ELEVEN
A Word in Your Eye
I’M A MOVER. I get it in and I get it out. I don’t have time to research the stuff!”
Such was the response of a successful British antique dealer to a collector’s question about the history of an item in his shop. Although one might argue that by being able to tell a customer more about his wares, the dealer could make them more attractive and “pricey,” there is no denying the importance of a quick turnover in today’s highly competitive world of antique trading. Only in that way does the small dealer secure time and capital for the ever more arduous pursuit of increasingly scarce merchandise. The collector, on the other hand, is under no such pressure and, in theory at least, he has the residue of a lifetime for research and the acquisition of keys to doors beyond which lie journeys, adventures, and dramas that are uniquely his own. However, the metaphorical key does not, itself, open the door; it must first fit the lock, which in turn needs to be oiled. Thus, for example, there can be numerous interrelated steps (interlocking, if you will) between acquiring a Victorian spittoon and knowing the men who spat into it. Both must be placed in a setting; the spittoon needs a floor, and the floor needs a room—but what kind of room? Right away we are brought up short. Is this a genteelly domestic cuspidor or one that would have been used in public places, in a barroom, a courthouse, a jail, even an insane asylum? Clearly we have to establish the locale before we can furnish or people it. Alas, the majority of antiques defy us to take that first identifying step.
The spittoon illustrated in Figure 8 is of a type that could have seen service in any of the public places I have mentioned; it is only because it was dug from the rubble and ashes of an American “Bedlam” that we can associate it with an asylum. The same is true of the pair of ceramic papboats found in the debris of the hospital’s burned dispensary (Fig. 101). Left to speak for themselves on an antique dealer’s shelf, the feeding bottles would have little appeal other than as examples of pharmaceutical ceramics, yet, in truth, they are links not only with the first state-supported mental institution in North America, but also with a moment of high drama on a June night in 1885 when the inhabitants of Williamsburg turned out to watch the biggest blaze in the town’s history (Fig. 102). With their story safely on record, however, the papboats can provide the catalyst to set us off in a quest for information about fire fighting in nineteenth-century America, about the feeding of the elderly and infirm, or about the treatment of the mentally ill.
No matter what kind of antique one collects, the first steps along the research road relate directly to that object, learning how it was made, how it was used, and its relative importance to the people who owned it. Because most antique collectors are interested in the relics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I propose to confine my examples and sources to the Georgian and Victorian periods. That these blanket terms are as well understood in the United States as in England is not due to the influence of latter-day Anglophiles, for British taste, design, and products continued to be as much a part of American life in the eighty years after the Revolution as they had been in the centuries before it—as was demonstrated amid the debris of the Williamsburg asylum where most of the plain institutional plates, bowls, and bedroom ceramics bore the marks of Staffordshire potters.
101. A pair of ironstone china papboats whose appearance is as uninteresting as their purpose. They are, however, the stuff of drama, for they were found in the debris of America’s first public hospital for the insane, a building opened in 1773 at Williamsburg and burned in 1885. Length of papboats 7⅜ inches.
102. The basement below the dispensary of Williamsburg’s “Bedlam” in the process of archaeological excavation. Bottles by the hundred lie in boxes on the floor.
British trade catalogues, pattern books, and merchants’ advertisements remain legitimate sources of information about the goods sold in American stores and used in American homes at least as late as the 1860s, though British influence declined in the post-Civil War years. Thereafter, the possessions of the average American family have been recorded for us through one of America’s greatest contributions to Western culture—the mail-order catalogue. Beginning with Montgomery Ward in the 1870s, and Sears, Roebuck in the 1890s, the story of rural American taste and need was recorded in microscopic detail, and the recent bout of nostalgia has usefully resulted in the facsimile reprinting of some of those early catalogues. A few comparable British catalogues (e.g., that of the Army and Navy Stores) have been reprinted, but the vast majority have not, and for the earlier catalogue sources one must go to libraries and museums. The Henry Francis du Pont Museum at Winterthur, Delaware, probably has the best research library of this kind in the United States, while in England the British and the Victoria and Albert museums have important catalogue collections.
Although catalogues were carried by salesmen in the eighteenth century, many of them were hand-drawn and written rather than printed, meaning that few were issued and consequently are extremely rare. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the survivors are kept in the humidity and humanity-controlled rare-book dungeons of libraries, guarded by frigid-faced jailers who see would-be readers as potential bibliorapists. Thanks, however, to the emergence of publishers specializing in modestly priced facsimile editions of rare pictorial books, today’s antique collector has many more sources available to him than did his predecessors of twenty or thirty years ago. Furthermore, these same publishers provide the added service of reissuing out-of-print books about antiques and dying crafts which, though their texts may be of questionable value, frequently contain valuable illustrations of objects that no longer survive.
Often more useful than books on antiques are those written about the same objects when they were new. Fortunately for the general collector there are a number of encyclopedic sources to provide points of departure, and because of their original popularity and large editions, these are still fairly readily available today. The first major encyclopedia prepared and published in England was Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, which was printed in 1728, with a second edition ten years later, and a two-volume supplement in 1753. Although most of its engravings relate to such uncollectable subjects as military defenses, ships, heraldry, and mathematics, the text provides tremendously valuable data on the manufacture of all manner of objects from pins to cannon. A French version was completed in 1745, but problems over rights and credits brought Denis Diderot into the picture as an editor and led him to undertake an entirely new Encyclopédie which was to run to ten volumes of text (the first published in 1751) and more than six hundred plates comprising a further six volumes. The latter are unquestionably the most valuable pictorial record of eighteenth-century manufacturing processes, as well as being an astonishing picture gallery of topics ranging from classical antiquities to the anatomy of hermaphrodites. Fortunately, the volumes of plates and their descriptions were reprinted in Paris in 1964, thus making this essential source more widely available.
It is hard to find in Diderot’s achievement anything but a staggering contribution to knowledge, but in its day the Encyclopédie was received with outrage by church and government, both of which saw the seeds of their own destruction in the text’s preference for facts over dogma. In the dedication to a supplement for the third edition of the British Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1800, the editor declared that “The French Encyclopédie had been accused, and justly accused, of having disseminated far and wide the seeds of anarchy and atheism. If,” he went on, “the Encyclopaedia Britannica shall in any degree counteract the tendency of that pestiferous work, even these two volumes will not be wholly unworthy of your Majesty’s attention.” First published in weekly segments beginning in 1768, the Encyclopaedia Britannica followed more closely in the footsteps of Chambers than of Diderot, and lacked the wealth of illustrations that made the latter’s work so valuable.
In addition to these most famous of encyclopedias, there were others
elsewhere which can, on occasion, be equally helpful. In France there was Le Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle compiled by Pierre Larousse (1865–76), in Italy the Nuova Enciclopedia Italiana (1841–51), in Germany the Conversations-Lexikon…&c., which began to be published in 1796, and in the United States, first the Encyclopaedia Americana (1839–47) and then the New American Cyclopaedia (1858–63). Unfortunately, however, the illustrations in most of these works are more likely to help you build a bridge or a steam engine than identify a cockle pot or an Irish decanter.
The earliest English compendia that described or illustrated common household objects in a semi-encyclopedic way were heraldic dictionaries which described the objects used on crests or in coats of arms. Thus, for example, in James Boswell’s Workes of Armorie (1597), the arms of the Urinal family are shown to incorporate three pear-shaped flasks of a type described earlier (and rather surprisingly) as “a little vessell with a broade bottom, and a small necke…. Such tokens may be given to servitours of kings and princes, which beginne and take assay of all drinks before their soveraigne.” In the second half of the seventeenth century, Randle Holme of Chester wrote, and profusely illustrated, a rather similar but much larger work which he called his Academy of Armory. Holme, like the encyclopedists who came after him, was interested not only in objects as such, but also in the way they were made, named, and used. Consequently, the Armory is a primary source for information concerning the manufacture and terminology for such things as bone combs, tobacco pipes, and pewter ware, for the appropriate furnishings “to a dineing Rome,” and dozens of other topics having little to do with heraldry. One volume of Holme’s work was reprinted by the Roxburghe Society in 1905, but the rest remains in manuscript among the Harlean papers in the British Museum. Even so, the Academy of Armory remains a most useful and entertaining entrée into a century that is sadly short of such sources.
Building a library is just as important a part of antique collecting as pursuing the objects of one’s affections. Naturally enough, it is best to begin by reading what other collectors, curators, and professional writers are saying about that particular class of object. From there one can go back to seek older “classic” works on the subject. But for the time traveler there are other less trodden paths, such as acquiring a range of dictionaries and early gazetteers. In their brief descriptions of words and place names, the lexicographers tell us how they were most commonly used, and one frequently discovers that the meanings have changed considerably over the years. Today, for example, a blunderbuss is thought of as a short-barreled weapon flaring at the muzzle and capable of firing iron garbage for relatively short distances, but Edward Phillips in The New World of Words (1671) described it as a “long Gun that will carry 20 Pistol Bullets, and do execution at some distance.” However, the term “long Gun” was probably used to distinguish the blunderbuss from pistols. The unfamiliar phrasing often makes the reading of such dictionaries amusing as well as instructive. It is gratifying to know, for example, that Phillips considered Florence to be “a proper name of a woman: also the chief City of Tuscany in Italy, so called.” He was the nephew of John Milton and his dictionary (first published in 1658) did not pretend to be complete but merely tried to bring together the tricky words derived from other languages.
The first dictionary that attempted to assemble all the words in the English language was published by Nathanial Bailey in 1721, and thereafter went through many subsequent revisions and editions. The New World of Words is nice to have (particularly when you pick it up, as I did, for about twelve cents in a street market), but Bailey is indispensable, though admittedly not such fun for the browser as is Samuel Johnson’s English Dictionary (1755) with its pithy definitions and whimsical words. Bailey makes up for that, however, by appending to the 1737 edition “A Collection of the Canting Words and Terms, both ancient and modern, used by Beggars, Gypsies, Cheats, House-Breakers, Shop-Lifters, Foot-Pads, Highwaymen, &c.,” which opens to our astonished twentieth-century ears the voices behind the faces in the taverns, the brothels, and the city slums that we otherwise know only through the brush and burin of Hogarth.
For the collector of earthenwares, wine bottles, drinking glasses, country furniture, pewter, and many another category of everyday objects, it is not the past of kings and courtiers or of palaces and salons that beckons, but rather it is the world of the common folk and the commonplace that must be explored. Unfortunately, it is the hardest gate to crash, for the people who lived behind it were less eloquent than their social superiors, less given to letter writing or diary keeping, and less attractive to biographers, portrait painters, and lily gilders. Instead, their loves and hates, their physical descriptions, and their personal achievements are best revealed to us through their brushes with the law and their resulting immortality upon the pages of court records. Thus there is no better introduction to eighteenth-century London than through the often verbatim records of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers. If we want to know what ladies carried in the cloth pockets that served them as purses, the trial transcript of a pocket-snatcher has the answer: “37 shillings, and some half-pence, a silver snuff-box gilt, a pocket bottle of geneva [gin], and a tortoise-shell tobacco-box”1—all then worth stealing and now eminently collectable. The pocket-picker, Joseph Blake, was hanged at Tyburn on November 11, 1724.
Another London thief was more fortunate; Arthur Gray was tried in December, 1721, convicted, condemned to die, and then, like John Gay’s MacHeath, was reprieved. His trial is of interest in that it tells us something about brass door locks (Fig. 103), a crucial piece of evidence which Gray was to use in his defense against the charge of breaking into the “house of George Baillie, Esq; with an intent to ravish Mrs. Murray.” She was Baillie’s daughter, and among her other misfortunes had the ill luck to be named Grizel. A maid, Elizabeth Trimmel, appeared as a prosecution witness and was cross-examined by the prisoner on whether or not her mistress’s door was locked.
“What kind of lock was it?”
“A brass spring lock.”
“Was there a key in it?”
“No, it opened and shut with a brass knob.”
“But don’t you know that the lock was faulty, was difficult to be made fast, and would after slip back and open itself?”
“The spring indeed was bad.”
“And might not that be the occasion of the door’s being open, when you came to it a second time?”
Brass locks were expensive and were generally used only on street doors or on those of reception rooms in relatively wealthy households. Mr. Baillie’s wealth is not revealed, but he lived in the parish of St. James, Westminster, which was then, as it still remains, one of London’s more exclusive areas. Nevertheless, the presumably costly lock lacked a key and relied only on a knob-operated bolt, and one might be forgiven for wondering whether the term “lock” might then have been synonymous with “latch.” But if we could call Ephraim Chambers to give evidence, he would quote from his Cyclopaedia, saying that a lock was “a little instrument for the shutting and fastening of doors, chests, &c, only to be opened by a key.” He would have gone on, too, to add something else of consequence, telling us that “From the various structures of locks, accommodated to their different intentions, they acquire various names—Those placed on outer doors are called stock-locks, those on chamber doors, spring-locks…. Of these the spring-lock is the most considerable, both for its frequency, and the curiosity of its structure.” Like all pedants he would have gone on to bore us to death, naming its twenty-one different parts, none of which had any bearing on the ravishing of Grizel Murray.
103. A man’s life once hung on whether a lock like this did its job. The brass rim lock has a spring latch, a main bolt operated only by a key, and a dead bolt below. It differs from the one described in the trial of Arthur Gray in 1721 in that it cannot be locked from outside the room without using the key. Probably mid-eighteenth-century but with some modern replacement parts. Length 9½ inches.
&n
bsp; The bed chamber door had lost its key, and as the lock would have been on the room side, there could have been no way for the maid to secure it from outside. Indeed, without the key, the average brass rim- or box-lock could be more than latched only by using the dead bolt which could be shot by no one but the person remaining in the room. Therefore the maid’s subsequent evidence that she went to her mistress’s bedroom at three in the morning, found the door open, shut it, and was “pretty sure that she locked it fast the second time”2 leaves the antiquarian Sherlock Holmes wondering how this was accomplished—and why. After all, it is not normal for people in the safety of their own homes either to lock their bedroom doors or to be locked in. Indeed, in another Old Bailey case when house locks were at issue, a witness stated that none of the doors was kept locked because there was only one key for all the locks in the building.
My point in all this is not to retry a case that went to its jury two hundred and fifty years ago, but to show that such transcripts are capable of telling us something about eighteenth-century locks, and at the same time turning an inanimate object into a thing of such dramatic import that a man’s life hung on whether or not the lock’s spring did its job.
All the Best Rubbish Page 22