St Stephen is the first Christian martyr. Acts 6 records that the apostles arranged for Stephen and six others to serve food while the apostles served the word; by the end of Acts 7 he had been stoned to death.
Yet Boxing Day is concurrent with and not derived from his feast day.
Rather, the day is built upon the giving associated with the day before.
For centuries before the industrial revolution, haves had put money in boxes for havenots as part of the season’s activities. In mid-December 1663, diarist Samuel Pepys recorded:
Thence by coach to my shoemaker’s and paid all there, and gave something to the boys’ box against Christmas.
By the 19th century, the first day – initially the first weekday – after Christmas had become the day errand boys and the like were permitted this treat of breaking their boxes and dividing the loot.
The AD 1800s is late in the day for a Christmas tradition and explains why Boxing Day is celebrated only in Commonwealth countries and has almost never taken off in the US, save an effort by Governor William F Weld in Massachusetts in 1996.
The OED gives 1833 as the first record of the expression, a journal entry by the well-known comic actor Charles Mathews, although the record was not made public until 1838 when his widow published the journal as his memoirs.
According to the OED, the first published – ie publicly recorded – use is by Charles Dickens in his 1837 Pickwick Papers.
So, Mathews gets the first private record and Dickens gets the first public record. Ironically, Dickens’ Pickwickian malaprop Alfred Jingle was based on Mathews.
The irony is interesting.
Mathews used the expression through the eyes of his comic French character obsessed with the English word “box”. At one stage, the character fumes:
One day everybody box — it is Crissmas day — the wash-men, de beadles, de churchwardens — the constables and all de parish box one house after anoder. So you see the English are a nation of Boxeurs.
Mathews died in 1835 and Dickens’ 1837 use in Papers was “No man ever talked in poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’ day.”
I wonder whether Mathews’ widow had asked Dickens the editor to look over and prepare the memoirs for publication and Dickens took in the reference to beadles, consciously or subconsciously?
The question is piquant because I can’t get the date that the illustrator George Cruikshank, who worked with Dickens from 1836, went into print on the same joke:
The question is more piquant when one recalls that three decades later, Cruikshank wrote to The Times claiming credit for Oliver Twist.
In any event and whoever between Mathews, Dickens and Cruickshank first got the beadle to Boxing Day the OED is wrong. There is at least one prior record of the use, the London Observer, Sunday 28 July 1828.
