The United States is often, but incorrectly, thought of as the instigator of the patent-medicine boom in the nineteenth century, but in fact the majority of the proprietary, nonprescription medicines sold in nineteenth-century America were not patented but were protected by the registration of their brand names. The first truly patented medicines came from England, the oldest of them being Stoughton’s Elixir, which acquired its royal license in 1712. Little attention has yet been paid to nineteenth-century medicine bottles in England, and the molded bitters and historical liquor flasks so widely collected in America lack their English counterparts, possibly because the British were more firmly wedded to beer, wine, and gin and did not have to contend with the American temperance movements (first promoted by Benjamin Rush in 1785) that turned medicinal bitters into a socially acceptable substitute for honest liquor.
91. British pharmaceutical phials and bottles dating from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. From left to right they can be given the following median dates: about 1815, 1650, 1740, 1700, 1680, 1740, 1790, and 1750. All are green save for the 1650 example, which is amber, and that of 1790, which is clear and 6⅛ inches tall.
In 1968, excavations on the site of an eighteenth-century Williamsburg store revealed two abandoned well shafts, and with the Custis treasures still in mind, hopes were high that equally exciting discoveries were about to be made. It soon became apparent, however, that both wells had been filled in the present century, the first around 1910 and the second in about 1930. Each had been in use when the property was occupied by a barber’s shop and drugstore—as the artifacts lucidly reminded us. Mixed with the bottles for cologne, Ayer’s Hair Vigor, Swamp Root, and Mexican Mustang Liniment found in the 1910 well were bottles for bitters, beer, and various brands of whisky. The second shaft, on the other hand, yielded no liquor bottles and, instead, contained a surprising number of broken Mason jars—surprising only until an elderly Williamsburg resident recalled that during Prohibition local moonshine was dispensed in these jars. The same well surendered a medicine-type bottle embossed with the name of a neighborhood bottling company whose history should have been easy enough to trace, yet Colonial Williamsburg’s research staff reported that no record could be found of a company under the proprietorship named on the bottle. Later, however, another old resident remembered it, recalling that the business closed around 1928 when one partner was said to have gone off with the other’s wife.
92. The best of the new rubbish. A group of soft-drink and other bottles found in a Williamsburg well abandoned in about 1929. From left to right, a Ball “Mason” jar; a bottle made for the Williamsburg Bottling Works, and others for Taka-Kola, Hayo-Kola, Indian Rock Ginger Ale, and Great Radium Spring Water, this last 10 inches in height.
There were two lessons to be learned from these drugstore bottles: first, that the people and events of our own time slip into oblivion much more quickly than we complacently suppose, and second, that relatively recent artifacts, unable yet to be officially called antiques, already attract the attention of serious collectors (Fig. 92). This last point was demonstrated when the contents of the two wells were shown in a tongue-in-cheek display at a Williamsburg Antiques Forum, and to our dismay drew as much interest as did the newly discovered colonial objects that we considered to be the cream of the exhibition. Tennyson made the same point more succinctly and certainly more eloquently when he wrote:
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.10
TEN
“All the Best Rubbish Is Gone”
IT WAS COMMON in the nineteenth century for gentle-man-travelers to stop and draw the scenes and buildings that pleased or interested them, and their journals and sketchbooks were filled with pen-and-ink renderings of minarets, fallen columns, fountains, and architectural details. Today the mindless camera has become the tourist’s substitute for the talented hand and the educated eye; nevertheless, a few artist-travelers linger on as anachronistic scions of a more leisurely age. One of them, an American resident of the Caribbean island of Saint Eustatius, has made a hobby of drawing the fretwork designs characteristic of West Indian architecture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, jigsaw work that is rapidly disappearing as wooden buildings are replaced by cinderblock construction and mail-order ornament. While sketching the fretwork on a dilapidated frame house on the island of St. Kitts, the artist saw a small black girl emerge from the garbage-strewn alley beside the building. She shook her head sadly, and then to nobody in particular sighed, “Oh, dear, all de bes’ rubbish is gone.” Had she been referring to the state of antique collecting in the later twentieth century, it would surely have been one of the most honest and naively profound observations on record.
The lament might equally well have been that of the despairing archaeologist who must stand impotently by as the detritus of the past is bulldozed away. The world’s lesser museums have long drawn their treasures from what once was considered rubbish, things worn out and no longer wanted, things out of fashion and obsolete, things relegated to rot in the cellar or to shrivel and fade in the attic. But now most of the cellars and attics are gone or have been cleared out as the houses have changed hands or been pulled down. The old family home is a thing of the past, made outmoded by shifting fortunes, by death duties, and above all by twentieth-century mobility and the need to go where the jobs are. Relocation has become an accepted punctuator of modern working life, and where, less than a century ago, moving to a town fifty miles away was a relatively serious undertaking, job-seeking on another continent is now as commonplace. It is true, of course, that British fortune-seekers went off to America in the eighteenth century and to Australia in the nineteenth, but having got there they generally put down roots, as did the majority of Americans who moved westward across the continent. The difference today is that few people stay anywhere very long, certainly no more than two generations, and their houses are built with that in mind, so shoddily constructed that most have a life expectancy of barely twenty-five years.
The attrition resulting from kitchen fires and portable flame lighting decreased with the introduction of municipal gas and was further reduced with the advent of electricity in the 1880s, but these advances, coupled with the increasing availability of indoor plumbing, did much to promote new construction, and thus hurried the demise of the old. In England, villages and towns that had changed little in two or three hundred years were drastically transformed in the late Victorian era. In America and the Caribbean, a greater reliance on wood-covered frame construction, coupled with the voracious appetites of termites and a high degree of inflammability, did much to dictate the life-span of the average nineteenth-century home—and as the house went, so went its furnishings and the “almost antiques” stored in its darker recesses.
It would be foolish to suppose that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses invariably remained jammed from attic to basement with aged furniture and old crockery, just because they had a better chance of survival in their own time than did the less strongly constructed homes that came later. It is true, however, that the absence of municipal garbage disposal services made getting rid of the rubbish more difficult, but at the same time the presence of large and ever hungry hearths for both cooking and heating made sure that old furniture served one last turn. Strictly utilitarian, country kitchen joinery was the first to go, for having neither aesthetic merit nor value as scrap, no one pleaded for its reprieve. Like the undated and unmarked ceramics and glassware discussed in previous chapters, its simplicity made it dateless, and even if by accident it escaped to live beyond its time, it remained an old table or chair and never a desirable antique. It is for these reasons that the simple kitchen, wash-house, and buttery furniture of the eighteenth century is now more rare than are quality pieces
. Admittedly they are not losses loudly bemoaned, and the collector of Queen Anne or Chippendale is unlikely to have a good word to say for a butcher’s oak bench. To me, however, the example shown in Figure 93 is tremendously interesting—quite apart from the fact that it makes a splendid coffee table. Although impossible to date with accuracy, the bench is typical of countless work tables, boat trestles, and rustic benches seen in any number of paintings and engravings from Bruegel to Hogarth, and rightfully belongs in any museum, period room, or historic restoration that purports to show how the other half lived. But being part of all that rubbish which, alas, is gone, such furniture is conspicuous by its absence.
93. An oak butcher’s bench, typical of the common, utilitarian furniture that has rarely survived to become antique. Length 5 feet.
The conversion of furniture into firewood was a natural enough step, particularly if it did not happen to be your furniture (Fig. 94a). In time of war the occupying enemy—be he British regular, Sherman’s Yankee, or Wehrmacht Nazi—made no distinction between good and indifferent furniture, any more than he considered the cultural consequences of ripping out the balusters from elegant staircases. In all fairness (if that is the appropriate word) one must admit that the vandalism of necessity has never been confined to one’s enemies. Liberators can be equally destructive, and when it comes to staying warm, even friends and scholars will eschew the cold comfort of antiquarian scruples. The point was well made shortly after the Second World War when, living in a London apartment house, I descended to the basement to pay my rent and found my landlady busily tearing up old books and stuffing them into the furnace. She explained that the fuel shortage was such that she was using anything that would burn—including a trunkful of books left behind by a Polish officer. Loose pages and ripped covers littered the floor, evidence enough that the majority of the books had been of considerable age and possibly of some importance. I was able to salvage only one volume, and that only after it had been shorn of its vellum covers. It was a dictionary of law, Vocabularius Pro Communi Utilitate printed in Paris by Philip Pigouchet in 1510, and a note on the final page written in a sixteenth-century hand stated that the book was the property of Stephen Long, who had bought it from Gerard for one pound and twelve pence (Fig. 95). The title sheet had gone with the covers and many of the fragile pages had suffered from being thrown on the floor, and therefore in spite of the fact that this copy was thirty-seven years older than the earliest edition in the British Museum, its parlous condition made it of little monetary value. This, then, was one occasion when my supernatural solicitors let me down, for had they sent me down to pay the rent an hour earlier, many other books might have been saved.
94a & b. The back leg of an eighteenth-century chair burned almost down to its brass caster, a reminder of the fate shared by most old furniture. Had this example survived it might have resembled the Philadelphia example shown in Figure 94b. About 1770. The fragment is seen with a cleaned brass caster found on the same archaeological site, that of cabinetmaker Anthony Hay in Williamsburg.
95. One man’s treasure is another’s fuel. This is the last page of a law dictionary printed in Paris in 1510, a book barely saved from a domestic furnace in 1947.
One can find some sympathy for the unfortunate landlady and her houseful of chilly and complaining tenants; at least her vandalism was the product of ignorance and necessity. It is far harder to condone the destruction of books by antiquarian dealers, yet they have often been guilty of taking fine seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century volumes apart to remove the engraved and hand-colored maps and illustrations to sell them separately for greater profit. Atlases, books on travel, natural history, and archaeology have been prime targets. The culprits would doubtless defend themselves by claiming that the destroyed books had already lost frontispieces, had broken spines and foxed pages, and therefore they were doing us a service by saving illustrations that would otherwise have been lost. They might add, too, that many of the books were so uninteresting that no one would want them. It is, however, such value judgments as these that represent the greatest dangers to the survival of the past’s material remains. They are made every day, and at every level of society. They send the wrecker’s ball crashing through the walls of an ugly Gothic Revival city hall, route a highway through an unimportant village, and flood a valley containing nothing of architectural merit—“ugly,” “unimportant,” “of no architectural merit,” all conclusions based on opinion, and much too often a monetarily-biased, minority opinion. The destruction of anything can be guaranteed to be to the financial advantage of someone, and thus to the prosperity of cities, counties, states, and nations. Conversely, retaining something of antiquarian interest generally costs money rather than earns it, and preservationists tend to be wealthy only in words. Furthermore, they are likely to belong to the “older generation” and to be predominantly female, while those in their ranks who are younger and male are unlikely to offer to wrist-wrestle horny-handed land developers. In short, as far as the progressive businessman is concerned, preservationists belong to a lunatic fringe standing in the path of commerce and prosperity. They might even be politically subversive.
Even when the preservationists prevail, the future of the past can rest in singularly capricious hands. Buildings that have grown and changed over the years, acquiring a weathered if portly dignity, can find themselves the recipients of a Devil’s deal that will restore their youth at the price of their integrity. What they have become is sacrificed for what they might have been, in the hands of saviors who do not remember the advice of John Dryden:
If ancient fabrics nod, and threat to fall,
To patch the flaws, and buttress up the wall,
Thus far ’t is duty; but here fix the mark:
For all beyond it is to touch our ark.1
The lines are as valid today as when they were written in 1681. There is not the slightest doubt that all is done with the best of intentions, just as the conquest of Peru and Mexico by the Spaniards was a high-minded and godly endeavor—unless one happened to be an Inca or an Aztec. Thus, if we happen to be enthusiastic about Georgian architecture, the “back to colonial times” movement gets our vote. At the same time, however, the Victoriana aficionado and the Civil War buff may deplore the stripping away of nineteenth-century wings from eighteenth-century houses or the removal of ante-bellum buildings to permit the reconstruction of others of earlier date.
In short, the preservation or destruction of the past all too frequently rests in the hands of people with relatively narrow points of view. That also means a singleness of purpose, and without it very few of the major triumphs of historical preservation would ever have been undertaken. The trick is to be sure that this dedication benefits more than the first person singular.
In the 1930s the popularity in England and the United States of things faintly Elizabethan and the architecture that Osbert Lancaster dubbed “stockbrokers’ Tudor,” brought with it a taste for parchment lamp and sconce shades. As a consequence, thousands of muniments of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were bought by lampshade makers from town clerks, lawyers, and families anxious to be rid of “old papers” that were no longer legally relevant. As the best lampshades invariably included a panel featuring a decorative commencing capital letter, and as you got only one to a deed, the attrition was not unlike the slaughtering of elephants to take only their tusks. Then, too, there has long been a small but lucrative business in wax seals, particularly those in metal boxes attached to royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal charters, freedoms, commissions, and the like, all cut from their documents and sold to collectors. Seals of all types were particularly popular collectors’ items in the late nineteenth century, and one might suppose that professional archivists would have shrieked for protective legislation to burn publicly the destroyers of historical documents. But no fires were lit and no flesh melted. The majority of British archivists were medievalists, and their attitude was generally that
if it was not in Latin, it wasn’t worth bothering about. Consequently, masses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century records were dismissed in the same cavalier way that we still toss out late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century papers.
When, in 1951, the bombed ruins behind the City of London’s Guildhall were to be cleared away, I happened to be the only person around to record the medieval foundations before they were bulldozed. While doing so, I came upon an iron-doored basement room, shelved along two walls, and on the shelves stacks of documents bundled in all shapes and sizes. The door had rested partially open, and although the shelves were protected from the rain, they had not escaped the damp, nor had they been spared the effects of the fire that raged above them when the great building burned in 1940. The pages had stuck together, turning the bundles into solid blocks, while the searing effect of the heat had first buckled the door and then reduced the exposed edges of the documents to black ashes. Nevertheless, it was evident from prying a few of the slabs apart that here were countless papers relating to City legal business dating back at least into the eighteenth century. Efforts to get the library staff to salvage the contents of the cellar before it was bulldozed away got me nowhere—and bulldozed it was. But not before I had salvaged one slab of papers from a shelf just inside the door.
I took them home with the intent of slowly drying them out and then trying to pry the sheets apart to determine whether they were of any real significance. Fifteen years slipped by before I got around to it, by which time (needless to say) the papers were tinder dry and ready to fall to pieces. Among them were records of repairs to the Lord Mayor’s coach in 1791, bills for the guards’ wages at Newgate prison in the 1780s, for coverlets for the “poor prisoners,” and for the purchase of a “stout plunging bath tub [with] 6 strong iron hoops.” Five groups of the papers related to the transfer of felons from Newgate to prison hulks (Fig. 96) or to the ships aboard which they would be “transported beyond the Seas” to Botany Bay in Australia. The earliest of these lists contained 210 names delivered to the vessels between December, 1785 and November, 1789, and of whom the first 112 almost certainly sailed aboard the “First Fleet” of nine transports and men-of-war that left for New South Wales in March of 1787. The second list amounted to a further 138 names, among them those of thirty-four women deposited aboard the Lady Juliana transport between March and April, 1789, the vessel then lying in the Thames waiting to make its second trip to Australia (Fig. 97). There is no doubting that the reluctant passengers would remember the ship and their long voyage for the rest of their lives, but the memory would have died with them had it not been for the presence of a young cooper, John Nicol of Edinburgh, whose first duty was to remove the shackles from the prisoners’ ankles as they came aboard. Years later, toward the end of his days, Nicol wrote a long and colorful account of this and other voyages, in a book first published in 1822. In it he mentioned the names of nine of the women from the total of 245 put aboard the Lady Juliana. Three of them figure in the salvaged lists: Elizabeth Davis, described by Nicol as “a noted swindler”; Mary or Sarah Dorset, who “had not been protected by the villain that ruined her”; and Eleanor Kerwin (alias Karravurn), to whom he referred as “Mrs. Nelly Kerwin, a female of daring habits.” At once these faceless names spring to life, and the convict ship creaks and groans at her moorings ready to sail again on the next tide. But, in fact, she was in no hurry and remained in the Thames for six months, “all the gaols in England [being] emptied to complete the cargo.” When at last she was ready, the Lady Juliana was setting out on one of the most unconventional voyages ever sponsored by a British government.
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