The first commercial Christmas card

In 1843, the British civil servant and reformer Sir Henry Cole found himself with a problem of etiquette. Custom demanded a handwritten seasonal greeting to every friend and acquaintance, and his pile of unanswered correspondence had grown unmanageable. His solution was to commission a single printed image he could send to everyone at once.

Cole turned to his friend, the painter John Callcott Horsley, who designed a card showing three generations of a family raising a toast, flanked by scenes of feeding and clothing the poor. The greeting read “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.”

Roughly a thousand were printed, hand-coloured, and the surplus sold for a shilling apiece.

That price was steep for the era, and the venture was judged a commercial flop. The toasting child sipping wine also scandalised some Victorians. Yet the idea endured: cheaper printing and the new Penny Post soon made the Christmas card an annual ritual, and Horsley’s original now survives in museum collections as the seed of a global industry.