One of the problems of collecting anything is that practically every class of object has its own vocabulary, or, to be more precise, collectors, historians, and dealers have their vocabularies—sometimes using terms that are misleading if not downright incorrect. Chinese export porcelain is called Oriental Lowestoft, cream-colored earthenware is collectively called Leeds, and Rhenish stoneware is often described as “tigerware” regardless of the fact that it is leopard spotted rather than tiger striped. Similarly, in the wonderful world of bells some writers (and there are not many) who discuss animal bells refer to the so-called latten type used on horse and ox harness as crotals, although the Oxford English Dictionary interprets the word as being of Irish origin meaning “a small globular or pear-shaped bell or rattle, the nature and use of which are obscure.” This, however, is a description of a rumbler bell, a type often hung around the necks of pack horses or attached to sleigh harness. Then there were the bells worn by sheep, known as cups, cannisters, and cluckets (Fig. 23). Cups were generally of bell metal and looked as their name suggests, being cup-shaped but with their handles on the bottom. Cannister was an equally descriptive term, the bells being shaped like old-fashioned tobacco cans, cut out of sheet iron, and with two iron loops for suspension. Cluckets were made in the same way save that the barrel was wider at the top than at the mouth. All three varieties were occasionally made of brass, and sometimes those of iron were dipped in copper as a crude form of plating.
In discussing bells at such length I am not suggesting that they belong at the forefront of collectable curiosities; I mention them as a demonstration of the fact that even the most mundane objects have a lot to teach us, have their coterie of aficionados, and a terminology to confuse and intimidate the novice. I realize all too well that the reader who never saw a bell he liked will already have become bored stiff by all this campanological detail—and there is a lesson in that too. The more varied the things we collect, the better chance we have of avoiding becoming tiresome about them. The secret hoarders mentioned earlier are comparatively rare birds; most collectors want their treasures to be admired, to turn their friends on, not off. To that end, therefore, there is much to be said for collecting objects that are decorative or functional assets to the home. Small, obscure, unattractive, or now-useless things do not readily become the focus of attention, and so direct a ploy as asking “Who wants to see my collection of urethral syringes?” is considered unsportsmanlike conduct.
23. Bells of types in use in colonial Virginia. At left, a copper-coated iron “cannister” normally used as a cow bell; in the center, brass “rumbler” bells of different sizes and used on everything from horse harness to bird scarers; and right, a bell-metal house or shop bell 3½ inches in height.
Antique furniture and works of art are the most obvious household assets, and they are the backbone of most dealers’ business. From the point of view of the modest collector, however, space limitations necessitate that his furniture be used. Consequently, chairs too fragile to sit on or tables too valuable for glasses to be stood on serve only to promote heart failure in their owners whenever approached by a tired guest with drink in hand. Anyone wishing to become acutely aware of how heavily, untidily, and destructively male guests are prone to sit has only to buy a fragile antique chair. Concern for the safety of one’s chairs, however, is not a new emotional hang-up. In 1806, Yale’s Benjamin Silliman found himself being chided for leaning back in his chair “so as to make it stand upon the two hinder feet only.” His British host had traveled in America and considered this practice to be peculiar to New Englanders. Silliman was unconvinced that this was so but noted in his journal that he was sure he would “never forget again that a chair ought to stand on four legs instead of two.”3
Using antiques as furnishings, even if one has no interest in the objects as history, is perfectly legitimate if they are aesthetically pleasing or do a job that needs to be done. But it is rather sad when they are bought simply to have a few “nice pieces” dotted about to give the place class. Ironically, they tend to have the reverse effect, spotlighting their owners’ lack of it—like admitting to being so uncertain of one’s own good taste as to allow one’s home furnishings to be chosen by an interior decorator. Taste is not something that can be pinned to a dissecting board or be analyzed in a test tube; it is measured on the yardstick of fashion, or by the opinions of a few accepted trend setters. In Europe until the Second World War the arbiters of taste were the wealthy upper classes obsequiously prompted by designers. Now, with the aristocracy either gone or reduced to impotent penury, it is the designers and manufacturers who openly tell us what we should enjoy, regardless of who we are or what we really like. Thus the glossy magazines, in cahoots with paint, fabric, and bathroom salesmen, will tell us that puce is the color for this year or that things Mexican are today’s fashionable accent.
Taste in antique collecting is equally fickle and manipulable. Until a few years ago just about everything Victorian was considered the very nadir of tacky taste; now it is back in favor, and things which even the Victorians thought cheap and nasty are today hailed as nice—and expensive. Nevertheless, there still remain plenty of opportunities for the collector to show his individuality. If he is a speculator, he can expect to turn a respectable profit by concentrating on an area that is currently out of fashion or, better still, one hitherto unexplored. By assembling the “classic” collection and writing about it he becomes the acknowledged authority; then, while his book and his name are still in the minds of his readers, he sends the collection to auction where the pieces fetch more than they are intrinsically worth by virtue of their newly acquired pedigree.
“Yes, madam, there is a tiny age crack, but you see it’s a documentary piece from the Adam Thoroughgood Collection. I expect you saw it illustrated in his article in the Antique Connoisseur.” The fact that the object is not so much age-cracked as held together with fish glue is instantly overlooked, swamped by the magic of the Thoroughgood name.
Personally I have never been interested in paying inflated prices for other collectors’ castoffs. For me the fun lies in breaking new ground, in discovering unrecorded specimens and tracking down their histories. If you know that someone else has already been through the same exercise, the sense of adventure and of accomplishment are drastically diminished—which is why I remain a disciple of the Tradescants. The specialist collector is concerned with learning more and more about less and less, developing a tunnel vision that prevents him from looking anywhere but at the objects of his affection. He is concerned with their date of manufacture, and to a degree with their purpose, but primarily he is interested in assembling all possible sizes, variations, and styles of whatever it is. When, at last, the myopic collector of Welsh loving spoons sits grimly down to write his definitive article, “The Lure of the Love Spoon,” the odds are that it will be all spoon and very little love, all whittling and no wedding. With the spoons illustrated a dozen at a time, the reader loses sight of the fact that each was once a prelude to courtship representing an emotional bridge between two young people, masculine desire in the carver being turned to maidenly delight in the recipient. Instead, seen as a collection, the spoons lose their message and become mere specimens of Welsh folk art. The old adage that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” remains equally true when he becomes an old collector; a stodgy diet of facts leaves him too corpulent to soar on flights of fancy, and the magic of the past slips away from him like a morning mist before the sunrise.
I am not suggesting that listening to clocks ticking or bells tinkling is alone stimulus enough to send us tripping into history. Imagination must be bolstered by knowledge, although, alas, the possession of it is liable to destroy our pleasure in other people’s time machines. An otherwise superb television play set in the seventeenth century can have its carefully woven spell broken by the sight of nineteenth-century jars, bottles, and glasses. A generally well-researched movie of an eighteenth-century classic is torpe
doed when the hero points a flintlock pistol with its frizzen open (and thus incapable of firing) and the villain still throws in the towel. Similarly, the novelist who allows his Elizabethan heroine to throw up the window and listen to the dawn chorus (Hark, hark, is’t not a meadow lark?) does so unencumbered by the knowledge that throw-upable windows would not be introduced until a century later. But for the readers who do know, their literary magician is transformed into an inky-fingered charlatan.
As long as writers, artists, and film directors are to be our guides, naïveté remains one of the time traveler’s greatest assets. It was a lesson that was graphically demonstrated to me at the age of eleven, though I was not to realize it until thirty years later.
In the summer of 1938 I was taken by childless neighbors on a camping trip into the Taw Valley of central Devonshire and to a minuscule hamlet named Eggesford. It was my first escape into the wilder English countryside, and the woods around our campsite were all I had dreamed they might be. Turned loose to explore them on my own, my imagination ran riot. I was in the New Forest hunting with King William when he got the arrow in his eye; I was in Sherwood Forest helping Robin Hood outwit the Sheriff of Nottingham, and I am sure that had I by then been exposed to As You Like It I would have seen myself in the Forest of Arden listening for the voices of approaching courtiers, lovers, shepherdesses, comic servants, transvestites, and assorted hey-noninoers. In spite of more wet days than I deserved, I roamed the woods untiringly, and there, amid the ferns, the lichens, the fallen trees, and the tinkling streams, I painted myself a medieval dream world that would have done justice to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I was small, the trees were tall, and when the sun had the grace to peek through, it studded the dripping leaves with diamonds. But nothing my youthful imagination could conceive matched the revelation that awaited me one gray and misty morning as I emerged from the woods into a broad, green meadow.
Beyond a herd of grazing cows stood a vast ruined mansion more romantically, yet awesomely evocative than Mr. Rochester’s Thornfield, Rebecca’s Mandelay, and Miss Havisham’s Satis House all rolled into one (Fig. 24). There were towers and battlements, tall mullioned windows, parts of stone and parts of brick, a medley of medieval manor and Jacobean grange. One wing lay in a mountain of rubble, and the walled courts and terraces were thick with weeds, but there was still glass in some windows of the central block, and the collapsing roof still kept part of the first floor dry. Nevertheless, ceilings had fallen, and breached and rotten floorboards offered precipitous access to black cellars below, and I ventured only into one room whose floor seemed relatively safe. I took it to be a kitchen, for on a wall beside the massive hearth hung a glass-fronted box filled with little numbered windows—part of the wired bell system.
At that age I knew nothing of architecture, but I had read Ivanhoe and The Black Arrow, and I was entranced. I could see that this was a house that had grown over the centuries, yet no part of it failed to fit my romantic image of the past, and it may have been here that I first became aware that the passage of time is itself intriguing. Today, when people tell me that they have torn down a nineteenth-century wing to restore an eighteenth-century house to its original appearance, I remember the impact that the apparent continuum of Eggesford House had on an eleven-year-old boy, and I wonder whether to applaud or condemn.
So great an impression did the house make on me that more than twenty-five years later I was able to describe it to my wife in what proved to be almost photographic detail. There had been beauty in the way that nature had embraced the ruins, yet at the same time they remained more than a little frightening. My imaginary Merry Men of the woods had been replaced by sepulchral shadows, and the solitary cawing of a crow from a mist-shrouded chimney top left no doubt that this was a place to be avoided once the sun went down. (Fig. 25). I have revisited it over the years whenever a nightmare needed a setting, and I have doodled its towers and crumbling stones in countless moments of boredom. It was inevitable, therefore, that one day I should return to Eggesford, and I did so in the late summer of 1966.
The ruins were still standing almost exactly as I had remembered them, though less lofty than they once had seemed. The lone medieval tower was there, divorced from the body of the house by the collapsed wing, and the central block, now empty-windowed but still crenelated and impressive, remained as evocative as ever—from a distance. But as soon as I approached it across the meadow I realized that I had been taken. The house had made me what it was itself, a product of the Ivanhoe syndrome. It was a creation of the nineteenth century’s medieval revival, architecture designed to stir the imagination and rekindle the romantic fires of English chivalry. I was living proof that the architect had done his job well. My initial disappointment, and annoyance at having been duped, were soon tempered by a growing interest in the house for what it was, and I would later discover that I had shared my youthful enchantment with some famous figures of Victorian letters.
The mansion was built in 1830 by the Honorable Newton Wallop Fellowes, afterward the Fifth Earl of Portsmouth (Fig. 26). For thirty years he was master of the Eggesford Hunt, and during that time he built it into one of the most renowned in England, establishing a pack of hounds of such distinction that his dogs provided the foundation stock for some of the best packs still running. Today, in spite of the earl’s long life, his wealth, and his position, few people (even in the village) remember the name of Newton Fellowes; yet, ironically, that of a neighbor, less noble, but a close friend and frequent visitor, will survive the centuries. He was the Reverend John “Jack” Russell, a perpetual curate of the village of Swymbridge, a celebrated “sporting parson” who gave his name to a breed of terrier. Jack Russell not only shared the earl’s love for hunting but also his wife’s birthday, as did another of their sporting friends, Charles Kingsley, author of two of my childhood favorites, Westward Ho! and Hereward the Wake. Although Kingsley left his Dartmoor home at the age of nineteen, he is said to have returned whenever he could to share a triple birthday party at Eggesford House, reputedly an annual bash of mammoth proportions. I like to think that if, on the night of each June 12, the villagers will turn down their radios and television sets, they may yet hear the strains of a polka borne on the wind as ghostly dancers cavort in the ruined ballroom.
24. The ruins of Eggesford House, once the Devonshire seat of the Fifth Earl of Portsmouth.
25. Jacobean-style chimneys still provide nesting places for crows above the wreck of Eggesford House.
26. Eggesford House shortly after its completion in 1830. The artist has added an extra story, but otherwise the surviving remains, from their medieval-style towers to the mock Tudor front, bear witness to the authenticity of the rendering. Designed to evoke the spirit of romantic chivalry, the house in ruins still weaves its spell.
In his book The Buildings of England, Nikolaus Pevsner has described Eggesford House as an “eminently picturesque large ruin, standing against the sky, surrounded by the woods of the Taw valley like the best of follies,”4 and as such it is hard to realize that its past glories are barely a century old. Kingsley died in 1875, Russell in 1883, and the Fifth Earl as recently as 1891, the same year as did another of his literary guests, James Russell Lowell, the American poet, essayist, and minister to Britain from 1880 to 1885. So hard have blown the winds of change, and so far have the wheels of progress traveled, that those tranquil and lordly days of England’s summer already defy comprehension. Attempting to imagine what it must have been like to have been mistress of Eggesford House in the reign of Queen Victoria is as difficult as accurately envisaging the life-style of Bess of Hardwick or of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. The very idea of a 3,000-acre estate, stabling for forty horses, a house with thirty bedrooms, and two full-time servants just to take care of the lamps is enough to boggle the imagination of a two-bedroom apartment dweller. It is equally difficult to reconstruct in contemporary human terms the relationship (or lack of it) that existed between his lordship and the as
sistant lamplighter. The earl is not totally lost, his biographical data is recorded, and his portrait probably survives, but what of the lamplighter? No one painted her portrait; her legacy may be nothing more than one of the lamps she trimmed and polished, a lamp now gracing the shelf of a New York antique dealer or lying buried in the ruins of Eggesford House.
What, one may ask, has all this got to do with collecting? First, it reminds us that the twilight of the past has a knack of creeping up on us, allowing the lengthening shadows of forgetfulness to obscure people and places that are little more than a long lifetime into history. Next, it provides an object lesson for those of us who tend to scorn Victorian antiques as being too new to be worthy of our attention, and third, it puts a new shine on the cliché that ignorance is bliss. The nostalgia-covered walls of Eggesford House were built to evoke in anyone whose knowledge of the past extended no deeper than the pages of the Waverley novels precisely the same images of romantic medievalism as they did in me. Thus, as I suggested at the outset, when it comes to purely cerebral excursions into the past, what we do not know need not bother us—providing we remain ignorant of our ignorance.
FIVE
Something for Nothing
THE LURE of the treasure hunt is more than the mere desire for wealth without work. It was the motivating force that built the Spanish empire in America, that sent Sir Walter Ralegh in search of El Dorado, and in recent years has caused large sums of modern treasure to be expended on diving expeditions off the Florida coast and around the islands and cays of the Caribbean. Most of these enterprises end up investing much more than they retrieve, but now and again the results are spectacular, and eventually less hardy, armchair adventurers can enjoy the vicarious pleasure of possessing a genuine piece of sunken treasure by bidding for it in the comparative safety of the auction room.
All the Best Rubbish Page 8