A Thanksgiving without a turkey is like a Christmas without a tree.
Charles Dickens and the Prize Turkey
Early Americans could reference the Pilgrims and Indians of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 at Plymouth. According to colonist William Bradford’s journal, that season they had waterfowl, a “great store of wild turkeys,” along with deer and Indian corn. Turkey is mentioned almost in passing, so it isn’t definitively known if turkey was served during this special occasion.
Just as the English played a role—to say the least—in both the founding of the Plymouth colony and the American Revolution, an English writer by the name of Charles Dickens played a substantial role in placing the turkey as the focal point for holiday meals.
“Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?—Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?” ...
It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ‘em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.As Mark Connelly, professor of modern British history at the University of Kent, once wrote, “The tale conjures up the image of a perfect and nostalgic Victorian Christmas, full of turkey, mistletoe and goodwill.”
Dickens in America
When the book was released in America in January 1844, the change, according to a lecture given by William Makepeace Thackeray in 1852, was evidently more impactful as it created “a wonderful outpouring of Christmas good-feeling; of Christmas punch-brewing; an awful slaughter of Christmas turkeys, and roasting and basting of Christmas beef.”The turkey is only mentioned once at the end of “A Christmas Carol,” and the reader never witnesses the final dinner at the Cratchit home. “All we know is that Scrooge sent Cratchit the biggest turkey in the poulterer’s shop,” Kaufman surmises. “It was also the food image that resonated most deeply in America.”
Hale and the Start of an American Tradition
Sarah Josepha Hale was one of the most influential people on 19th-century American culture. She was born in 1788, the year the Constitution was ratified, and nearly an exact year before Washington made his Thanksgiving proclamation. As a widow and mother of five, her first novel, “Northwood; Or, Life North and South: Showing the True Character of Both,” was published in 1827―16 years before Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” Her novel’s success opened the door for her to become editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an influential magazine. Under her leadership, magazine subscriptions increased 15-fold, from 10,000 to 150,000.
The magazine significantly influenced American fashion, etiquette, and food. As editor, she also wrote a monthly column. In 1846, she began pushing for Thanksgiving to become a national holiday. She wrote to every president from Zachary Taylor to Abraham Lincoln, insisting on the creation of a national Thanksgiving Day holiday.
Presidents after Washington had issued Thanksgiving proclamations before. Even Lincoln had issued one in 1861, another in 1862, and a third in the summer of 1863. The 1863 proclamation was issued mid-July and indicated August 6 to be “observed as a day of National thanksgiving, praise, and prayer” and for citizens “to assemble on that occasion in their customary places of worship.”
Hale believed that Thanksgiving should take place on a specific day every year. She sent a letter to Lincoln on Sept. 28, 1863, stating that “for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritative fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution.”
The Thanksgiving Template
When it came to what this “glorious Festival” should look like, Hale had already provided an intricate portrait in her novel:The table, covered with a damask cloth ... was now intended for the whole household, every child having a seat on this occasion, and the more the better, it being considered an honor for a man to sit down to his Thanksgiving supper surrounded by a large family.Hale went on to discuss the food, which included a sirloin of beef, leg of pork, joint of mutton, chicken pie, bowls of gravy, plates of vegetables, pickles, preserves, butter, wheat bread, plumb pudding, custards, pies, cakes, sweetmeats, fruits, currant wine, ciders, and ginger beer. But it was the turkey that stood out at this fictional, yet influential Thanksgiving table.
The roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly station, sending forth the rich odour of its savoury stuffing, and finely covered with the frost of the basting.According to the New England Historical Society, Hale’s description of the Thanksgiving Day table setting “became a template for the rest of the country.”
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