Boxing Day Fancy Dress in Wigan

Anna FC Smith

Published in The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance

In 2017 through the Imago residency project at Wigan Library I undertook the first ever historical study into Wigan's Boxing Day Fancy Dress tradition. Through public call outs, interviews and photograph gathering I've attempted to put a definitive age on the custom and hunt down its origins. I discovered multiple and competing myths with many adamant of their origin story. My earliest logged date is 1976 but we can roughly say that 1978/9 it was established. All the competing explanations can be understood as a combined force of creation that emphasises the public ownership and grass roots origins of the tradition. My essay for this book lays out this research and my interpretation of the custom as a uniquely organic folk custom and a living, dancing archive, documenting the interests and character of the townsfolk each year.

The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance is a broad-based collection of essays is an introduction both to the concerns of contemporary folklore scholarship and to the variety of forms that folk performance has taken throughout English history.

Combining case studies of specific folk practices with discussion of the various different lenses through which they have been viewed since becoming the subject of concerted study in Victorian times, this book builds on the latest work in an ever-growing body of contemporary folklore scholarship. Many of the contributing scholars are also practicing performers and bring experience and understanding of performance to their analyses and critiques. Chapters range across the spectrum of folk song, music, drama and dance, but maintain a focus on the key defining characteristics of folk performance – custom and tradition – in a full range of performances, from carol singing and sword dancing to playground rhymes and mummers' plays.

As well as being an essential reference for folklorists and scholars of traditional performance and local history, this is a valuable resource for readers in all disciplines of dance, drama, song and music whose work coincides with English folk traditions.

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