Influence
Magazine editor Sarah Hale held up Queen Victoria as a role model of feminity, morality and intellect, and Godey's hired Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney to report on the royal activities in London. The tradition of a white wedding is commonly credited to Queen Victoria's choice to wear a white wedding dress at her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840. With American women following styles or dress set by the young Queen, less than a decade after her wedding Godey’s wrote: “Custom has decided, from the earliest ages, that white is the most fitting hue, whatever may be the material. It is an emblem of the purity and innocence of girlhood, and the unsullied heart she now yields to the chosen one.”
A woodcut of the British Royal family with their Christmas tree at Windsor Castle, initially published in the Illustrated London News December 1848, was copied in Godey's at Christmas 1850. Their version removed Queen Victoria's crown and Prince Albert's mustache to remake the engraving into an American scene. The republished image was the first widely circulated picture of a decorated evergreen Christmas tree in America, and Art historian Karal Ann Marling called Prince Albert and Queen Victoria shorn of their royal trappings "the first influential American Christmas tree". Folk-culture historian Alfred Shoemaker summed up that "in all of America there was no more important medium in spreading the Christmas tree in the decade 1850-60 than Godey's Lady's Book". The image was reprinted in 1860 and, by the 1870s, putting up a Christmas tree had become common in the United States.
As editor, Sarah Hale also used her editorial space and influence to advocate for the establishment of a national Thanksgiving holiday.
Read more about this topic: Godey's Lady's Book
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
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—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
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—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)