Two Christmases
Two books given at Christmas, 1918 and 1927. Gift inscriptions as time stamps on what a decade hoped for.
Two books in this collection were Christmas presents, nine years apart, and between them sits the whole emotional history of a decade.
The first: The Great White Chief by Robert M. MacDonald, a Blackie & Son boys' adventure novel of 1908, set in unexplored New Guinea, dedicated to Admiral Moresby, with eight plates by William Rainey and a map of British New Guinea. Its gift inscription is dated Christmas 1918, the first Christmas after the Armistice, barely six weeks after the guns stopped. Somebody chose, for a boy in that strangest of Decembers, a story of empire and exploration from the confident world of 1908: a book from before, given at the exact moment that world ended. Whether the giver meant it as reassurance or simply gave what boys' presents had always been, the date makes it impossible to read innocently now.
The second: The Flight of the Heron, D. K. Broster's novel of the 1745 rising, in the cheaper 3/6 edition of February 1927, inscribed 'Xmas 1927'. Nine years on, the bestselling gift was no longer imperial adventure but a story of doomed loyalty: a beautiful, honourable, lost cause. The generation that had buried its sons read defeat differently, and what it gave at Christmas had changed accordingly.
A gift inscription is the most honest provenance there is: it records not just ownership but intention. Someone thought this book belonged with this person at this moment. These two Decembers, 1918 and 1927, sit on the shelf like bookends around the interwar mood: the empire story given as the empire's certainties collapsed, and the lost-cause story given when loss had become the thing Britain understood best.