Nibsy’s Christmas was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1893, a slim illustrated volume designed for the holiday season. It tells the story of Nibsy, a tenement boy who has grown up without any experience of Christmas — no presents, no tree, no family celebration — until a settlement-house worker introduces him to the holiday’s warmth and generosity.
The story is frankly sentimental — Riis wrote it to be read aloud at charitable events and to inspire donations to the children’s programs he supported — but it is grounded in the specific reality of tenement childhood that Riis knew intimately. Nibsy’s world (the cold flat, the absent parents, the hunger, the street life) is rendered with the same documentary precision that characterizes Riis’s journalism, and the Christmas that arrives is not a fairy-tale transformation but a small, specific act of kindness: a tree, some toys, a warm meal.
The book belongs to the tradition of Victorian Christmas philanthropic literature (descended from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol) that used seasonal sentiment to motivate charitable giving. Riis was unapologetic about this strategy: if sentiment was what it took to get middle-class Americans to open their wallets for tenement children, then sentiment was what he would provide.
Collecting Nibsy’s Christmas
First edition (Scribner’s, New York, 1893): Illustrated boards, slim volume.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$15