CHAPTER IV
SALT CELLARS AND MUSTARD POTS
The salt cellars—The pattern books of Sheffield—The new style of table salt cellar—The mustard pot—A bid for the Continental trade.
There is nothing so ancient and so massive about the salt cellars that Sheffield made as there is in the old styles beloved by the collector of rare silver plate. There are no standing salts in Sheffield plate, such as those treasured at the Universities, or brought out on state occasions at the dinners of the great London Companies. There is nothing in the eighteenth century in silver approaching the grandeur affected by the standing salt and its place of honour at the tables when those who sat above the vessel and those who sat below it were of different status. The trencher salts of a later day were more democratic; they were smaller and they answered the practical purpose of serving salt to the diners. But they had nothing of the stateliness of the great standing salt with its ritual as fixed as that of the loving cup which circulated, although the salt was a permanent fixture. Those who sat below the salt were either the Greek chorus or they were "preposterous shadows lengthening in the noon-tide of one's prosperity." They were poor relations, "a blot on your scutcheon, a rent in your garment, a death's head at your banquet." Charles Lamb touches on the late eighteenth century phase of the dependent below the salt. "He casually looketh in about dinner-time—when the table is full. He offereth to go away seeing you have company—but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children are accommodated at a side-table.... He declareth against fish, the turbot being small—yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a slice, against his first resolution.... He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough to him. The guests think they have seen him before. He calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that your other is the same as his own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity he might pass for a casual dependent; with more boldness he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent. When the company breaks up, he proffereth to go for a coach—and lets the servant go. He recollects your grandfather, and will thrust in some mean and unimportant anecdote of the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as 'he is blest in seeing it now.' He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape; but after all, there was something more comfortable about the old tea kettle—which you must remember."
DESIGNS OF SALT CELLARS.
From an old Pattern Book issued by eighteenth-century Sheffield platers to Continental markets. The volume contains 86 full-page plates in copper engraving, illustrating various Sheffield plated articles. Date about 1784.
(At the Victoria and Albert Museum.)
(Reproduced by permission of the Board of Education.)
What a picture, graphic and piquant, of the closing years of the eighteenth century. Had the great standing salt survived how Elia would have revelled in his sly whimsical manner in portraying the exactitude with which it was fixed as a thermometer to register the correctitude of degrees of social affinity with the host. But the scattered plebeian trencher salts, as was the urn, which succeeded the copper kettle, were of the days when Sheffield and the silversmiths ran neck and neck.
The Pattern Books of Sheffield.—Advertisement is often considered to be of modern origin. In the twentieth century it is true it has taken to itself attributes which might very well have been eliminated. The press is the fourth estate, and its power for good or evil is illimitable. It is obnoxious to find a page of advertisement printed on the cheap edition of a novel. It is a stab in the vitals to read an insidiously worded article carefully printed in an evening paper and find it only an advertisement. There is a Plimsoll mark in advertising, and modernity has not always agreed as to where this should be placed.