The Afterlife of Things 6

Silversmiths love to produce supposedly practical objects for people to give each other as presents. We’ve had silver holders for billiard cue chalk, vesta cases (for phosphorus matches that would catch fire if kept loose in your pocket), tops for canes, comb cases, wine coasters, pencils, handles for shoehorns, buttonhooks and parasols, silver pheasants for your dining table (why?), clocks, menu holders, handbag clasps, cigar-cutters, cigarette cases, hip flasks, snuff boxes, toothpicks, powder compacts, scent bottle tops, lorgnettes (spectacles on a stick), money clips, pill boxes, vinaigrettes…

Vinaigrettes were not small bottles of salad dressing, but boxes containing a sponge soaked in aromatic vinegar. You sniffed it if you felt faint, or if you were surrounded by nasty niffs (before the germ theory of disease caught on, we thought noxious odours caused disease).

So are they making silver phone covers now? Garrards usefully offers a cocktail shaker, a champagne bath, claret jugs with lion and unicorn heads, and a statuette of Edward VII. The Asprey's catalogue has a rather disappointing selection including a birth certificate holder. Thanks, just what I wanted.

Silver Service

We emptied the silver cupboard and the sideboard and spread their contents out on the dining room table. Candlesticks, serving dishes, sugar bowls, milk jugs. Sauce boats, sugar tongs, ashtrays, salvers. Fish slices, a tea caddy, an ivory-handled crumb scoop. And other items, entirely mysterious unseen for decades… Those were knife rests, that was a pair of grape scissors. And this was a bon-bon dish. “A what?” said my daughter. There were the napkin rings… It had come to this. Time was, life could not proceed appropriately for a family such as my grandmother’s without ownership of sauce ladles, knife rests and ivory-handled crumb scoops. Now her descendant did not know what a napkin ring was for. The battered and baffling array of metal in front of us seemed suddenly to be a potent symbol for 80 years of social change… In 1995 there was still a tin of Silvo [silver polish] at the back of the silver cupboard, its contents long since dried up… Starch, grate cleaner, metal polishes: the goods reflect an age and a lifestyle. (She goes on to say that as sales of Brasso fell due to the disappearance of brass doorknobs and fingerplates, Reckitt and Colman marketed its own range of brass fittings. “A neat idea, if something of a last-ditch stand.”)

Penelope Lively, A House Unlocked
More here, and links to the rest.