If you could travel back in time, where would you least like to spend Christmas day? How about inside a Victorian asylum? It sounds like something a long way from the cosy Dickensian Christmas that we assume the rest of Britain was enjoying. But what was a Victorian Christmas really like, and was Christmas in the asylum really so much worse than on the outside?

Most British Christmas ‘traditions’ were created by the Victorians. In previous centuries Christmas had been a time of raucous drunkenness and wild parties, but as British society got more polite these kinds of antics were frowned upon. So at the start of the 19th century Christmas was a bit of non-event. Many people didn’t celebrate it at all. The royal family changed all that. Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert brought Christmas trees from his native Germany. When the Illustrated London News featured a drawing of the royal family around their decorated, candle-lit tree, the public went crazy for Christmas trees, and what started as a trendy, exotic fad soon became a tradition.

The first commercial Christmas card was printed in 1843, and new printing and paper-making technologies lowered the prices. Soon the middle classes could afford to send colourful mass-produced Christmas cards. The introduction of the half-penny post also made it far cheaper to send cards. By the 1880s millions of cards were being produced and sold each Christmas. The Christmas cracker was also invented in mid-19th century Britain. Initially they were a marketing gimmick by a confectioner, and were simply filled with sweets. They became unexpectedly popular, and soon everyone was selling them, filled with paper hats and paper hats and small gifts. Before the Victorian era people had given each other gifts at New Year, but as Christmas got more important the gifts got moved to Christmas. Initially these were small treats that hung on the tree, but Christmas quickly became a commercial affair, and soon people were showing off with the latest expensive goods, and placing them under the tree.

Before the Victorian era, a mid-winter feast was also more likely to be held at New Year than Christmas. The Victorians preferred to eat goose or beef, but some wealthy families started having the more exotic turkey. It was the perfect size for a large middle-class family and by the early 20th century was established as the festive meat of choice.

If the royal family started the trend for an expensive, family-focused Christmas, Charles Dickens really helped to crystallise the idea in the Victorian psyche. A Christmas Carol was published in 1843. The novella portrayed the ideal Christmas as a time of goodwill, generosity and feasting and, above all, as a secular family celebration, rather than a religious festival for the community.

Christmas in an asylum, workhouse or prison was inevitably wildly different from the Victorian ideal of the family gathered together around the hearth. The harsh New Poor Law of 1834 was designed to make receiving poor relief as unpleasant as possible, to keep the number of claimants down. The Poor Law Commissioners were not allowed to add to the paupers’ meagre rations on Christmas day, and paupers were certainly not allowed alcohol.

As Christmas got more important to the Victorians, however, the ‘no Christmas in the workhouse’ rule was relaxed, and workhouses were allowed to offer Christmas treats. The money had to come from private donations, though: Victorian tax-payers were certainly not going to pay for Christmas for the poor. But perhaps the miserly authorities were visited by the ghosts of Christmas themselves, because eventually they became less Scrooge-like, and authorised workhouses to pay for a Christmas dinner. At Chard workhouse in 1887 the chapel and dining hall were decorated, there was roast beef, plum pudding and beer for lunch, cake for tea, and a magic lantern show and plenty of singing in the evening.

The situation in prisons was even worse than in workhouses. Conditions were deliberately unpleasant, but Christmas day was sometimes an exception, if a wealthy sponsor could be found to shoulder the cost. On Christmas Day 1839, inmates at Yarmouth Gaol tucked into a hearty meal of roast beef and plum pudding paid for by the Mayor. They were also allowed the rare treat of singing hymns instead of listening to the usual boring sermons about mending their ways.

By contrast, the state was happy to pay for asylum Christmases. In Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum the patients put up hand-made decorations. The ones made by artist and murderer Richard Dadd were especially good. After a service in the asylum’s chapel, the patients and staff received ‘the usual Christmas treats’ of exotic oranges, sweets and tobacco. The authorities had a cunning ruse going on with the tobacco. Any contraband tobacco seized by customs was passed on for use in state institutions such as prisons, workhouses and asylums. Scrooge would certainly have approved of this thrifty arrangement. After presents, the patients had a good dinner, including the all-important Christmas pudding. One of the staff instruction books even gives a recipe for enough Christmas pudding to feed hundreds. That’s one gigantic pudding!

The jollity didn’t end there. On Boxing Day in 1892, Broadmoor’s patients were treated to a show in their purpose-build theatre and main hall. This was a double-bill of popular farces: Cut off with a Shilling and Fortune’s Frolic. Most years they were treated to similar entertainments as a reward for good behaviour.

It’s hard for us to imagine how wonderful the Christmas dinner must have been for those incarcerated in Victorian institutions. Most of the time inmates ate a diet that ranged between the monotonous and the inadequate: bread and butter, potatoes, gruel and soup made up most of the diet for prisoners and paupers. ‘Lunatics’ fared a little better, as a good diet was thought essential to their recovery: they had meat or meat pies several times a week, fruit and vegetables grown on their farms, and the occasional suet pudding or serving of cheese.

However simple, the food in institution was in fact often better than the diet of ordinary working class people. Roast meat was a rare treat for many and for hundreds of thousands of families, Christmas remained an impossible dream. One family of agricultural labourers in Lancashire in the 1860s ate porridge and a small piece of bacon on Christmas day, followed by a plain suet pudding with a handful of currants mixed in. Not much of a feast. An institutionalised Christmas, then, might have been the best Christmas many of the working classes ever had. This is a rather devastating thought.

When so many Victorians couldn’t afford to celebrate Christmas, or had an unconventional celebration in an institution, why do we still have an idealised view of the Victorian Christmas? Quite simply, social history is normally written about the middle classes. They left the most records, reflected on their experiences and significant national events, and followed new trends. This does mean, though, that we have quite a skewed vision of the past. So this Christmas let’s raise a glass to everyone that history usually leaves out: they deserve to be remembered too.