In America, early court records were rarely published and when testimony survives it is not easily available. On the other hand, there is much colorful information to be obtained from contemporary newspapers whose advertisements provide graphic descriptions of the physical appearances and clothing worn by fleeing felons and by runaway slaves and servants. The same colonial and later papers contain equally useful ads for merchandise, telling us what was available and when, though rarely describing the articles as fully as we would like. The same is true of the household inventories filed along with wills in county court records. There, however, even when the objects were poorly described, they were valued, and, more important, we know to whom they belonged and often where they were kept in the house. Information like this is invaluable to the archaeologist who, if he is lucky, may dig up the very items listed in the inventories, but it is also important to the collector interested in imagining or re-creating the associations and surroundings that his objects once enjoyed—or endured.
In our enthusiasm for learning about the names and lives of makers and owners, we readily overlook the middleman who brought the two together, the vendor, the shopkeeper, the dealer; yet he was often the most colorful link in the chain. Henry Mayhew, the Victorian journalist and social reformer, has left us a finely-etched portrait of the 1850 version of today’s Portobello Road stallholder and his stock of “second-hand curiosities.”
The principal things on his barrow [wrote Mayhew] were coins, shells, and old buckles, with a pair of the very high and wooden-heeled shoes, worn in the earlier part of the last century. The coins were all of copper, and certainly did not lack variety…. Of the current coin of the realm, I saw none older than Charles II., and but one of his reign, and little legible. Indeed the reverse had been ground quite smooth, and some one had engraved upon it “Charles Dryland Tunbridg.” A small “e” over the “g” of Tunbridg perfected the orthography. This, the street-seller said, was a “love-token” as well as an old coin, and “them love-tokens was getting scarce.”…The colonial coins were more numerous than the foreign. There was the “One Penny token” of Lower Canada; the “one quarter anna” of the East India Company; the “half stiver of the colonies of Essequibo and Demarara”; the “halfpenny token of the province of Nova Scotia,” &c. &c. There were also counterfeit halfcrowns and bank tokens worn from their simulated silver to rank copper.
These are precisely the kinds of coins that are to be found on the muddy foreshores of the Thames, and it is quite possible that Mayhew’s dealer obtained at least some of his stock from the mudlarks.
“The principle on which this man ‘priced’ his coins,” Mayhew went on, “was simple enough. What was the size of a halfpenny he asked a penny for; the size of a penny coin was 2d. ‘It’s a difficult trade is mine, sir,’ he said, ‘to carry on properly, for you may be so easily taken in, if you’re not a judge of coins and other curiosities,” and the curiosities “got scarcer and scarcer.”3 More than a century later one continues to hear precisely the same cry from the dealers, but miraculously the rarities continue to turn up.
Mayhew’s coin dealer was but one in a cast of hundreds of remarkable characters who peopled the pages of his famous study of the London Labour and the London Poor; others ranged from crossing sweepers and hawkers of gutta-percha dolls’ heads, to prostitutes and crumpet sellers, a gallery of ghosts to haunt the memory of starched and complacent scrapbook Victorians. In short, no collector of Victoriana should fail to read Mayhew, any more than he should overlook Flora Thompson, whose writing painted a portrait of rural England every bit as lifelike as Mayhew’s faces from the city slums. Her trilogy, Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green (happily, reprinted as one volume), records in photographic detail the belated retreat of medieval village life in the face of the Industrial Revolution. Born into the poorest social class in Victorian England, Flora Thompson was the daughter of a farm worker, but through her own industry acquired an education that prepared her for a long career in the Post Office. It was during her later years that she wrote these remarkable books which have so exquisitely and tenderly captured the image of a world that is now beyond our comprehension. They are gems both as literature and as historical documents, and the reading of them cannot fail to enrich any collector of nineteenth-century antiques, and if students of sociology were to be deprived of all but a single volume, this would be the one to keep. Although this wide-eyed recommendation is likely to be viewed as an Englishman’s bias, I was introduced to the books not in England, but in Bloomington, Indiana. From American friends who have since become acquainted with the people of Lark Rise, I have discovered that close parallels for some of the rural domestic traditions described by Flora Thompson have been noted in the mountain country of North Carolina, while games and verses played and chanted by Lark Rise children are remembered by a lady editor who grew up in New York City. It is a fair bet, too, that many a nineteenth-century American farm woman reacted in much the same way to a traveling salesman as did the proudly poor wives of Flora Thompson’s English hamlet.
One such salesman was a cheap-jack, a seller of ceramic bargains running a gamut from single plates and chamber pots to a twenty-one-piece tea service, identical, so the man said, to another that Queen Victoria had bought for Buckingham Palace. The service was the envy of the women who gathered around to watch the man unload his wares from his cart and lay them out beside the road, but bargain though it was, no one could afford it.
“Never let it be said,” the peddler implored, “that this is the poverty-strickenist place on God’s earth. Buy something, if only for your own credit’s sake. Here!” snatching up a pile of odd plates. “Good dinner-plates for you. Every one a left-over from a first class service. Buy one of these and you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re eating off the same ware as lords and dukes. Only three-halfpence each. Who’ll buy? Who’ll buy?”…The man had brought the pink rose tea-service forward again and was handing one of the cups round. “You just look at the light through it—and you, ma’am—and you. Ain’t it lovely china, thin as an eggshell, practically transparent, and with every one of them roses hand-painted with a brush? You can’t let a set like that go out of the place, now can you? I can see all your mouths a-watering. You run home, my dears, and bring out them stockings from under the mattress and the first one to get back shall have it for twelve bob.”
Each woman in turn handled the cup lovingly, then shook her head and passed it on. None of them had stockings of savings hidden away. But just as the man was receiving back the cup, a little roughly, for he was getting discouraged, a voice spoke up in the background.
“How much did you say, mister? Twelve bob? I’ll give you ten.” It was John Price, who, only the night before, had returned from his soldiering in India.4
A little drama, to be sure, but like the lock from the Old Bailey records, the tea service comes to life. It may have been no more than five-and-dime porcelain, yet for the ladies of Lark Rise its possession meant dignity and status—as it might still do today now that it would be a hundred years old. Flora Thompson knew her women well, but the traveling salesman was a fleeting figure, and like the villagers, we hear his voice but do not get to know him. We do not know where he came from, how old he was, how he packaged his wares, or what hopes and fears lay hidden behind his glib patter and showmanship. To see the face of a less ambitious china seller we can turn to John Burr’s 1865 painting The Pedlar (Fig. 104), which shows the man with his basket, knapsack, and dog, and his countrywoman customer coveting a flowered porcelain teapot just as Flora Thompson knew she would.
Paintings, engravings, and drawings are, of course, every bit as important to the collector as are documentary records. To the novice and the lazy-minded they are more so, for they are specific, showing us faces from the past, furnishing rooms, building houses, yet leaving little to the imagination, and discouraging us from looking beyond the flatness of the canvas or the paper. So, to my mind, John Burr’s ped
dler is less alive and provoking than is Miss Thompson’s English Barnum with his cartload of crockery and tinware, and his basins—“exact replicas of the one the Princess of Wales supped her gruel from when Prince George was born.”5 Burr would have shown us the basins, removing any speculation as to whether they were white, yellow, banded, or willow-patterned, or whether they were large, small, broad, or tall. To that extent he would be of more practical help.
104. The Pedlar (1865) by the British artist John Burr. The salesman is trying to sell a teapot to a country woman, and beside her a broken, transfer-printed pitcher stands on a seat akin to the workbench illustrated in Figure 93.
Contemporary genre paintings show us not only where and how objects were used, but also how long they remained in service. Figure 105 illustrates another painting rather similar in style to John Burr’s, at least insofar as it relates to rural aspirations. Called Early Attempts, it was painted in 1861 by William Henry Knight and shows a country family encouraging its smallest member in what appears to be the slightly constipated act of creation. For the collector, the picture’s interest lies less in its subject than in its set dressing, for here in a mid-Victorian cottage we find a late-seventeenth-century gateleg table, a press cupboard at least half a century older, on top of it a wine bottle of about 1780 and a Rhenish stoneware jug of a type made around 1690. More surprising is the broken jug in the left foreground which might be French, Spanish, or Italian, but certainly not English. The occupants of the room clearly are not collectors, and so must have around them possessions that have been there a very long time—at least that is the obvious conclusion. But is it the correct one? Seventeenth-century oak furniture has a fine rustic appearance, a proper setting for the Shakespearean concept of the faithful servant:
105. Early Attempts (1861) by William Henry Knight. This view of English rustic life is thought to be more cute than accurate in its portrayal of household furnishings. Detail.
O good old man! How well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
When service sweat for duty, not for meed!
Thou art not for the fashion of these times…6
The room, the furniture, the props, all are theatrical in their effect and perhaps, therefore, in their origin, making the picture just another of those artistic clichés for which Victorian painters are renowned. If so, Early Attempts has no historical value—and there’s the rub. How do we tell the document from the pastiche?
The answer is that all too often we cannot, unless we know the style and scope of the artist’s work. If the same objects turn up in two or more paintings, it is clear enough that he was not painting “from the life.” The Flemish genre painters David Teniers the Elder (1582–1649) and his son, David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690), both favored tavern and alchemical scenes, the latter frequently being used to illustrate books on glass; but as the same bottles and flasks were repeatedly used, one can use the pictures only to show that the objects were available when the painters were at work, and not that these were the actual vessels used by the alchemist whose workshop is shown. One must also beware of the possibility that common objects that the artist learned to paint in his youth will continue to turn up in his later works, in spite of the fact that those things were by then obsolete or old-fashioned.
The paintings and engravings of William Hogarth are unquestionably the most used and useful windows into English life in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. His portrayals of the people and trappings of high and low life are drawn as much with the scalpel of the social reformer as with the soft brush of the man who conceived the “line of beauty,” and thus the objects and furnishings seen in the pictures may be more symbolic than natural to the scenes. Then, too, some of the objects favored by Hogarth were never common. His table knives, for example, are more reminiscent of scimitars than of ordinary eighteenth-century cutlery (Fig. 106). Indeed, so peculiar are they that his best-known biographer, John Ireland, writing in the 1780s, mistook the knife brandished by one of the Drury Lane lovelies in the Rose Tavern caper as “a razor, which, in a posture of threatening defiance, she grasps in her hand”7 (Fig. 107). Had Ireland better grasped Hogarth’s way with cutlery, he would have known that this was how the artist chose to draw his table knives. In his tailpiece to Ebenezer Forrest’s account of their peregrination to Rochester and Gravesend in 1732, Hogarth symbolized the temper and elements of the trip by means of its artifacts, drawing a smiling face over a wine bottle, a glass, and a ribbon-tied tobacco pipe, spoon, fork, and knife with its Saracen blade (Fig. 108).
106. Typical bone-handled cutlery of the mid-eighteenth century. The knife, with its round-ended blade, is marked with the cutler’s initials I.P. and his rebus, a tobacco pipe, and measures 10½ inches in length.
107. A detail from William Hogarth’s Rose Tavern scene showing a harlot making her point with the aid of a peculiarly-bladed table knife. 1735.
Although caution is always needed in using Hogarth’s objects as historical documents, it sometimes happens that had we believed him, we might have avoided perpetuating some long-accepted fallacies. In my own writing I have often been guilty of stating, for example, that German stoneware bellarmine bottles ceased to be imported into England and her colonies around 1700, and that any found in later archaeological contexts had to be survivals (Fig. 109). I went on to claim that 1699 was the latest known date on such a bottle. I was aware that Hogarth’s sixth picture in his A Harlot’s Progress series showed a bottle that looked remarkably like a poor drawing of a bellarmine, but I dismissed it as the artist’s embellishment of an otherwise uninterestingly ordinary bottle (Fig. 110). It was labeled NANTS and so contained brandy from Nantes in France, and as the picture included a glassy-eyed parson spilling his liquor in his lap, I deduced that the grinning face on the bottle was more comment than correct. I have since learned that Rhenish potters went on making mask-decorated stoneware bottles well through the eighteenth century, and the latest dated example now known to me is marked 1769. There is therefore no reason why such bottles should not have been present in a 1730 London household, and Hogarth’s engraving (the paintings were burned at Fonthill in 1755) can be accepted as proof that they were—though the weight of other negative evidence still indicates that they were far from common.
108. Hogarth drew this “tailpiece” to illustrate an account of his trip to Gravesend in 1732. Among the artist’s symbols of travel and conviviality are a pipe, spoon, fork, and another scimitar-bladed table knife.
109. Dated 1699, this Rhenish stoneware bottle is typical of the quality of such wares as they faded from British favor in the late seventeenth century. Height 1M inches.
110. A detail from scene VI of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress showing a stoneware bottle with a bellarmine-style mask at its neck and a label on its side identifying the contents as NANTS brandy. 1732.
111. A further detail from the same engraving, depicting the results of too much Nants. The lady seated beside the cleric was Elizabeth Adams, who would later be convicted of robbery and executed in 1737.
One of the most entertaining aspects of research of this kind is determining how the people of the past looked at, and thought about, the commonplace things around them. In my search for information that might reveal some subtle second meaning to the word NANTS (alas, none was forthcoming) I learned something about brandy—besides the simple, if impressive statistic that in the 1730s Nantes produced in excess of 174,000 gallons a year. Chambers’s Cyclopaedia informed me that “The chief use of brandy is as a drink: especially in the cold northern countries; among the negroes in Guinea, who fell over one another for a few bottles of brandy; and among the savages of Canada, and other parts of north America, who are infinitely fond of it.” What at first seems to be nothing more than an amusing choice of words becomes rather sinister, and the brandy that painted a vacant smirk across the face of a drunken cleric (Fig. 111) becomes the fuel that fired the slave trade and robbed
the American Indian of a continent.
The brandy bottle’s contribution to the history of slavery and so to the racial troubles of our own time is very real and thoroughly documented. Thus, for example, a tradesman’s directory published in 1753, after condemning the English, Dutch, Spaniards, and Portuguese for their leadership in the trade, had this to say:
The Negro’s [sic] make a frequent practice of surprising one another, while the European vessels are at anchor, and dragging those they have caught to them, and selling them in spite of themselves; and it is no extraordinary thing to see the son sell, after this manner, his father or mother, and the father his own children, for a few bottles of brandy, and a bar of iron.8
From amid the dry pages of what was described by its publisher as a “Necessary Compendium to lie upon the Counter of every Shopkeeper,” emerges the bones of a horror story, a skeleton that today’s masochistic penitents would prefer to see thrown back into the closet, secured by a spring lock that really works.
The archaeologist labors with broken pots and the historian with half-truths, and from these fragments both try to put the past back together again, and all the while they are beguiled by scores of deliciously aromatic red herrings. Anyone who has ever tried to turn out an attic or even an old trunk knows how a small job inevitably stretches into a mammoth project as memories are stirred and curiosity is titillated. It would be hard, for example, to come upon the front page of the British Daily Sketch and not be hooked by the headline “DEATH AMID THE JUJU MASKS—Woman murdered in theatre-land curio shop—STABBED BY ORIENTAL DAGGER—Pictures on Middle Pages.” Even if one did not know either the shop or its proprietor (as I did), it would be disappointing to smooth out the rest of the sheets only to find that the middle pages were missing. Who was the killer? Were the police right in their belief that he was “a curio lover whom [the victim] discovered rummaging through the shop for a rare antique he could not afford”?9
All the Best Rubbish Page 23