Accessories

Gifts for Victorian Lovers

Accessories

Chatelaine

"A Victorian chatelaine is essentially a tool belt of a highly personal nature. Picture a Swiss Army knife crossed with a charm bracelet and you’ll start to get the idea. Nineteenth-century chatelaines are highly customized to suit the needs of their individual owners; the two elements they all share are the clip, which hangs them from their owner’s waist, and a series of chains hanging from that clip to tether various accessory tools. Even the clips were beautiful. The simplest chatelaines worn by housewives in the lower-middle class might be little more than a clip with an unassuming geometric pattern, but they grew progressively more elaborate as one’s budget increased—while never losing their functionality. Most chatelaine clips from the nineteenth century are made of base metal worked into shapes and patterns appropriate to jewelry. Flowers and classical motifs were especially favored. Particularly valuable chatelaines could be plated with silver or even gold, inset occasionally with semiprecious gems.
From the clip that hooks into the wearer’s waistband dangles a number of chains, and each chain ends in a tiny clip that hooks into a tool. The tools on a woman’s chatelaine give a casual observer an immediate insight into that indi- vidual woman’s daily life, since these are an indication of which items she uses on a constant basis. (They are often sewing-related.) The tools are quotidian but seldom plain, and the makers of chatelaines often followed William Morris’s very good advice that a person should have nothing in their life which they do not know to be useful or feel to be beautiful—but preferably both together..."
—Excerpted from This Victorian Life, by Sarah A. Chrisman, Skyhorse Publishing, 2015.

The tools shown on Sarah's chatelaine above are, from left to right: pincushion, aide memoirs /notepad holder, thimble holder, match safe (Vesta), embroidery scissors. Close ups of these items are shown below:

Book-shaped pincushion with embossed flowers.

Aide-memoire / notepad holder with embossed orchids motif. In the Victorian language of flowers, orchids symbolized a beautiful lady.

Book-shaped match safe / Vesta

Embroidery scissors

Sarah wearing her chatelaine:

Chatelaine Purses
(These were also called chatelaine pockets.)

For historical chatelaine pictures, click here.
For information about sources for chatelaine purse frames, see our Resource Links page.

A comic about chatelaines from 1849: http://tinyurl.com/gsz55p2

More on chatelaine pockets:
Chatelaine pocket in "Ladies Fancy Work", 1876
Chatelaine pocket in "The Delineator", 1900

More on the history of chatelaines:
FIDM Museum piece
Metropolitan Museum of Art link
V&A Museum link

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Sunglasses

Sarah's sunglasses - blue-tinted glass, steel rims. Circa 1890s.
Sunglasses came in a variety of styles and colors in the late 19th-century; blue and green were especially popular —which is convenient for us, since blue is Sarah's favorite color and green is Gabriel's favorite!

Gabriel's fold-out sunglasses, circa 1850s
These sunglasses have four lenses -all of them green! The front two remain fixed, and the side lenses can be swung to shade the peripheral vision or to double over the front.

Cycling Eye Shields

Vasculum

"For our tenth wedding anniversary (traditionally the tin anniversary in the way that the twenty-fifth is silver and the fiftieth gold), Gabriel gave me a gift that tied into the scientific aspects of the nineteenth century in a most remarkable way…He explained that vascula originated in the 1700s as a way for scientists to collect and carry specimens while doing fieldwork. (Fans of the 2003 movie Master and Commander might remember seeing an eighteenth-century vasculum carried by the ship’s doctor in the scene where he is collecting plants and animals in the Galapagos Islands. Gabriel bought my vasculum from the same tinsmith who made the prop for the movie.) By the nineteenth century, their popularity had grown far beyond the realm of professional science, and vascula were popular accessories for amateurs (and even children) to use for collecting wildflowers and other items of scientific interest. The nineteenth century had a particular fad for Pteridomania, or “fern fever.” It was very fashionable to collect live ferns from forested areas, carry them home in a vasculum with a damp cloth, moss, or moist bit of cotton against the roots, and replant the botanical curiosity in one’s home garden or as a potted parlor specimen. The same was done with wildflowers, and orchids were especially sought after…" —Excerpted from This Victorian Life, by Sarah A. Chrisman, Skyhorse Publishing, 2015. pp. 206-207.