All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  It makes no difference whether we are reading a paper from 1961 or 1761, they are still the most lively chronicles of their times available to us. They reflect the concerns, the interests, the mores, the economics, fears, and humors of both journalists and readers, unencumbered by the hindsight of historians who reveal the past to us through the distorting mirror of their own biases. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers are to be found in many libraries, and from time to time turn up in antiquarian bookshops at surprisingly modest prices. Whether it is the Virginia Gazette, the Pennsylvania Evening Post, the Massachusetts Spy or the London Journal, they are all windows on the past and are well worth opening. Who could fail to be intrigued by the London Journal’s freshest advice for September 23, 1732:

  On Monday Evening, about Six o’Clock, the Lady Dolin and her Daughter returning in her Chariot from Newington to Hackney, was attacked between Dorlaston and Church-street, by a single Highwayman, well mounted on a Black Horse, with a Rug Great Coat, and the Cape about his Face; upon presenting his Pistol, with a Volley of Oaths, they gave him what he wanted, their Money; and he returned back, and committed another Robbery near the Turnpike at Kingsland. A Countryman in the next Field, stood looking over a Gate over-against them, all the time the Ladies were robbed, but never offered to stir to their Assistance.

  The last lines could just as well have come from the columns of today’s paper in any country, demonstrating that although technology advances and fashions change, human nature obstinately remains the same. Hardly a week went by in the 1730s without the London newspapers reporting one or more attacks on travelers by footpads and highwaymen. Nowadays they would be sufficient to send editorial writers rushing to their typewriters and TV commentators to their microphones to condemn society in general (and the party in power in particular) for the moral decay of our generation, and to augur the imminent collapse of the nation.

  In recalling Lady Dolin’s stimulating experience, I am less concerned with contemporary parallels than with the reporting of the incident itself. The attack occurred at a point about two miles northeast of London in an area that was part of the turf of the most celebrated of all English highwaymen—Dick Turpin. Every British boy of my generation has thrilled to the cry “Stand and deliver!” and has vicariously galloped away over heath and dale on Turpin’s famous Black Bess. Lady Dolin may have met them both, for it was in the 1730s that Turpin was about his business, and doing it north and east of London. But the Dick Turpin that I knew would have doffed his hat, stolen a kiss, leaving a mocking smile beneath a pencil-thin Errol Flynn mustache lingering in the swooning ladies’ eyes as he disappeared into the night. An hour or a filmic dissolve later we would find him gaming at White’s or causing fans to flutter in the salon of an unidentified dowager duchess. But the brigand who pointed his pistol and fired a volley of oaths at Lady Dolin was obviously no romantic knight of the road—and that is the point. From John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) to Harrison Ainsworth’s fictional account of Turpin’s amazing ride to York in his novel Rookwood (1834), the public has been conditioned to seeing the highwayman as a hero. The truth was quite otherwise, and well fits the London Journal’s report.

  Richard Turpin was born in 1706 and was apprenticed to a butcher until he was caught stealing. He then joined a gang of deer thieves and smugglers, remaining with them until he went into the traveler-robbing business with a notorious practitioner, Tom King. In the mid-1730s, to escape arrest, Turpin fled to Lincolnshire, where he was later convicted of horse stealing and hanged at York in 1739. It is hard to imagine how such an ordinary fellow who made such a wretchedly antisocial mess of his life could wind up a hundred years later as a popular hero—at least it is until we remember that people fitting the same description today need not wait a century to aspire to similar adulation.

  Despite the distortions and misconceptions that tiptoe in their footsteps, modern screenwriters, playwrights, and novelists are largely responsible for keeping alive the public’s interest in the past, and we must forgive them for making us believe that all eighteenth-century women wore ball gowns or nothing. If, however, it is the truth we want, then we can usefully look to those writers of fiction who were part of that past but who were writing about the present. There was Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722) and his contemporary History of Colonel Jack, then, twenty years later, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones, a Foundling (1794), all rich in both rural and urban detail. In the nineteenth century the stuff of English life was recorded by a veritable blaze of luminaries from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy.

  America, unfortunately, was less well served, and her best authors, like James Fenimore Cooper, tended to look either to the past or to the frontier for their inspiration. The concertinaing of time that inevitably takes place as we look backward can lead the unwary into supposing, for example, that Cooper’s accounts of the “noble savage” in the French and Indian Wars were drawn from life. After all, wasn’t he writing back about there someplace? In fact Cooper was not born until 1789 and did most of his writing in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Daniel Defoe’s dramatic picture of London and the Thames in 1665 as portrayed in his Journal of the Plague Year has little documentary value. He was only five in 1665 and wrote the book fifty-seven years after the event. Then there are the occasional deliberate fakes, such as the remarkably researched The English Rogue, a four-volume “Life of Meriton Latroon, And other Extravagants,” which describes low life in the reign of Charles II in great detail. Published in an alleged facsimile edition in the nineteenth century, this lively and mildly pornographic work, if authentic, would rival the diary of Samuel Pepys or Ned Ward’s London Spy (1698) as a portrait of Stuart London. But, alas, it is not—and there’s an end on ’t.

  The suppressed literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has often been touted as possessing redeeming social value as a source of contemporary information. More often than not, however, it is only the authors’ numbingly similar approach to a limited spectrum of sexual gymnastics that has anything to offer, reminding us of something that should be painfully obvious already, to wit: the human animal is an unchanging beast at heart. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), better known as Fanny Hill, is of disappointingly little value as a piece of social history, being far less interested in furnishings than in fun. On the other hand, the wisely anonymous My Secret Life, written in the 1860s, is (in its embarrassing way) a remarkable evocation of the netherworld of gaslight and garters behind the starched façade of Victorian England.

  To both the collector and the social historian, the diaries and journals of travelers are generally more helpful than are those of writers who stayed at home. The latter described the unusual but overlooked the commonplace, whereas the foreigner found the other fellow’s habitat and daily round interesting and worthy of note. It may be added that, on the whole, diaries, being daily records, were likely to be more detailed and accurate than were journals, which might be written up days or weeks after the described events occurred, time enough for backgrounds to blur and nuances to be forgotten. Although, for the reasons stated, many of the most perceptive descriptions of England were written by German, French, and Dutch diarists, most of the better portraits of the English colonies in America were provided by traveling Britons—from Captain John Smith to Nicholas Creswell. It was a compliment returned, as I noted earlier, by Benjamin Silliman of Yale in his travels through England and Scotland in 1805–1806.

  There are, of course, a tremendous number of such sources, and in mentioning any of them I am laying myself open to charges of having deliberately and with malice ignored everybody else’s favorites. How can he say that only British visitors wrote about colonial America, and is he suggesting that there were no American diarists who had useful things to say about their own time and place? I am not saying or suggesting either; my point is merely that the inquiring collector need not limi
t his library visits to the stacks labeled “Collecting.” Unfortunately, however, publishers and their indexers are often ill-prepared for our attention; relatively few diary and journal indexes have been prepared with the needs of the student of objects in mind, assuming, instead, that only proper names are worthy of recognition. It is true that to the genealogist the insertion of “buttons” between Butterworth and Buxton may seem jarringly pedantic, but no more annoying than it is for me to find no reference to “tea” in the index to The London Diary of William Byrd of Virginia. Indeed, I feel that insult has been added to my injury when I discover that “Andrews, Mrs. (or Miss)” rates no fewer than twenty-five entries—six referring to visits by Byrd to an unspecified address where he found Mrs. (or Miss) Andrews not at home, and thirteen to occasions when she was, and he joined her for tea! In short, the collector who expects to make frequent use of such published source material should be prepared for the tiresome chore of making his own indexes.

  Hurrying once more to my own rescue, I must insist that I do not suffer from a hang-up about proper names (though I doubt if it would ever occur to me to look in this index for half of those that are listed); on the contrary the acquisition of an object bearing the name or initials of its maker or owner sends me riffling through the indexes of everything that even remotely relates to the period and the place. For the very reason that they do enable us to take that step, marked antiques are both a better investment and a lot more fun than are those that remain glumly mute. Take, for example, the bell-metal skillet illustrated in Figure 112; it is of a type generally attributed to the eighteenth century, and although little has been written about these once common kitchen utensils, it is sometimes claimed that those made in England were produced either in the southeast or in the southwest. The claim is made baldly and without any supporting evidence, and we can take it or leave it. But the illustrated example has something to say for itself, for cast into the handle is the inscription cox TAUNTON VI, indicating that it is a size six and was made for or by a Mr. Cox of Taunton in Somersetshire—which happens to be on the edge of the English West Country. With that much in hand, the next step is to try to run Mr. Cox to earth in the pages of eighteenth-century county trade directories. I found him in The Universal British Directory of Trade, Commerce, and Manufacture for 1793, where he was listed as “Cox William, Ironmonger.”

  112. This bell-metal skillet was made for William Cox, an ironmonger of Taunton, England, in about 1790. Diameter 7¾ inches.

  In the eighteenth century the business of the ironmonger and brazier were frequently considered as one; thus in 1753 The General Shop Book described him as a seller of “stoves, grates, candlesticks, box-irons, jacks, spits, tea-kettles, hinges, kitchen-furniture, and all manner of brass and iron utensils, tho’ he seldom makes any of them.”10 There is still no knowing whether William Cox of Taunton cast his own skillets or had them made to his order; but one thing is certain, he was one of very few individuals to have left us examples marked both with their own names and those of their towns. What may be one of the largest collections of these bell-metal skillets (sometimes pedantically called “posnets”) is owned by Colonial Williamsburg, yet only two spell out the name of their town, both dating from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and both made, not in England, but in Richmond, Virginia, by or for John Taylor and I. Boulton.

  Another example in the Williamsburg collection is marked WARNER PH, and might have been made by Herinemus Warner (c. 1790–1800) of Philadelphia, but other skillets marked WARNER have turned up in England and obviously are not American. After being purchased in England and shipped home by American dealers and collectors, antiques are prone to acquire “colonial” or “early American” credentials simply through losing sight of the fact that they have been imported. Even if the object is demonstrably of English manufacture, the possibility that it may have been in America since it was new makes it vastly more desirable. The fact that most English place names have their American counterparts (or vice versa, depending on your point of view) makes certain identification of marked objects that much more difficult and demands that we make full use of the documentary sources, which, of course, is what this chapter is all about. In the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, a New England kitchen exhibit includes a skillet marked s. c. NEWPORT 1715, the implication being that it was made at Newport, Rhode Island—and perhaps it was. But until someone produces documentary evidence that a brass founder with the initials “S.C.” was in business there in 1715, one cannot ignore the possibility that the skillet came from any one of twenty Newports in the British Isles. The same museum also possesses an example elegantly marked AUSTIN & CROCKER Boston, and although there is a Boston in England, this skillet, unquestionably, is American. A Boston, Massachusetts, directory of 1796 lists Robert Crocker as a brass founder, and Richard Austin is known to have been a contemporary Boston pewterer. So here, as with the Cox skillet from England, a city and trade directory provides the proof—as they can for all sorts of antiques from sealed bottles to labeled furniture.

  Like all copper-alloy cooking vessels, bell-metal skillets were originally coated on the inside with tin, which gave them a silvery appearance. It was done not for looks, but as a protection against copper poisoning, on which were blamed “palsies, apoplexies, madness, and all the frightful train of nervous disorders which suddenly attack us without our being able to account for the cause.”11 Rarely has the tinning survived; it has either been worn off through the harsh scouring of generations of scullery maids, or has become so dull and patchy that the dealer, knowing that his customers like their brass shiny, has thoughtfully removed what was left. The outsides, on the other hand, are generally heavily blackened from having been thrust countless times into hot ashes and are extremely hard to clean, and just as old iron pots are usually painted black to cover the rust and plugged cracks, so dealers will sometimes smarten up the outside of a bell-metal skillet with a coat of paint. One of Colonial Williamsburg’s rare American specimens (the one marked IN0 TAYLOR * RICHMOND) was disguised in that way, being painted black both outside and in. It was unmasked by an eagle-eyed curator in a junk shop not ten miles from the city and bought at the modest price that old iron pots command.

  Objects whose pedigrees were stamped or cast into them when they were manufactured are matched in interest only by those accompanied by genuine written histories. When, as occasionally happens, one comes upon an object possessing both, mountains should be moved and piggy banks broken to acquire it. This happened only once to me, and I really was not at all pleased when it did; not that I disliked the object, it was simply that I did not know what to do with or where to put a massive leather-covered trunk (Fig. 113a). The leather was secured and decorated with patterns of brass studs describing tulips, crowns, and the Hanoverians’ “G.R.” cipher. Inside, the trunk was lined with marbelized paper, and on the interior of the lid was a large maker’s label declaring that it was made by “Smith & Lucas, Coffer & Plate Case Makers to his Majesty and his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales at the Kings Arms & three Trunks Charing Cross London” (Fig. 113b). The label went on to state that Smith and Lucas made and sold “Black Leather Trunks, for Travelling, Carriages, & Exportation.” They did not, however, make trunks to be used as fireside log boxes, and that was the fate the dealer told me was in store for this trunk if I decided not to buy it. An American who had recently bought an English house near Winchester was in the process of furnishing it with quaint antiques, and the trunk had taken his fancy. Would I want that to happen to this fine and historically important relic of British royalty? My answer was as predictable as the response of a theaterful of kids to Peter Pan’s “Do you believe in fairies?”

  Accompanying the trunk was a document listing its owners from 1787, when it was in the possession of “Mr. Philips Morgan, mason” of Bristol, until 1940, when it was willed into the Southampton family from whom the dealer bought it. Checking the late-eighteenth-century Bristol directories proved that a
Philips Morgan lived there, and the evidence of the studded decoration and the maker’s label left no reason to doubt the document’s heading which described the trunk as “A Royal Chest.” I at first thought that the cipher was that of George III (1760–1820), but I was to be proved wrong. London’s Guildhall Library owns a bill issued by Edward Smith in 1758, at which date he was in business alone, though at the same Charing Cross address printed on the trunk’s label. Further evidence was provided by an advertisement in The Connoisseur in September, 1958, when a comparable trunk bearing a very similar Smith & Lucas label was offered for sale. Unlike the would-be log box trunk, this one’s label had incompletely erased the “By Appointment” reference to the Prince of Wales and has substituted “the Princess Dowager of Wales.” As her husband, the prince, had died in 1751, and as Smith was no longer in partnership with Lucas in 1758, there was no doubt that my trunk could have been made no later than the date of the prince’s death, thus putting it in the reign of George II and not George III.

  113a & b. Made for the household of George II, this important and closely documented leather-covered trunk narrowly escaped ending its days as a log box. The stand is believed to be original. Figure 113b shows part of the lid interior with its marbelized paper lining and maker’s label. Before 1751. Length 4½ inches.

  By buying the trunk, having it restored, and bringing it to America I believed I was saving it from a fate worse than death, but after living with it through two Virginia years, I was not so sure that I had done the right thing. In spite of constant attention to prevent mildew developing through the humid summers, and frequent applications of preservatives to discourage the leather from drying and cracking during the centrally heated winters, the patient showed signs of deterioration. Neither air-conditioning the house for the summer nor adding a humidifier to the furnace for the winter seemed to do enough—which is why the trunk is now to be seen in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg. Some museum-quality objects belong in museums and nowhere else, and this was one of them.