Henry Cole had too many letters to write and too little December to write them in, so in 1843 he commissioned an artist instead. The result was the first printed Christmas card sold to the public, a single sheet that let a busy man discharge an entire season’s correspondence with a signature.
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Cole was a civil servant at the Public Record Office in London. Christmas correspondence was one more task competing for his time, and he solved it the way he solved most things: by commissioning someone else to do the work once, at scale.
What the card actually showed
Cole asked the illustrator John Callcott Horsley to design something he could send instead of a letter. Horsley produced a hand-coloured lithograph, roughly five inches by three, showing an extended family raising glasses of wine at a table. Two smaller scenes of people feeding and clothing the poor flanked it. Underneath ran the words “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year To You,” a greeting close enough to the modern one that a reader today would recognise it at once.
Not everyone approved. The image of a child sipping wine alongside the adults offended the temperance movement of the day, which campaigned to have the card suppressed. Justin Schiller, a dealer in antiquarian books who later sold one of the surviving cards, said campaigners “had a campaign to censor and suppress it.” It took three years before anyone produced a Christmas card again.
A shilling each, a thousand printed
Cole had 1,000 copies printed and sold at a shilling apiece, making the 1843 card the first to reach commercial sale rather than staying a private exchange between two households. Fewer than 30 are thought to survive. One sold at auction in 2013 for £22,000. In 2020 a Boston-based dealer offered another for sale, and Christie’s estimated a third at £5,000 to £8,000.
The habit Cole started outgrew him by a wide margin. He went on to help organise the Great Exhibition of 1851 and to found what became the Victoria and Albert Museum, work for which he was knighted. Horsley kept drawing too, contributing to Punch and later serving as rector at the Royal Academy.
What Cole could not have planned for was the market a few years of cheap postage would create. Once Parliament cut the cost of sending a letter to a penny, mailing a card to everyone on a list stopped being an extravagance. By the time the Greetings Card Association reported on the trade in 2015, the Christmas boxed card category alone was worth about £200 million at UK retail. Roughly 900 million cards changed hands in a single season.
