ABSTRACT
In 1876, the front cover of the Illustrated London News’s Christmas Number displayed a full-page wood engraving of a middle-class family group watching a pretty mother lift her young son to crown the decorated tree with its final glory: not an angel or star but the nation’s flag. By the time “Hoisting the Union Jack” was published in the Illustrated London News almost 30 years later, Christmas trees were being prepared annually for children across the kingdom – a familiar domestic rite, rather than an unfamiliar foreign one. From its inception, Home Thoughts and Home Scenes was conceived as an object of domestic consumption, with childhood as its all-consuming theme. Houghton’s pictures for Home Thoughts and Home Scenes portray the domestic world as the domain of children, women and the elderly, a space rarely shared with the fathers who supported it.
