The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materialityand Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age

Paul R. Mullins & Nigel Jeffries

Published online: 12 October 2012# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012

Abstract This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparentlyinconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of sharedtransatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urbanAmerica. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from nineteenth-century sites inLondon and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many earlynineteenth-century material patterns and ideological practices that were well-established in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Ageaffluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goodsand focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrow-ing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.

Keywords Consumption . Affluence . Figurines . Atlantic World

“Material for Thought”: Consumption, Gilded Age Affluence, and HouseholdMateriality

In 1876 Henry Ward Beecher greeted the United States’ centennial by celebrating aprosperous republic in which “there is more material for thought, for comfort, for home,for love, to-day, in the ordinary workingman’s home, than there was a hundred years agoin one of a hundred rich men’s mansions and buildings” (Orvell 1989, pp. 46–47). Thematerial forms taken by Gilded Age affluence included many ostentatious objects,

Int J Histor Archaeol (2012) 16:745–760DOI 10.1007/s10761-012-0206-x

P. R. Mullins (*)Department of Anthropology, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, Cavanaugh Hall413B, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USAe-mail: [email protected]

N. JeffriesMuseum of London Archaeology, Mortimer Wheeler House, 46 Eagle Wharf Road,London N1 7ED, UKe-mail: [email protected]

and period observers and scholars alike often have focused on the most astoundingmaterial goods found in elite homes. Beecher himself had a spectacular householdassemblage of figurines and decorative goods that was auctioned in November 1887.Many comparable goods evoking affluence and worldliness were found in homesthroughout the Atlantic World, but Beecher’s collection contained exceptionallyexpensive examples of all the goods he had invoked in his Centennial address:3,024 books, a massive collection of oil paintings, several thousand engravings, 30antique Oriental rugs, a scatter of stuffed animals, and hundreds of pieces of furniturewent under the auctioneers’ gavel. The assemblage was composed of thousands ofdecorative goods with no concrete function besides aesthetic display, includingfigurines and statues as well as goods such as Asian ceramics that were generallyreserved for display in bourgeois homes.

It was precisely this sort of pretentious material wealth and the imperative toconsume that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1873) first ridiculed in TheGilded Age. Twain and Warner’s analysis posed life in the wake of the Civil War ascontrived “gilding” masking an inferior reality. Histories of the Gilded Age haveoften followed Twain and Warner’s rhetorical lead, painting it as a period of aggres-sive capitalist accumulation and growth that, in Vernon Louis Parrington’s words, had“no social conscience, no concern for civilization, no heed for the future of thedemocracy it talked so much about.” Parrington (1927) characterized the GildedAge as crass material opportunism, writing in 1927 that Gilded Age society was amarked contrast “from the sober restraints of aristocracy, the old inhibitions ofPuritanism, the niggardliness of an exacting domestic economy … and with thediscovery of limitless opportunities for exploitation it allowed itself to get drunk.”Veblen’s (1899) analysis of conspicuous consumption in Chicago was among thebest-known studies linking consumption to Gilded Age social life, and he painted apicture of consumers driven by invidious status hierarchies that hearkened back to aceremonial past. Veblen (1899, p. 85) noted that “No class of society, not even themost abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption. … Very muchsqualor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket or the last pretense ofpecuniary decency is put away.” Veblen departed from dominant neoclassical eco-nomic theories that goods have a specific utility and consumers make rational,independent decisions based on all possible information. Instead, he argued thatconsumers had always acquired things as mechanisms to demonstrate social status.Writing in the midst of an especially active consumer metropolis, Veblen coined thenotion of conspicuous consumption to explain the high-style materialism that hewitnessed in late nineteenth-century Chicago. He argued that consumption of desir-able goods was public evidence of a consumer’s wealth and their mastery of socialdiscipline and style (Veblen 1899, pp. 46–47).

Gilded Age consumption and broader Victorian materialism certainly includedostentatious symbols of excess and some deluded aspirations to wealth, but focusingon these factors alone risks ignoring the rich meanings of the mass-produced thingscrowding transatlantic households. It is easy enough to ignore such material goodssince many of the material forms fueled by prosperity were at least superficiallymundane. Beecher himself argued that an array of rather prosaic goods should be inall homes, intoning that “The laborer ought to be ashamed of himself … who in 20years does not own the ground on which his house stands and … who has not in that

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house provided carpets for the rooms, who has not his China plates, who has not hischromos, who has not some picture or portrait hanging upon the walls, who has notsome books nestling on the shelf, who has not there a household he can call his home,the sweetest place upon the earth. This is not the picture of some future time, but thepicture of to-day, a picture of the homes of the workingmen of America” (Orvell1989, pp. 46–47). The goods Beecher singled out were all quite common: carpets,tablewares, chromolithographs, and books could be found in almost every householdand were readily obtainable for a vast range of consumers. Beecher’s advice to stockhomes with an array of rather prosaic things was somewhat in contrast to his ownhousehold assemblage, which was a spectacular cascade of symbols that invokedideological visions of nature, history, culture, nationalism, and wealth. Most homeswere outfitted with comparably quotidian decorative objects, but those goods includ-ed spectacular aesthetics not much different than those in Beecher’s home. Indeed,across the Atlantic World nineteenth-century consumers embraced a materiality thatemployed spectacular symbolism invoking culture, heritage, domesticity, and a host ofrather ill-defined social beliefs.

This paper focuses on a collection of decorative figurines recovered fromnineteenth-century archaeological sites in London and examines how period com-mentators on each side of the Atlantic defined their meaning. Some of these figurinesare in chronological contexts that are not strictly Gilded Age assemblages (typicallydefined as circa 1870–93), but many identical motifs are found in earlier and latercontexts alike. The Gilded Age is a term reserved for American contexts, but we wantto argue here that many of the patterns in Gilded Age decorative materiality andbroader consumption patterns were transatlantic phenomena. Consequently, we areinterested in the ways that Gilded Age ideologies amplified long-term material stylesoutside late nineteenth-century American elite contexts as they also led to a contin-uation of comparable decorative aesthetics afterward. Comparing objects outsideAmerican contexts alone reveals broad Atlantic World patterns in the relationshipbetween everyday material goods and social and material ambitions that extendedbeyond a narrowly defined American urban elite.

“A Great Store of Shepherdesses”: The Aesthetics of Bric-a-Brac

Figurines were mass-produced by virtually all English potteries from the eighteenthcentury onward, and nearly anything that could be modeled appeared as a figurine atsome point. In 1851, Henry Mayhew (1851, p. 354) decried the offerings of typicalLondon figurine shops, describing them as a “great store of shepherdesses, or grey-hounds of a gamboges color, of what I heard called ‘figures’ (allegorical nymphs withand without birds or wreaths in their hands), very tall-looking Shakspeares [sic] (I didnot see one of these windows without its Shakspeare, a sitting figure), and some‘pots’ which seem to be either shepherds or musicians.” A shepherd figure much likethe ones Mayhew derided was excavated from the Jacob’s Island site in the LondonBorough of Southwark. The Jacob’s Island figure had only its base surviving, but the basebore the identification of it as a “SHEPERD” [sic] (Fig. 1). In the US and UK alike suchbroadly defined motifs invoked apprehensions of urbanization and labor by celebrat-ing a romanticized pastoral heritage, yet the ambiguity of the motif and ideological

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references, the small scale and unobtrusiveness of the figurine, and the modest cost ofsuch decorative goods made them especially rich symbolic vehicles. Decorativegoods like the shepherd figurine occupy an interesting but not wholly unique positionin commodity symbolism. On the one hand, like many commodities, figurines arephysically prosaic forms that reside beneath critical awareness (cf. Mills 2010). Tosome scholars they appear to invoke only the most fundamental ideological messagesabout wealth, heritage, nature, and similarly broad discourses; they are simply viewedas yet another class of goods distinguished by their function; their insignificant cost(in most cases) renders them inconsequential; or very modest excavated quantities ofbric-a-brac makes them seem symbolically insignificant. Many observers (and somearchaeologists) have been unable to see past the seemingly crass surface of gilding,reducing the flood of inexpensive decorative objects in nineteenth-century homes tohollow claims to socioeconomic status or insignificant aesthetic displays. Conse-quently, there is a tendency to see them as utterly banal in terms of their physical andaesthetic presence and, by extension, their symbolic if not political impacts.

On the other hand, though, figurines often appeared in ambiguous if not spectacularstylistic forms that sparked a very wide range of public discourses and consumer mean-ings (Fig. 2). Period observers often commented on figurines and household aestheticsthroughout the nineteenth century, and Gilded Age analyses are rife with densematerial descriptions of the pretentious forms taken by Americans’ sudden wealth.A rich late nineteenth-century literature on gilding wrestled with the enigma of howsocial relations shaped the meaning of things, pushing beyond simply seeing theirmeanings expressed as prices (Richards 1990, pp. 263–264). A flood of thinkerspondered material desire, the “signifying power” of material goods, and the ways inwhich consumers projected their imaginations onto material goods (Mills 2008;Pykett 2003, p. 1). This rich symbolism found an especially receptive consumer

Fig. 1 Only the feet of a “shep-herd” and a portion an animalremain on this figurine base.Pastoral motifs that romanticizednature and agrarian life weretypical in Atlantic World urbanhomes (Photograph by P.Mullins, courtesy Museumof London Archaeology)

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audience in post-Civil War America, but similar if not identical decorative goodswere marketed and consumed quite extensively throughout the Atlantic World beforethe 1870s. In their 1897 survey of household material culture, Edith Wharton andOgden Codman (1897, p. 83) argued for common bric-a-brac styles throughout theAtlantic World, indicating that “the reaction from the bare stiff rooms of the firstquarter of the present century—the era of mahogany and horsehair—resulted, sometwenty years since, in a general craving for knick-knacks; and the latter soon spreadfrom the tables to the mantel, especially in England and America.” Indeed, theconsumption of such goods outside the US suggests that many of the consumerpatterns linked to wealth and social discipline in Gilded Age America extended insome forms over most of the “long nineteenth century” and outside the provincialboundaries of the US alone.

Decorative figurines and similar household goods had been mass-producedsince the eighteenth century. A 1917 collector’s survey of eighteenth-centuryfigurines indicated that in the second half of the century “about twenty of theStaffordshire potters engaged in this business. Pastoral groups and animals werefavorites with them, and also scriptural and pseudo-Classical subjects. TheFlight into Egypt, Elijah and the Widow, busts of Franklin, Shakespeare,Milton, and Falstaff, Toby jugs, cavaliers, shepherdesses, and dogs were allpopular, and indicate the general scope of subjects” (Fearing 1917, p. 82). Suchdecorative goods were in most nineteenth-century domestic assemblages. In

Fig. 2 Few figures reflect theambiguities of figurines betterthan this well-dressed monkeyplaying a violin. This figuremight have evoked many differ-ent things for various consumers(Photograph by P. Mullins,courtesy Museum of LondonArchaeology)

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1825, for instance, a criminal case was lodged in London’s Old Bailey bylaborer Robert Williams, who had left a trunk in the home of his landlordWilliam Gerrard only to find that Gerrard and two women had claimed it whileWilliams was gone for an extended absence. The trunk included a modest rangeof goods that composed all of Williams’ earthly possessions, including eight“chimney ornaments” valued at four shillings (Old Bailey 1825). The trunk held23 groups of items including a tea pot (value 3s), three wine glasses (1s), 15 plates(2s), three pillows (6s), a coat (value 25s), seven yards of silk (value 11s), a petticoat(value 20s), two prints (value 3d), two spoons (value 6d), and a pair of sugar tongs(value 6d). The ornaments apparently held some idiosyncratic if not especiallysignificant exchange value in an otherwise modest laborers’ assemblage long beforethe zenith of bric-a-brac consumption.

The volume of figurines increased dramatically in the nineteenth century, whenthey were marketed in various times and places as “chimney ornaments,” “cottageornaments,” “knick knacks,” or lumped within the category of “bric-a-brac.” Styleideologues routinely lampooned mass-produced figurines, but that advice was appar-ently ignored by most households, because decorative goods were found in at leastmodest quantities in virtually every household through most of the nineteenthcentury. For instance, in 1870 the British journal The Builder (1870, pp. 402–403)indicated that “always to be found in the room of the poorest and humblest, are whatare termed ‘chimney ornaments.’ … Figures in coarse china-ware, very gorgeouslycoloured, animals of different sorts, grotesques somehow contrived so as not to begrotesque at all, but only utterly unmeaning and silly; imitation model clocks, a wholewarehouse of stupidities, are common end to be seen everywhere, and are eagerlybought and carefully displayed, and always on view, for there is no getting away fromthem.” Collector Virginia Robie’s (1912, pp. 75–76) survey of figurine motifsindicated that “your chimney ornament may be anything from a woolly china dogto a brightly painted villa. It may be common Staffordshire crockery, or a really fineporcelain; it may be a work of art, or an atrocious daub. If it is a real cottagespecimen, it is quite apt to be a daub, for the cottage ornament pure and simplewas of humble origin, made of coarse clay, decorated by a potter whose education, ifhe had any, was not along art lines, and turned out to sell at two-and-six apiece;sometimes for one-and-six. But two shillings and sixpence was, and is, quite a sum toan English cottager. It ought to buy a very respectable china cow, and, to the potter’scredit, it may be said that it did.” European potteries produced figurines, too, and in1870 The Builder (1870, p. 403) intoned that “It may not here be out of place toinform or remind the intelligent reader that there are ‘warehouses’ in the east end ofLondon which regularly import by wholesale cargoes of ornaments of the kindmentioned. They would seem to be manufactured in France and Germany, and arethe production, for the most part, of children working, of course, under a regular-system of manufacture, the object passing from hand to hand as it goes on tocompletion. … The workshops are the south of France and Germany, but the marketsEngland and America.”

As Robie (1912, p. 76) acknowledged in 1912, most such goods were quiteinexpensive, and this was the case for most figurines throughout the nineteenthcentury. For instance, an 1899 “fancy goods” price list from the London wholesalerT.M. Whitton and Sons (1899) inventoried a vast range of motifs designed to retail at

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six pence, including “New Blue Glazed Tall Figures,” “New Assorted China Dogs,”“New 10-inch Tall Glazed Figures,” “Negro Umbrella Figures,” “Nodding ChinamanFigure,” and “Large Cats and Dogs.” Such goods could be acquired in a broad rangeof market spaces. In her 1904 survey of life in nineteenth-century Surrey, GertrudeJekyll (1904, p. 119) indicated that “I can remember when this class of chimneyornament was sold at country fairs, such as the yearly fair at St. Catherine’s Hill nearGuildford …. The same kind of ornament was also to be bought in china shops, aswell as a better type, like second-rate Chelsea.”

In some ways, figurines invoked the pretentious material displays and extravagantaesthetics of elite Victorian households that reached a pinnacle in the Gilded Age.Period observers like Twain were often suspicious of the ostentatious decorativeaffluence found in many American homes. For many of them, this material “gilding”was pure artifice that aspired to make its consumers appear worthy of social privilege,and for many thinkers that contrived privilege inelegantly revealed the absence ofsubstance beneath. The notion of gilding drew a distinction between, on the one hand,appearances of wealth, taste, or social privilege and, on the other hand, realities inwhich dramatic materiality masked character shortcomings, modest material stand-ing, or an absence of educated style and taste. For instance, William Dean Howells’1889 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes detailed a “drawing-room … delicatelydecorated in white and gold, and furnished with a sort of extravagant good taste;there was nothing to object to the satin furniture, the pale, soft, rich carpet, thepictures, and the bronze and china bric-a-brac, except that their costliness was tooevident; everything in the room meant money too plainly, and too much of it”(Howells 1889, p. 199). The drawing room’s visitors concluded that “this tastefulluxury in nowise expressed their civilisation” (Howells 1889, p. 199). In 1894,novelist Sarah Grand (1894, p. 194) wove a similar tale, detailing a home that “wascrowded now to suffocation with curtains, cushions, couches, ottomans, and easychairs, upholstered in the modern manner with mere trivialities of a costly fashion,devoid of association with the past, and not likely or even intended to last into anydistant future. It was decorated, too, in excess with pictures, statues, china, arms, andornaments of every sort, stuck any and everywhere till the eye was satiated. …. It wasa house furnished to death.”

These eclectic and striking aesthetics in paradoxically prosaic items often forcedobservers to contemplate and question their own preconceptions about consumers. In1885, for example, Charles Eyre Pascoe’s (1885, p. 293) guide to London devoted awhole chapter to bric-a-brac shops, acknowledging that “most of us, from the highestto the lowest, have a liking for such things; the chimneypiece of the humblest cottageis seldom destitute of ornament of some kind.” Yet Pasco admitted that he “was oncesurprised to find in a stuffy back room of a small tenement house in a London suburb,chiefly inhabited by working-men, a remarkable collection of bric-a-brac—such acollection, indeed, as would have brought no discredit to a much more cultivatedconnoisseur.” Ideologically, all consumers were expected to make the effort to followhousehold decorative disciplines, but for various class, racial, and ethnic reasonsideologues assumed that most consumers could not reproduce dominant standards.Consequently, stylish decorative goods often registered with observers who recog-nized that such goods signaled social aspirations if not a circumspect foothold inconsumer society.

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Novelist Edith Wharton and architect Ogden Codman Jr.’s 1897 study The Dec-oration of Houses spent a whole chapter exorcising most bric-a-brac from theAmerican and British parlor alike, and they noted the ways gilding had lost itssymbolic power as the twentieth century approached. They suggested that the“deterioration in gilding is one of the most striking examples of the modern disregardof quality and execution. In former times gilding was regarded as one of the crowningtouches of magnificence in decoration, was little used except where great splendor ofeffect was desired, and was then applied by means of a difficult and costly process.To-day, after a period of reaction during which all gilding was avoided, it is againunsparingly used. …The result is a plague of liquid gilding” (Wharton and Codman1897, p. 193). For Wharton and Codman, gilding invoked genuine material andsymbolic wealth, and its reach into commonplace goods and everyday domesticspaces erased its capacity to confirm such social and material standing, arguing that“in former times the expense of good gilding was no obstacle to its use, since it wasemployed only in gala rooms, where the whole treatment was on the same scale ofcostliness: it would never have occurred to the owner of an average-sized house todrench his walls and furniture in gilding, since the excessive use of gold in decorationwas held to be quite unsuited to such a purpose. Nothing more surely preserves anyform of ornament from vulgarization than a general sense of fitness” (Wharton andCodman 1897, p. 193).

Animal figurines were probably the most common figurine motif. Many of theanimals rendered in ceramic figurines were domesticated pets, often representing onthe mantelpiece the same animals that might also inhabit Victorian homes. Nearly 100figurines from London archaeological sites were analyzed for this study, and not onedepicts a wild animal, instead portraying dogs, sheep, and a host of domesticatedanimals including house pets and livestock alike. A typical whiteware figurinerecovered from a mid-nineteenth-century cesspit on Randall Row in the LondonBorough of Lambeth includes the remains of a seated dog alongside a foot that wasalmost certainly understood to be the dog’s owner (Jeffries 2006, p. 284) (Fig. 3). Suchhuman and animal relationships were widely believed to have domesticating effectson people. In 1868, for instance, Josepha Buell Hale (1868, p. 244) repeated a view ofpets that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century (cf. Grier 1999), indicatingthat “Home-life is the place for all innocent loves; and, when the love of pet animalscan be judiciously cultivated, it leads to the love of natural history and intellectualimprovement, as well as to thoughtful tenderness and moral sensibility.” EgertonLeigh (1859, p. 6) agreed that the “love of Pets is one of the flowers of civilization, afeeling either openly apparent or lying dormant until warmed into existence bycircumstances …. there is something humanizing in a Pet, which makes the heartopen to the genial warmth of kindness, like the rose bud expanding its long foldedleaves when kissed by the sunbeam.”

Many figurines did not depict a human with the animal, yet even in thosecases the central relationship between pets and humans—and the ways bothcould be domesticated—was the central implied subject of many animal figur-ines. For example, a dog figurine from the Chelsea Academy site in the RoyalBorough of Kensington and Chelsea sits on its haunches resplendent in asweater with a black collar: impeccably dressed, motionless, and utterlydisciplined, the dog provided a model for behavior that thwarted the dog’s

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natural instincts, just as many households hoped their human family memberswould curb their own desires and behaviors as well (Cetera 2008) (Fig. 4). Figurines ofsheep and lambs were likewise common. A typical example was recovered from theQueensborough House site in Lambeth with a now-fragmented human figure along-side a lamb docilely resting at the figure’s feet (Fig. 5). Such motifs invoked a mostlyfictive pastoral past that was significant as a contrast to the defamiliarization of citiesand factory labor, and on a London mantel the symbols of agrarian life were clearcontrasts with everyday urban life in the metropolis. This approaches figurines as a

Fig. 3 This dog once appears tohave sat obediently beside ahuman figure, a very commonfigurine motif depicting therelationship between humansand domesticated animals(Photograph by P. Mullins,courtesy Museum of LondonArchaeology)

Fig. 4 Many domesticated ani-mal figurines placed the animalsin seemingly disciplined posi-tions and even dressed, as thisdog was in a sweater and collar.The display of a well-behavedanimal was viewed as a disci-plinary lesson for people reluc-tant or unable to tame their ownnatural instincts (Photographby P. Mullins, courtesy Museumof London Archaeology)

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symbolic retreat from everyday experience, albeit one that casts such experience in apurely escapist if not ideological form.

“Ambitious Borrowed Decorations”: Art, History, and Bric-a-Brac

Disingenuous ideologues constantly pressed to elevate household aesthetics andfortify genteel standards by championing a variety of stylish and often “artistic”decorative goods. Much of this overwrought commentary inelegantly attempted topatrol class divisions and ensure that working people and the elite were distinguishedby material goods. In 1846, for instance, Andrew Jackson Downing wrote in TheHorticulturist (1846, p. 107) that “the mansion of the wealthy proprietor, which isfilled with pictures and statues, ought certainly to have a superior architecturalcharacter to the cottage of the industrious workingman, who is just able to furnisha comfortable home for his family. While the first is allowed to display even an ornatestyle of building, which his means will enable him to complete and render somewhatperfect—the other cannot adopt the same ornaments without rendering a cottage,which might be agreeable and pleasing, from its fitness and genuine simplicity,offensive and distasteful through its ambitious borrowed decorations” (cf. Downing1856, p. 247). This mid-century commentary pointed toward many subsequentideologues’ apprehension that mass-produced goods risked erasing the visible class

Fig. 5 This docile lamb satalongside a human invoking aromanticized vision of agrarianlabor and life that contrastedradically with many consumers’real life working experiences(Photograph by P. Mullins,courtesy Museum of LondonArchaeology)

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distinctions once rendered in the material world. That apprehension likely fueled thevolume of commentary that criticized figurines and most mass-produced decorativematerial culture.

Ideologues’ critique of everyday materiality routinely celebrated household “art.”In 1870, for example, The Builder (1870, p. 402) moaned that:

It will surely then be seen that the art of common things is a matter ofimportance and interest, and the chimney ornaments on the chimney shelfof a working man’s room, and the pictures hung round the walls of it,may come to be tests of his educational advancement; and perhaps theGovernment inspector himself may actually find out what sort of educa-tion the workman’s family of sons and daughters are receiving by asimple inspection of the chimney ornaments and pictures in his posses-sion, and even get in time an idea of art himself.

Nineteenth-century decorative ideologues routinely counseled consumers to stocktheir homes with “art,” an ambiguity that framed a complicated ideological terrain.When invoked in material ideologues’ thought, “art” routinely included both purelyornamental objects (e.g., figurines, chromolithographs) as well as functional goods(e.g., lamps, clocks); it clouded the distinction between a unique work of art and amass-manufactured commodity; and it included both contemporary objects andgenuine antiquities. In 1897, Wharton and Codman (1897, p. 186) struggled withthe ways cost shaped aesthetic meaningfulness, arguing that “though cheapnessand trashiness are not always synonymous, they are apt to be so in the case ofthe modern knick-knack. To buy, and even to make, it may cost a great deal ofmoney; but artistically it is cheap, if not worthless; and too often its artisticvalue is in inverse ratio to its price. The one-dollar china pug is less harmfulthan an expensive onyx lamp-stand with molded bronze mountings dipped inliquid gilding.” This position was typical of late nineteenth-century stylisticcritiques that aspired to remove clutter from Victorian parlors, and it alsolaunched a complicated critique of cost-status. Wharton and Codman (1897, p.186) argued that “it is one of the misfortunes of the present time that the mostpreposterously bad things often possess the powerful allurement of being expensive.One might think it an advantage that they are not within every one’s reach; but, as amatter of fact, it is their very unattainableness which, by making them more desirable,leads to the production of that worst curse of modern civilization—cheap copies ofcostly horrors.” This was a lamentation about the ways overdone elite styles werereproduced in mass-produced goods, and they dismissively concluded that “it seemsimprobable that our commercial knick-knack will ever be classed as a work of art”(Wharton and Codman 1897, p. 184). In 1870, The Builder (1870, p. 403) ponderedwhat exactly constituted art, suggesting that

if among the very worst of these trumpery ‘ornaments’ we take the vilest andthe most worthless and the cheapest,—say a small earthenware figure of a manand dog, the man with a daub of red, and the dog with a daub of blue, andcompare such with a very expensive modern line engraving of a like subject,—Isay it would puzzle the most expert of art analysts or art critics to determine

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with accuracy which of the twain is the emptiest and the most artisticallyworthless. A real and practical change in art and in the practice of it willcertainly come about when the time shall come for even the commencementof a new order of things on the chimney-shelf and walls of a common room!

Wharton and Codman expressed a commonplace affection for the antique, whichbecame perceived as “real” and in opposition to the artificial commodity. Theyconcluded that the debasement of art reflected that “the substitution of machine forhand-work has made possible the unlimited reproduction of works of art; and theresulting demand for cheap knick-knacks has given employment to a multitude ofuntrained designers having nothing in common with the virtuoso of former times”(Wharton and Codman 1897, p. 191; emphasis in original). Bric-a-brac includedsome objects that reproduced classical antiquities, but some of these figurines wereexpensive and do not appear in many archaeological assemblages. The SpitalfieldsMarket site in London included a caneware Triton candlestick, a relatively typicalexample of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century figurines incorporatingclassical motifs. The caneware Triton was found alongside a small range of completemid nineteenth-century ceramics in a cellar that served a public house at No. 9 CrispinStreet (Holder and Jeffries in prep) (Fig. 6). The Greek god Triton was manufactured

Fig. 6 A series of potteries pro-duced mythological figures likethis unmarked candlestickdepicting the Greek god Triton,the son of Poseidon (Photographby P. Mullins, courtesy Museumof London Archaeology)

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in basalt, jasper, and other refined wares by Wedgwood beginning about 1770, but theSpitalfields example is unmarked, and the same design was produced by other pottersincluding Enoch Wood and James Caldwell (circa 1790–1818).

By the second half of the nineteenth century, most figurines reproducing historicalaesthetics liberally borrowed from a breadth of historical styles. Rather than clearlyinvoke some concrete mythological reference like Triton or a real historical person likeNapoleon (Fig. 7), most figurines included no references to concrete artwork, sym-bols, periods, or personalities. For instance, the Albert Embankment site in Lambethincluded a typical later nineteenth-century figurine in clothing that was certainly notnineteenth-century garb, but it has no especially clear referent to historical dress: Witha button jacket rendered in orange and brown polychrome dots and a flowing purplesash dropping from beneath the jacket, the figure might well be a pseudo-historicalreference, even though the actual referent is not clear and may never have existed in

Fig. 7 Some historical figurinesdepicted genuine personageslike this Napoleon figurinefrom the Sydenham Brewerysite (Photograph by P. Mullins,courtesy Museum of LondonArchaeology)

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the minds of its makers. Other motifs were more clearly period references, but theirsymbolism was ambiguous. For example, the Albion Brewery in Whitechapel locatedin London’s East End included amongst its post-1830 backfill a seated equestrianfigure that evokes the ways seventeenth-century garb was being defined in midnineteenth-century novels like The Three Musketeers, which was first serialized in1844 and appeared in English two years later (Fig. 8). The Albion figurine is of amale in knee-height boots, a broad hat, and a bold mustache sitting astride a horsenow gone, invoking the historical symbolism of seventeenth-century France as wellas the class dimensions of horseback riding. The most productive figurines workednot necessarily because they invoked a clear reference but because they insteadprovided ambiguous jumping-off points for consumers who might imagine anynumber of meanings for such symbols.

Rethinking Gilded Affluence and Small Things

The eclectic motifs of figurines and ornamental household goods were highly prizedby consumers across a social and economic spectrum spanning the Atlantic World,yet they have been largely ignored by archaeologists. These rather mundane decora-tive goods found throughout the Atlantic World provide interesting challenges toconventional archaeological insight. Historical archaeologists have long focused on

Fig. 8 Many historical figurineswere simply loose evocations ofa period or historical experience,in this case an equestrian figurewhose concrete period referencewas not particularly specific(Photograph by P. Mullins,courtesy Museum of LondonArchaeology)

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three dimensions of material symbolism that are complicated by Victorian bric-a-brac.First, archaeologists have fixated on relative wealth, literally how an assemblage

confirms a household’s standing in an economic continuum. Most figurines werequite inexpensive, though, and the expense of outfitting even a whole home infigurines was not significant. Analysis of the Gilded Age often stresses rapidlyexpanding affluence and the material and documentary data reflecting increasedwealth, but consumers might gain a foothold in this newfound affluence withoutnecessarily being especially wealthy.

Second, much archaeological thought has pondered the ways consumers ostensi-bly “display” their affluence and mastery of social disciplines. Archaeologists havelong aspired to divine how consumers use goods to demonstrate wealth and masteryof dominant social codes to peers. Figurines would seem ideal evidence to probe thisquestion, since they were ornamental objects meant to be exhibited in some domes-tic context, and they did often invoke affluence and ideological symbolism invarious forms. However, this focuses on consumption as instrumentally “other-direct-ed,” casting materiality as a presentation of oneself to others, essentially mirroring whowe are. This risks ignoring the imaginative, inchoate, and personal dimensions ofmaterial consumption, those dimensions of consumption that are about who we wishwe are.

And third, Victorian and Gilded Age decorative commodities complicate simplis-tic notions of material representation that pose goods merely as reflective mecha-nisms that publicly communicate underlying social values and ideological meanings,and in fact the challenges dealt by figurines are common to most commodities. Leone(1992, p. 130; 1998, p. 57) distinguishes between recursive and reflective theories ofmaterial symbolism, and recursive materiality fits the symbolism of bric-a-bracespecially well. He argues that material culture is recursive in its capacity to activelyform meaning, which he opposes to a purely reflective symbolism that merely mirrorsbehaviors and represents instilled meanings. This notion of a recursive symbolismworks quite well for figurines, which were not necessarily intended to representanything particularly concrete. Perhaps the “gilding” itself—the very appearance ofmany commodities and their capacity to charge consumers’ imaginations—was whatmade some goods meaningful. This notion of an active symbolism formed byconsumers diverges from approaching figurines in terms of their capacity to strate-gically display affluence, ideological incorporation, or any other number of dimen-sions of identity. Rather than focus simply on what decorative material goods—or forthat matter all commodities—instrumentally represented, we might instead focus onthe apparently superficial gilding itself, examining how the surface aesthetics ofdecorative goods assumed meaning and cannot be approached simply as mechanismsthat represented other meanings.

Acknowledgments Mullins’ research in the London Archaeological Archive and Research Center(LAARC) was funded by an Indiana University Overseas Research Grant from the Office of the VicePresident of International Affairs. While working at the LAARC, much of this analysis was discussed withRupert Featherby and Alastair Owens. Thanks to the many colleagues who have shared their data anddiscussed these ideas, including Emma Dwyer, Julian Harrop, Mark Leone, Ralph Mills, Chuck Orser, BobPaynter, Adrian and Mary Praetzellis, Jim Symonds, Mark Warner, and Jane Webster. Any shortcomings ofthe paper are entirely our own fault despite so much good advice.

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