Christmas Roses

Christmas Roses is a children’s book illustrated by Lizzie Lawson, the English illustrator who lived from approximately 1865 to 1905 and who produced substantial work for the late Victorian English children’s book and illustrated magazine market. Lawson worked primarily in chromolithography and watercolour for the substantial gift book and children’s book market that British publishers cultivated during the late nineteenth century.

Lawson was a regular contributor to the various Marcus Ward and Company publications, the major Belfast and London publisher of decorative greeting cards, children’s books, and illustrated gift books that was one of the leading firms in the substantial late Victorian decorative publishing world. She also worked for various other publishers and contributed illustrations to numerous magazines and gift annuals across her relatively short career.

Christmas Roses belongs to the substantial Victorian Christmas gift book tradition. The genre had developed across the second half of the nineteenth century as British publishers recognised the substantial commercial market for decorative books that could be given as Christmas presents to children and to adult relatives during the substantial Victorian Christmas gift exchange tradition. The Christmas gift book typically combined original or selected verse and prose with substantial colour illustration in the manner that the developing chromolithographic printing technology had made commercially viable in the late Victorian period.

The Christmas roses of the title refers to the genus Helleborus, the winter blooming plant whose various species produce flowers during the cold months when most other garden plants are dormant. The Christmas rose proper, Helleborus niger, blooms in midwinter in suitable climates and was associated with various Christian legends about flowers that bloomed at the time of Christ’s birth in midwinter Palestine. The plant became one of the standard decorative motifs of Victorian Christmas card and gift book illustration.

Lawson’s illustrations for the book would have combined the floral decorative material with the various Christmas scene illustrations that the gift book genre required. The combination of decorative botanical illustration with Christmas narrative and verse content was a standard format for late Victorian children’s Christmas gift books and was produced in substantial quantity for the seasonal market.

The book is of interest now to collectors of Victorian decorative children’s books and to historians of late nineteenth century British illustration. It pairs naturally with the substantial broader Marcus Ward production and with the work of other late Victorian children’s illustrators including Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane.