Christmas Shopping in Victorian Times

Text by Susan Krysiak, Director of Media Relations at MAC / Winter 2025

Illustration of Wanamaker's clothing store in Philadelphia, an imposing corner building with a clock tower — Illustration of John Wanamaker’s Clothing House on Market Street in Philadelphia, circa 1876. From James D. McCabe’s *The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exposition*.

Victorians living in the late 19th and early 20th century didn’t have the convenience of shopping online as we do today, but like today, Christmas shopping meant heading out to small local shops, traveling to huge stores, and ordering by catalogue.

In the November 29, 1888 issue of the Cape May Wave is an advertorial for Wanamaker’s department store, which opened in 1871, and was the grandest and largest department store in the country. The holiday shopping season had begun, and Wanamaker’s marketers were on it:

The ad begins:

“5000 Dress Patterns!It will take days and days to pass them all out. When we take 40,000 or 50,000 yards of stuffs in a lump from a dealer who has too much, you may be sure the prices are interesting. …“

At the end, the advertorial encourages its target audience, mothers, to bring their children with them when they shop:

“A big part of the Basement is getting livelier all the time with advance notes of the Holiday hurrah. Of course, it’s where the Toys and Dolls and Games are gathered. Playthings and study-things that have all the seeming of playthings. A little world of amusement for Children. It’s as good as a circus for the little ones to look about there. Wonders in mechanical toys — sure-enough cars that run on the merest bits of track; trumpeters that trump, and all that.

“Let the little bright eyes come with you; you’ll feel younger and they’ll feel cheerier for the treat.“

But for Cape May shoppers who did not have the time or wherewithal to travel to Wanamaker’s for Christmas, ordering from the Montgomery Ward catalogue was an option, or from other catalogues such as Fashion Quarterly. Mail order catalogues were just becoming popular in Victorian times (1837–1901) in America.

Founding father, inventor, scientist, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin is credited with the original idea in 1744 of “mail ordering,” with his publication, A Catalogue of Choice and Valuable Books, Consisting of Near 600 Volumes, in most Faculties and Sciences. Making books and knowledge widely accessible to those near and far in the new colonies was very Franklin-esque, but make no mistake, reaching markets beyond Philadelphia was good business, and Franklin was an excellent businessman. “Those Persons that live remote, by sending their Orders and Money to said B. Franklin, may depend on the same Justice as if present,” his advertisement read.

The first real consumer catalog was the Montgomery Ward catalog produced on August 18, 1872 as a single sheet, offering 163 items. Many businesses, such as seed companies, for example, had been publishing mail order catalogs, but Aaron Montgomery Ward produced the first mail order catalog meant for the general public. Three million customers were on the catalog mailing list by 1904, according to Wards.com, and the company is still in business.

Fashion Quarterly was another Victorian era catalogue. Ten years after the first Montgomery Ward catalogue of one sheet, this advertorial in the Cape May Wave on November 18, 1882, and in newspapers across the nation during that holiday season, touts a catalogue of 90-some pages:

“… As the holiday season draws near, the careful mother feels, more than at any other time, the need of some reliable manual, by referring to which she may know just what is to be had, and just what everything will cost. And luckily, in this age of journalistic enterprise, the very thing she wants lies ready to her hand. For the winter number of the Fashion Quarterly is out, and a copy can be had for only fifteen cents. Within the compass of its ninety odd pages are illustrations of every kind and description of Christmas gifts; from the rattle of toy reins for the three-year old infant, up to the gold headed cane or dressing gown for pa, or the long wished-for watch for mamma. Dolls and doll furniture, tin toys, mechanical toys, telegraphic machines, bonbon boxes, velocipedes, fancy stationery, gorgeous plush-covered boxes, savings banks, magical apparatus, books of every description — in short, the whole range of possibilities in the way of Christmas presents is covered; and parents’ purses and children’s fancies can alike be suited, however fastidious the one, or attenuated the other. Indeed, we believe it safe to say that such a mass of useful information, for so small a price, was never issued from the press before.” – The Fashion Quarterly is published by Messrs. Ehrich Bros., of New York, at 50 cents a year or 15 cents a copy.

Such a mass of useful information!

I recall pouring over the three-inch thick Sears “Wish Book” each Christmas as if it contained a lifetime of happiness. I’d dog-ear pages and debate for hours, days, what to circle. There was a strategy. Resist the urge to circle everything. Don’t circle too much, you’ll look greedy and undeserving. Don’t circle too little, you’ll be undercutting the haul. Find a balance and be sure to pick one really great thing that will guide mom and dad in the right direction, in case big stuff is in the cards this Christmas.

(This pink banana seat bike with tassels on the handlebars, please? …)

Merry Christmas!