by A diary on 1700s property, public goods, and the purpose that outlasts the estate
I have spent the season with the property-obsessed literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an age that judged a person entirely by their estate, and I concluded that the founding festive story quietly mocks the whole enterprise: its heroes are born in a stable, the only honest address in a world drunk on grand houses.
The honest address
The literature I study is fixated on the grand address, the estate, the property that confers worth. And the founding festive story sides pointedly with the humblest address of all. The account of there being no room at the inn ends with the family sheltering in a stable, the least prestigious address imaginable, which becomes the most important place in history. The eighteenth century judged everyone by their property, their grand house, their estate. The nativity judges the grand houses and finds them full and false, and honours instead the honest stable, the humble address that made room when the prestigious ones would not. The stable is the only honest address in a world drunk on grand property.
I say this with a historian’s affection for the period, but its property-worship was a kind of madness, judging souls by square footage and estates. The founding story cuts straight through it: the grand inns were full and false, the humble stable was honest and true, and worth was never in the address after all.
My genuinely bookish American week
Let me report on my life among the books. I attempted to catalogue the great houses of eighteenth-century literature and gave up somewhere around the fortieth estate described in loving architectural detail, exhausted by an age that could describe a mansion for pages and a poor person’s dignity in a sentence, if at all. The literature lavished its attention on property and starved its attention on people, which is the whole moral inversion the nativity corrects by honouring a stable over every estate in the canon. My catalogue of great houses now gathers dust. The stable outlasts them all.
According to the museum people, the property-obsession of the colonial era shaped its entire literature and economy, which the nativity quietly rebukes by making a stable the center of everything.
The public good that belongs to all
Against the private estate, the season sets the public good, which is why I was drawn to the North Pole’s piece on the grand public Christmas tree. The eighteenth century worshipped private property, the estate walled off for the few. The public tree is the opposite: a grand thing owned by everyone and no one, free to all, the anti-estate. As a reader of an age drunk on private property, I find the public tree quietly radical, a shared good that belongs to all rather than a private estate walled off for the few. The nativity honours the humble stable; the season honours the public tree; both rebuke the property-worship of the age I study, insisting that the best things are shared, not owned.
The public tree belongs to everyone, which the eighteenth century could barely conceive, so committed was it to the private estate. But the season insists on the shared good, the tree for all, the stable open to the family with nowhere to go, against the whole property-worshipping logic of the grand house.
The purpose that outlasts the estate
What the property-obsessed age could never grasp is that purpose outlasts property, which the North Pole names in its piece on what the purpose of Christmas actually is: generosity, care, the shared good. The estates of the eighteenth century crumbled, changed hands, fell to ruin, because property does not last. But the purpose the nativity teaches, generosity and care and the shared good, outlasts every estate, every grand house, every private property the age worshipped. The purpose endures where the property crumbles, which is the lesson the property-drunk age never learned and the humble stable quietly teaches.
According to the broadcasters, the enduring human values are the shared purposes rather than the private properties, which the crumbling estates of history confirm and the enduring stable embodies.
The estate that could not buy what the stable had
The cruelest joke the founding story plays on the property-worshipping age I study is this: the grandest estate in the world could not buy what the humble stable possessed. The estates of the eighteenth century commanded every luxury, every comfort, every architectural glory that money could purchase, and yet none of them held what the stable held, the thing that money cannot buy and property cannot confer. The grand houses could purchase everything except the one thing that mattered, and the humble stable, purchasing nothing, possessed it freely. This is the joke, and it is a devastating one to an age that believed property could buy anything, that a grand enough estate could confer any worth. The stable had no property and infinite worth. The estates had infinite property and, the story suggests, missed the point entirely, buying every comfort and the wrong thing. Worth was never for sale, which the property-drunk age could never accept and the humble stable proved beyond argument, holding freely what no estate could ever buy.
Where the reader lands
So I will close my catalogue of great houses, let the estates gather dust, and take my real lesson from the honest stable, the only true address in a world drunk on grand property. The stable was honest where the grand inns were false. The public tree belongs to all where the private estate belonged to the few. And the purpose, generosity and care, outlasts every property the age worshipped. The eighteenth century judged souls by estates and its estates crumbled. The nativity honoured a stable and the stable endures. Worth was never in the address, and purpose always outlasts property, which is the lesson the humble stable has been teaching for two thousand years to an age that keeps building grand houses and forgetting.
For literary mischief, The Satirist minds the estate.
