Chats on Household Curios

by Fred. W. Burgess

There are many household curios which cannot be classified under the headings of the foregoing chapters. They represent well-known features in every home, and yet each little group has an individuality of its own. Some may say that the main features of house-furnishing have been left out of consideration, and that they are the most interesting household curios when age and disuse have come upon them. Household furniture, however, has been fully dealt with in the "Chats" series in the two volumes entitled "Chats on Old English Furniture," and "Chats on Cottage and Farmhouse Furniture," to which books those interested in the curiosities of cabinet-making and village carpentry are referred. Yet notwithstanding the completeness of those works there are a few objects which have so entirely passed into the range of household curios, and their uses were so entirely apart from present-day furniture, that some of them are specially noted in the following paragraphs, together with a few other isolated antiques.

Dower Chests.

If there is one piece of furniture above another that is surrounded with a halo of romance, surely it is the dower chest! We can picture the incoming of the coffer in all the newness of hand polish, fresh from the hands of the village carpenter or the retainer who had wrought the gnarled old oak grown on the estate for a favourite daughter of his lord—that chest which was to be packed full of fragrant linen, between which was laid sweet lavender, and richly embroidered garments for the bride, who, with her personal belongings stowed away therein, was to pass from the parental home to her newly wedded and unknown life. There are ancient chests full of historic memories, such as those in which the wealth of monarchs has been stored, like that in Knaresborough Castle, which, according to legend and some reference in old deeds, came over with William the Conqueror. In the Castle Museum there is another chest made for Queen Philippa in 1333—a veritable dower chest.

Some of the older chests have had loops for poles by which they could be carried about; but such were more correctly treasure chests. The dower chests usually remained in the home of the bride, and in time became her receptacle for bedding and other household stores, the little tray or corner box for jewels and trinkets being disused and eventually done away with altogether. The evolution of the chest until it became a cabinet or a chest of drawers is a story for the lover of old furniture to tell, but the dower chest in its earlier forms is a curio rich in legend and folklore. It may interest American readers to record that many of the oldest specimens in the States were first used as packing cases of unusual strength, gifts from the old folks at home, when colonists in Jacobean days crossed the Atlantic. Curiously enough, American craftsmen copied them and maintained the purity of the old English style long after the makers of English dower chests had been influenced by Dutch and French design and inlay.

Medicine Chests.

Some of the early English medicine chests, the foundation of which is of wood, are covered with tapestry, others with green satin, sometimes ornamented with floral devices made of puffed satin, overlaid and outlined with gold thread. Medicine chests varied in size, but few households were "furnished" without a fitting receptacle for home-made recipes for simple ailments, such as were much resorted to in the past. The chests were usually well fitted with bottles and phials, and with glass stoppers or silver or pewter tops. Many of the medicines had been prescribed by local practitioners, and were regarded as sovereign remedies to be used on all occasions; others were family recipes held in high repute. In such chests there was often a drawer or compartment containing bleeding cups and lancet—a remedy often resorted to when an illness could not be diagnosed.

Old Lacquer.

The beautiful red lacquer work is getting scarce, although it has had a long run, for it is more than twelve hundred years since the Japanese learned the secret of making it from the Coreans, who in their turn had it from the Chinese. The secret of producing in China and Japan lacquer which cannot be imitated in other countries lies in the rhus vernificifera which flourishes in those localities. It is the gum of that tree commonly called the lacquer-tree, which when taken fresh and applied to the object it is intended to lacquer turns jet-black on exposure to the sun, drying with great hardness. It will thus be seen that although French and English lacquers have been very popular, the imitation lacquer applied can have neither the effect nor the durability of the natural gum which sets so hard, and in the larger and more important objects can be applied again and again until quite a depth of lacquer is obtained, sometimes encrusted over with jewels and other materials embedded in it.

The best English lacquer was made in this country between the years 1670 and 1710, and was a very successful imitation of the Oriental. At that time and during the following century very many tea caddies, trays, screens, trinket boxes, and even furniture, were imported; and it was those which English workmen copied, gradually increasing the variety of household goods for which that material was so suitable.