The last Christmas before the Cotton Famine

Magic goblets were the latest craze on Manchester's Christmas markets in 1861, but across town thousands of mill hands were already out of work and hungry

It’s easy to think of Christmas in Victorian England as being like the winter scenes you used to see on festive tins of shortbread.

Carol singers wrapped in scarves. Horses pulling carriages through the snow.

If you had money back in the nineteenth century, it might just have been like that.

But for the poor and out of work, those Christmas scenes were …