Forty-five weird and wonderful greeting cards

Ah, the end of the year. A time to reflect, a time to look forward, or a time to say ‘Thank fuck for that’, open a bottle and enjoy yourself. 

So in the spirit of new beginnings we’ve compiled a selection of weird and wonderful New Year’s greeting cards from the strange days of Victorian England. 

Kindly provided by Manchester Metropolitan University's Special Collections Museum, here are forty five greeting cards from the Seddon Collection, one of the largest collections of Victorian and Edwardian Cards commercial greetings cards in public hands, with over 32,000 examples. 

Here's Special Collections Museum Curator Stephanie Boydell to give a bit of background: “Although the celebration of the New Years greetings is an older tradition than sharing Christmas greetings, it goes back to at least Roman times when gifts and tokens were given, the exchange of New Years cards really took off in Victorian times, along with Christmas cards. 

“These nineteenth century New Year’s cards don’t look very different from Christmas cards. They share similar iconography, such as robins, feasts and winter scenes, but many also included symbols of good luck such as four-leafed clover, horseshoes and even pigs and elves, which were thought to be lucky in some parts of Europe.

“The cards also feature things that we don’t associate with the new year now, such as sunny scenes and  flowers, which look forward to the coming spring and the rejuvenation of nature.

“There are also images of Old Father Time (not Santa Claus) and babies and children, representing the transition of the old year to the new. One of the cards shown here depicts a number of child street sweepers offering to ‘clear your door sir’, a nod to a new year tradition of sweeping the threshold to your house, to clear away bad luck for the future.”

Happy New Year from all of us here at Confidentials.

All image credits: Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections Museum

All these cards are from the Seddon Collection of Victorian and Edwardian Greetings Cards. All the cards shown here are dated from around 1870-1900.

The Seddon Collection is held at Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections Museum. It is one of the largest collections of Victorian and Edwardian Cards commercial greetings cards in public hands, with over 32,000 examples.

It is part of Manchester Met’s Special Collections museum, a resource holding over 100 collections and archives.

Click here For more information about the Special Collections Museum or email lib-spec-coll@mmu.ac.uk

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