Vanished Arts From the Christian Home.
LEATHER-WORK FRAME (1850).
We who live in the present generation of this best of all possible worlds, as we may well deem it, considering that we have no experience of any other, are apt to look back on those who preceded us as benighted beings who walked by very dim lights, had few artistic perceptions, and only the most humdrum of occupations. Girls who were born before Waterloo were not very much educated, and not at all emancipated, and when we think of them we are apt to wonder how their lives dragged on without railways, without gas, without circulating libraries, magazines, or tennis.
WAX FLOWERS (1853).
On the whole, however, these old-fashioned lasses had no time to be dull. One whose brain was as bright as ever when Queen Victoria celebrated her first Jubilee in 1887 was questioned by a girl of the period as to her occupations when in her teens and afterwards. "My dear," she said, "there were always babies in our old house at home, and your father was the youngest of them. I had the baby clothes to make, and they wore out so fast! When I was tired of plain hemming and sewing, I used to embroider the cap crowns or quill up the clean cap borders." And this woman's mind was not in the least dwarfed or stunted by much needlework; she lived and travelled a good deal on the Continent afterwards, and kept well abreast of the literature of her day to the very end.
Fine needlework may certainly be counted among the vanished arts, for our muslin embroidery is now Swiss, and made by machine, and our delicate stitchery accomplished by a "Singer" or a "Willcox and Gibbs'." No longer, like the Martineaus of Norwich and their contemporaries, do we make the fine linen shirts of our fathers and brothers; and no longer, happily, are middle-class girls obliged to laboriously copy the new music and songs that their wealthier relatives and friends have purchased. That is a distinct change for the better.
A kind of work that late in the last and early in this century was thought very highly of, and occupied a good deal of time, was called filigree. A Christmas present for Grandmamma or for Mamma's birthday might be a tea-caddy or a workbox, the frame of which was produced by the cabinetmaker in rosewood or mahogany and lined with tinfoil, or lead, or satin paper, as the case might be. Rims of polished wood were seen at the corners, and received the lock and hinges, but the surface was sunk and had to be filled in with tiny rolls of gilt-edged paper made in long lengths for the purpose. These rolls were closely packed together, and produced an appearance of fine gilt tracery, as seen in the illustration below. Unless very roughly treated, or kept in a palpably damp place, they did not come out of position. In the absence of all Oriental goods, which were never seen in those days unless in families connected with the East India Company, they were considered handsome, and no one not in the secret could have guessed how the effect was obtained.
FILIGREE WORK (1795).