The first Christmas card is generally attributed to English inventor and educator Sir Henry Cole and his artist friend J.C. Horsely, who collaborated in 1843 to create printed copies of a celebratory holiday scene that Cole signed and sent to his friends. Within a few decades the idea caught on in America, and Christmas cards became wildly popular by the later nineteenth century.
The most important Christmas card maker in the U.S. of the era was Louis Prang, a German immigrant who established his engraving, lithography, and printing business in Boston in the 1850s. In 1873 Prang began printing Christmas cards for export to England, and the next year he released what is generally regarded as the first commercially produced American Christmas card. In 1880 he held a competition for a Christmas card designs and received over 800 entries, the winners received a monetary award and had their designs published.
In 1883 Prang hired Elizabeth (Lizbeth) Bullock Humphrey, a Massachusetts native who aspired to a career as an illustrator and an award winner in Prang’s 1882 design contest, to design a series of cards featuring prominent figures in American literature. Humphrey created the card pictured above, featuring Henry W. Longfellow seated in front of a fireplace with three young girls, presumably his daughters, gathered around him. An inset on the card’s lower left features lines from Longfellow’s poem “The Children’s Hour”. On the reverse is an excerpt from his poem “Christmas Bells”, with an image of flowers and ringing bells.
Humphrey’s designs were well received and contributed to the popularity of purchasing and sending Christmas cards. She won another award in a Prang competition in 1884 with her "Boston" Christmas Card design. By the 1880s Prang was selling over 5 million cards a year. After Humphrey’s death at age 48 in 1889, Prang produced and sold a memorial collection of her work titled Child Life: A Souvenir of Lizbeth B. Humphrey.