BooksOfTheMoon

Old Christmas: From the Sketch Book

By Washington Irving

Rating: 2 stars

This is an odd little book. It starts off with an essay describing why Christmas was better in the Old Days and then proceeds to a travelogue in which the narrator runs into an old friend while travelling the country at Christmas and is invited to the family homestead where he encounters all sorts of quaint old traditions in the old school.

I don’t really grok this book. I’m not sure if it’s parodying the sort of nostalgia which Britain has been famed for these last centuries or whether it’s actually indulging in such nostalgia. The one thing that I did admire about the book is the illustrations. Apparently Randolph Caldecott was a well-regarded artist in his day, and the illustrations are lush, from the full-page ones to the smaller ones that adorn almost every page, they’re very definitely beautiful.

I mostly picked the book up because the edition that I found was very old, and I love old books. This particular one was from 1903 and has a handwritten inscription from 1905 on the inside and another one below that to the original writer’s granddaughter, and I loved that. The book itself failed to grab me though. If nothing else, at least it’s short.

Book details

ISBN: 9781603550789
Publisher: Juniper Grove
Year of publication: 1820

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