tradition of sending Christmas cards, a multi-billion dollar industry today.
It is believed to have been released the same week in December 1843 that Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was first published.
Christie’s auction house in London is also selling one of the rare cards and says it expects the item to fetch between £ 5,000 and £ 8,000 ($ 6,725 to $ 10,800).
