Time for some fun and games
The Victorians shaped Christmas as we know it today, from plum puddings to carols and cards. And contrary to their sexually repressed reputation, they refined the art of festive flirting through their penchant for parlour games.
Parlour games pre-date the 19th century, of course. Henry VIII’s courtiers enjoyed Blind Man’s Buff (a buff being a gentle push, not bluff as many seem to think), but revelry was reviled during the Commonwealth. Cromwell more or less banned Christmas itself – the Puritans had seen it as having unwelcome links to Catholicism, and it had become associated with excessive jollity (the Brits have long enjoyed a drink and a dalliance by way of a celebration) – and it wasn’t until the Restoration that it began to claw its way slowly back to being a public holiday. Parlour games duly increased in popularity during the Georgian period (Jane Austen mentions them in Mansfield Park) as the upper and middle classes sought diversion and the chance to engage with the opposite sex while chaperones were at their most hawk-eyed.
But the Victorian, observes that, “It is true that many of these games had been played for hundreds of years – the more primitive in village inns and on village greens, the more advanced in the drawing rooms of the wealthy. But it took a large urban middle class, deprived of the village inn, the village hall and other rural social centres, to develop and popularise the parlour game,” he argues.
