Victorian Things

Items

• Frederick Langton’s Scrapbook
  Frederick W. Langton’s scrapbook was created in the latter part of the nineteenth century, at a time when periodical publications were proliferating. Presented above are selected pages from Langton’s “Ruskiniana” scrapbook, a collection of documents taken from periodicals about the art critic John Ruskin. One page from the album features two typed newspaper columns cut and pasted onto a brown piece of paper. The two columns are carefully placed side by side in the middle of the page, leaving a slight brown gap between them. The newspaper’s masthead is pasted at the top of the page, identifying the source of the typed columns as an issue of “The Graphic” from 30 March 1878. Another album page includes two pages of an article entitled “Art and Its Relation to Life” pasted side by side, with a line of the album’s brown paper separating the two densely printed sheets. A handwritten note pasted in just below these two pages slightly overlaps the article when it is unfolded for reading, as in the photograph included above. Printed text at the top of the note identifies it as a “Memorandum from George Allen, Sunnyside, Orpinton, Kent.” The memorandum is addressed by hand to “Rev. W. M. Richardson, Banbury” and dated 10 July 1877. The memorandum begins, “Dear Sir, In reply to your query about Professor Ruskin and his tea-shop, I beg to inform you that he did put an old servant into a shop… so that the poor in the neighbourhood round about might be able to get pure good tea and coffee.” Another section of the scrapbook emphasizes the variety of materials included in the album: in addition to printed and hand-written materials, Langton included a full pamphlet, “Whistler v. Ruskin: Art & Art Critics,” written by James McNeill Whistler and published on 24 December 1878.
• Layette Pincushion
  This layette pincushion is made of light-blue fabric, faded from the sun and mottled in places. A message pricked out in pins reading “God Bless Thee my baby” appears in cursive in the centre of the cushion. The first three words are capitalized and separated by pinheads. A curved frame of pinheads surrounds the message, and there are decorative details at the top, bottom, centre, and corners of the frame. The top decoration resembles a crown, and the bottom decoration either a teardrop or a leaf. The corners of the frame are marked with triangular shapes. To the left and right of the pinhead frame, there are curved floral designs of ribbon rosettes in pink, blue, yellow, and white, and leaves in soft green. White lace trims all four sides of the cushion, which measures five inches wide, three and three-quarters inches deep, and two inches high. The pincushion’s provenance is unknown, but it most likely formed part of a baby’s layette and seems to have been made by its mother, as suggested by the possessive “my” in the message.
• Charlotte Brontë’s Dress
  Charlotte Brontë wore this dress on her honeymoon to County Clare, Ireland. The dress consists of a bodice and a skirt, each made of lavender-coloured, striped, medium-weight silk. The bodice is adorned with tan-coloured silk velvet cuffs and collar, and edged with ten small triangles trimmed with silk fringe. The full-length skirt, attached to a waistband, is gathered across the centre back, while the skirt front is flat with small pleats at either side. A small bustle would have been worn underneath. Both the bodice and skirt are close fitting around the waist and fully lined with cream-coloured cotton. The bodice fastens down the centre front with fourteen metal hooks and eyes, and the skirt fastens with two large metal hooks and eyes on the right hand side. The photos showing the interior of the dress reveal alterations and some of the damage to the interior caused by stress on the fabric.
• Ella Kidman’s Autograph Album
  The first page, or “ownership page,” of Ella Kidman’s autograph album features its owner’s name prominently at the centre of its elaborate design. Kidman’s cursive handwriting is framed by a detailed ink drawing of an ocean scene: three seagulls coast above the water, drawing the viewer’s eye to the indication of clouds behind them and to a mountain range on the horizon. A cluster of jagged rocks juts out of the water below the seagulls; beyond this rock formation is a small sailboat. At the bottom left corner of the page are the words “from May. / Xmas 1897.” The album’s paper shows wear from the passage of time; it is wrinkled in places and fully torn at the bottom right corner. Another page of Kidman’s album is decorated with layered rectangular shapes. Framed by these superimposed shapes are the signatures of Kidman’s friends and family. The uppermost rectangle features an illustration of a bundle of flowers lying horizontally on its side; opposite the flowers is a small illustration of a butterfly. In the shape below, two small winged insects decorate the top left corner of the rectangle. A third page shows a skeleton-like shape running the length of the page. The design has been created with black ink and is almost perfectly symmetrical, bisecting the page down the middle. These distinctive shapes are called ink blot signatures or ghost signatures. To create an ink blog signature, album signers would fold the paper over their wet signatures and then re-open the page to reveal their unique ghostly signatures.
• Amelia Wood's Conversation Tube & Pouch
  This black conversation tube, now part of the Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum Collections, has a metal earpiece on one end of a long cotton tube and a metal mouthpiece on the other end. The black drawstring pouch that was used to store the conversation tube is decorated with ornate hand-beading, also in black: eyes, a nose, and the outlines of a face and feathers come together to form an owl’s face.
• William Macready & Charles Dickens's Scrap Screen
  This elaborate folding screen is composed of four wooden leaves, each covered entirely by an assortment of square and rectangular paper cut-outs. Each individual leaf spans 202cm by 77.5cm, and the total length of the screen when extended is 310cm. Although the photographs above show only the front side of the screen, both sides are covered entirely in black-and-white images. Boasting approximately four hundred engravings overall, the folding screen displays an array of yellowed scraps of paper dating from the 1820s to the 1840s. These decoupaged images have been meticulously pasted onto the front and back of the screen and subsequently varnished. There are no gaps showing between the images, nor do their edges overlap. Covering a range of artistic genres, these engravings include portraits, historical paintings, and scenes from well-known plays. While the folding screen was made some time around 1860, the photograph above shows the object in its current state, housed in the collections of Sherborne House, in Dorset.
• The Brontë Family's Broken Hair Bracelet
  This simple but sophisticated nineteenth-century hairwork bracelet is composed of six thin plaits of light brown hair, joined together at each end by metal clasps. The photographs above show the bracelet, housed at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, in its current state. Uniformly muted in colour but slightly iridescent, the golden tinge of the hair complements the glinting metal in the flat links of the clasp. A partially obscured safety chain connects the two clasps at the ends of the bracelet, hidden underneath the body of the piece. The bracelet features two kinds of braid, alternating between the two styles to achieve an illusion of complexity and intricacy when viewed from afar. There is, however, one broken plait that has detached from the rest; having become partially unraveled, these hairs splay out loosely in all directions. The hair at the end of the broken plait still holds an imprint of its previous braided configuration, a subtle imprint that persists despite the passage of time.
• Charlotte Brontё’s “Little Book”
  This “little book” by Charlotte Brontë contains an edition of "The Young Men’s Magazine," created in 1813 when Charlotte was just 14 years old. The size of a matchbox, the book features neat but cramped handwriting in black ink. The left-hand side of the left page lists the book’s contents with titles and corresponding page numbers. Below the contents, the year 1830 and the author’s name in all capital letters appear prominently across the bottom third of the page. The date of August 19 1830 runs across the bottom of the page followed by the initials CB. The right page has a title that corresponds to the first entry in the table of contents on the facing page and is filled with small, indeed barely legible, text.
• The "Ladies Carpet"
  The “Ladies Carpet,” designed by English architect J.W. Papworth and displayed at the Great Exhibition in 1851, is an example of Berlin wool work. The carpet measured thirty by twenty feet and consisted of one hundred and fifty squares, each measuring two feet by two feet. The squares were made and pieced together by “one hundred and fifty ladies of Great Britain,” as proclaimed under the published design of the carpet. Red and green accents dominate the intricate design, with red roses and green vines surrounding an inner rectangle. Small union jacks appear on all four corners of the carpet; two of the union jacks feature crests at their centres, while the other two feature the cross of Saint George. In the middle of the carpet, a V and an A interlock each other, paying homage to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The carpet’s current location is unknown.