VICTORIAN POTTERY AND PORCELAIN IN THE CANADIAN HOME
Elizabeth Collard
The nineteenth-century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay once said that to make history come alive it was necessary to peer at the dinner tables and into the cupboards of a nation. History must recapture the everyday scene. It is in this context that pottery and porcelain have particular value as material history. As part of everyday life in Canadian homes during the long years of Queen Victoria's reign, from 1837 to 1901, ceramic wares throw light upon the social, cultural, and economic conditions of the time.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, while there was certainly no scarcity of ceramic wares for some Canadians, there were still many families who had only very limited supplies. Mrs. Nathan Taylor provides evidence of this in reminiscences which appeared in a history of Stanstead County in the Eastern Townships of QuΘbec (see Suggested Reading section). Recalling her childhood in a log cabin near what is now the village of Hatley, Mrs. Taylor remembered her mother's tableware had been considered rather above those of her neighbors because, for special occasions, she could set out six cups and saucers, and as many white earthen plates. The family ordinarily used dishes of wood or pewter. Mrs.Taylor was describing conditions at the close of the eighteenth century and in the early years of the nineteenth.
Widening Use of Ceramics
By the 1830s, according to Michael Gonder Scherck's Pen Pictures of Early Life in Upper Canada (published pseudonymously in 1905 by A Canuck ), most country people had a set of earthenware dishes. Although the children in a farm household might still be given pewter cups and saucers (Scherck refers to them as pewter but they were probably Britannia metal), the early Victorian housewife, whatever her circumstances, normally expected to set up housekeeping with ceramic wares for her table.
During Victorian times, transportation facilities improved greatly, making it easier for those living in remote areas to obtain supplies of such fragile goods as pottery and porcelain. Most important, however, in the transition from wooden or metal tableware to earthenware or porcelain was the fact that ceramic wares became cheaper than ever before a result of the mass production of the industrial revolution carried to new lengths by Victorian potters. Cheaper goods, of course, meant wider use. Even on the tables of the poor and even in the newest settlements, earthenware dishes (as Scherck noted) became part of normal household equipment. It is significant that at the beginning of the 1830s, Joseph Pickering, giving advice to immigrants intending to farm in Upper Canada, included crockery among the basic household supplies taken for granted. This confirms Scherck's memories and indicates a prevalence of ceramic wares not known by Mrs. Taylor's parents and neighbours clearing land in the Eastern Townships in the 1790s.
The Predominating Influence
Throughout the nineteenth century, the ceramic wares sold in Canada, whether in a new settlement or in such long-established cities as Halifax or QuΘbec, were predominantly the products of British potteries. There were two main reasons for this. The first was that British North American colonies were a protected market for such exports. Secondly, Canada had come under British rule at the very moment when the potters of Great Britain were on the verge of making a determined bid for world prominence. By the end of the, eighteenth century, they had achieved such marked success that the Parisian scholar, Faujas de St.Fond, was moved to comment:
... in travelling from Paris to Petersburg, from Amsterdam to the furthest part of Sweden, and from Dunkirk to the extremity of the South of France, one is served at every inn with English ware. Spain, Portugal, and Italy are supplied with it, and vessels are loaded with it for the East Indies, the West Indies, and the continent of America.
It was earthenware, particularly the cream-coloured variety as perfected by Staffordshire's Josiah Wedgwood in the second half of the eighteenth century and copied by other potters, which had gained for the British the widespread acceptance noted by St. Fond. Early in the nineteenth century, their newly-invented ironstone china (a high-fired, very dense, strong and durable earthenware) and a new porcelain of the type now known as bone china (more dependable in the kiln than earlier British porcelains) further secured their position. The British potters, who had come late to the field when compared with the potters of the Orient and continental Europe, were, by Victorian times, the confident masters of mass production. Their wares were in demand around the world and, in Canadian homes, were the familiar objects of everyday use.
These British wares maintained a commanding position throughout the century, in spite of the fact the lowering of protection through more liberal British trading laws resulted, from the 1840s, in freer entry of foreign goods into British colonies. Such wares held the lead by virtue of their volume, their long-established position in Canada, and the aggressive marketing methods of British potters, some of whom, from an early date, had their own warehouses or agents in such cities as Saint John, QuΘbec, and Toronto. While specialist china importers wooing the sophisticated were able to boast, as did Porter & Ronald of Winnipeg in 1886, that their stock represented the keramics of the world , the average Canadian continued to rely heavily on British-made wares throughout the century. Eaton's Spring and Summer Catalogue for 1889 typically featured English earthenware, ironstone, and porcelain. Foreign tableware were offered in the porcelain category only. As for wares made in Canada itself, their role, with only few exceptions, was limited to the humble utilitarian wares for kitchen and storage cupboard.
Earthenware
The demand for earthenware was always stronger than the demand for porcelain, because earthenware was generally cheaper. Demand prompted the importers to bring in huge quantities of it. An advertisement in the MontrΘal Transcript (October 8, 1844) offered "10,000 pieces assorted Earthenware in every variety". The 'every variety' might well have included earthenware of a cream colour the type with which British potters had stormed the markets of Europe and the continent of America in the eighteenth century. Cream-coloured earthenware continued in use throughout the nineteenth century; but far more typical of the Victorian period was earthenware that was whiter in appearance.
Like the early creamware, this whiter earthenware (sometimes called pearl ware) might have hand painted decoration, though in Victorian times it was most likely to be painted in a quick, broad peasant style, often described as common painted in the advertisements; or it might have only a painted edge applied over a slightly moulded rim design (edged wares). The most popular form of earthenware decoration was not, however, painted but printed.
Underglaze transfer printing was a method of ceramic decoration by which a pattern or design was transferred, using specially prepared paper tissues, from an engraved copperplate to a piece of fired but unglazed pottery. Later, the piece would be glazed and given a final firing. This process was an eighteenth century invention which did not reach its full potential until the next century. The impact of this essentially mechanical method of decoration upon the ceramic industry was of tremendous significance. With continued improvements in the printing process came increased output of cheaper wares.
By Victorian times, the technical difficulties which had at first plagued ceramic printing had been overcome. In the early days, only blue derived from cobalt could be depended upon to withstand the heat of the glost (or glaze) oven. The Victorian potter, in contrast to his earlier counterpart, had at his command a veritable rainbow even multi-colour printing became possible. In 1842, an advertisement in the MontrΘal Gazette offered Canadians an 'experimental shipment' of earthenware with new multi-coloured decoration.
Monochrome printing in colours other than blue had been advertised in Canada from the 1830s. One such advertisement appeared during 1835 in the Missiskoui Post, published in Stanbridge, Lower Canada. Shoppers in this rural community were able to exchange country produce for the brown, pink or blue tea sets available at A.L. Taylor's general store. Barter, it should be noted, was a common method of carrying on business, and tableware of all kinds were frequently offered in exchange for such things as eggs, pemmican, or hides. E.L. Barber, advertising in the West's first newspaper, the Nor'-Wester, in 1863, was willing to take payment for his tableware in Hides... Flour or Potatoes, as well as money.
There is convincing evidence printed wares appealed to those of fastidious taste, as well as those whose choice was dictated by low cost or the possibility of barter. These wares appeared, for example, on the tables of influential city dwellers such as Lady Dawson, wife of the principal of McGill University.
The popularity of printed earthenware rested solidly on three factors: relative cheapness because of the nature of the process; an almost limitless variety of patterns; and decoration that wore well because it was protected by the glaze. The broad based appeal of Victorian printed wares was summed up in the 1870s by William C. Prime, an American writer read in Canada, who declared that underglaze transfer printing had been "brought to such perfection" that "really wonderful ... decoration" was everywhere available "at very low prices". He added: "it must be a difficult taste to satisfy which cannot find among the cheap earthenwares of our day ... colour and decoration such as will meet the most fastidious demand".
General storekeepers in both town and country dealt in crockery as a staple. Surviving business papers of one country merchant, J.D. Laflamme of West Winchester, Ontario, not only show that printed earthenware was part of his varied stock but, by revealing the names of some of his patterns, also throw light on Victorian taste. In the early 1880s, Laflamme had on hand plates and tea sets in a pattern called "Bosphorus", purchased from a MontrΘal wholesaler at a cost of one dollar for a dozen plates.
Bosphorus was typical of a whole class of Victorian printed patterns. It was an idealized view with only a minaret or two to connect it with the strait separating European from Asiatic Turkey. The Victorians were less concerned with geographical accuracy on their tableware than with the romantic lure of distant lands as evoked by a name. Patterns such as Bosphorus appealed strongly to the Victorian sense of the romantic.
The romanticism of the Victorians was, however, almost paradoxically combined with pride in technological advancement. In the 1840s, British potters, spurred by public interest in Samuel Cunard's feat of spanning the Atlantic with a fleet of four paddle wheelers, put printed pictures of the ships and their interiors on table and toilet wares. Following his 1842 transatlantic crossing on a Cunard steamship, Charles Dickens pronounced the accommodation and the idea of oceanic steam travel unsafe; he returned to Britain by sail. The general public, however, hailed the Nova Scotia-born Cunard as "the best friend ... of progress in the whole history of navigating the ocean". On printed earthenware is a visual record of Victorian pride in the advances of applied science.
Printed wares reveal the gamut of Victorian interests, from an intense fascination with the past, reflected in furniture, jewelry, and ceramic design (revived rococo and Gothic patterns on tableware, for example), to an insatiable zeal for expanding knowledge, seen in arctic views inspired by the desperate quest for the Northwest Passage. Even fads of Victorian days found ceramic expression. The fern fever (so described by a nineteenth-century horticulturist) which possessed the Victorians in varying degrees throughout the entire period gave rise to countless table and toilet ware patterns. The Japanese mania of the last quarter-century swept the British potters into the oriental stream. Anglo-Japanese earthenware, printed with long-legged birds and the ubiquitous Japanese fan, invaded every china shop in Canada. Laflamme's country store was no exception: his papers show he had a chamber set in the current Japanese style on hand in 1882.
The importers' lure each season was the promise of new patterns:"TEA SETS in ... light blue and brown, different patterns" ran Thomas Clerke's advertisement in Saint John's New Brunswick Courier (July 8,1848). In an age of restless change, printed patterns came and went at a bewildering rate.
Among the few patterns in production throughout the nineteenth century (and still made today) was "Willow", a pattern devised in eighteenth-century England from Chinese ingredients. With its familiar willow tree, tea house, and bridge with three figures on it, the Willow pattern was a Canadian favourite; the evidence is in the multitude of surviving examples. The Victorians were devoted to Willow. Longfellow enshrined it in verse:
The willow pattern that we knew In childhood, with its bridge of blue...
In advertisements, Willow was placed in a category of its own. While Canadian importers tended to group all other printed patterns under the heading "fancy printed", they specified Willow by name, even though, by the second half of the century, it belonged with the common (or cheaper) class of tableware, just a brief step above common painted or cheaply edged wares. In the Niagara Chronicle (December 26,1850), Alexander Christie advertised Staffordshire BLUE AND BROWN PRINTED WILLOW AND COMMON WARE.
Any consideration of the place and kind of ceramics in the nineteenth-century Canadian home necessitates an emphasis on printed earthenware for two compelling reasons. First, its use was widespread and continued throughout the century: the New Brunswick Courier advertised "fancy... Printed Earthenware" in 1834; according to the Edmonton Bulletin, "Fancy Printed" at prices "never before heard of" was available in 1895. Second, printed wares have an obvious value as a record of tastes and attitudes. It is pertinent that a recent study of shards from twenty Hudson's Bay Company posts, in areas now part of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, reveals evidence of printed patterns dating from the 1830s to past the turn of the century, and ranging from romanticized scenery to the familiar willow and from revived rococo to the Japanesque.
lronstone China
Printed patterns appeared on the ordinary earthenware for the table and also on the denser higher-fired body known as ironstone china. This higher-fired earthenware was marketed under many names, including stone china and white granite, but ironstone has become the generic term. An invention of English potters in the early nineteenth century, ironstone china quickly gained immense popularity in overseas markets such as Canada, chiefly because of its durability and its appeal to both the rich and the poor.
Like ordinary earthenware, ironstone was often underglaze printed; or it might be painted, lustred, or sponged. The most costly ironstone, handsomely painted and gilded, was acceptable on the tables of the fashionable. Thomas Molson of MontrΘal (son of the founder of the brewing fortune) paid sixteen guineas for a painted ironstone dinner service in 1836, purchased, according to his unpublished diary, for best use.
Sponged wares, on the other hand, whether of ordinary earthenware or the tougher ironstone, were intended for the unsophisticated. Their decoration, stamped or dabbed on in lively colours, was underglaze, but the effect was cruder than printed decoration. Lady Dawson, who considered under-glaze transfer printing perfectly suitable for the principal's residence at McGill, would have been very unlikely to admit sponged wares to her dinner table. Advertisements indicate the market for which sponged wares were intended. One, appearing in the MontrΘal Gazette (July 1,1851), announced ,250 crates of wares for Country Stores and particularized sponged bowls, platters, cups, and saucers. Sponged decoration was used on the bowls and other articles called "Portneuf" in QuΘbec, many of which were in an ironstone-type body. Portneuf wares were not, as was once believed, made at Portneuf, near QuΘbec City, but originated mainly in British potteries and were imported by Canadian merchants with an eye on a country trade that liked wares of a bright fancy character.
Most ordinary earthenware for the table had some sort of coloured decoration, if only a painted edge or a lustre tea leaf. Vast quantities of Victorian ironstone, however, had no coloured decoration at all. The decoration, if any, was confined to an embossed (moulded) design. In 1899, Eaton's was selling this type of English ironstone at a retail price of only sixty-five cents for a dozen cups and saucers. To go back to an earlier day, this was the type of ware independent merchants of the Red River were advertising in the Nor'-Wester as "White stone" in 1860, and J.P. Davis, the Victoria auctioneer, was offering in a trade sale in 1873 as "White granite".
The same qualities of low price and durability which made plain white or sparsely decorated ironstone suitable for the country trade also made it suitable for institutional and hotel use. The QuΘbec Lunatic Asylum, hotels such as Donegana's in MontrΘal, and steamships of the Allan, Beaver and Cunard lines all found it practical to use English ironstone.
lronstone had such a ready market in Victorian Canada that it is not surprising to find this was the type of ware attempted at the one nineteenth-century Canadian pottery which made any sustained effort to produce white-bodied earthenware for the table. Canadian potters were placed at a disadvantage by the generally superior financial and technological resources of the overseas potters and the sheer bulk of their exports. Only at St. Johns (now St. Jean), QuΘbec, was any real effort made to compete with the imported tableware. In 1873, the St. Johns Stone Chinaware Company was formed to produce ironstone-type table and toilet wares. The chief financial backers of the ambitious venture were Duncan and Edward Macdonald, known locally as the merchant princes of St. Johns.
Falling into difficulties almost at once, the company was rescued by Edward Macdonald. He bought it outright and ran it with such attention that it was said he could scarcely be persuaded to take even a day's holiday. Soon afterward, in 1878, the St. Johns News reported that the company employed 120 potters, more than half of whom were from Staffordshire. By the mid-1880s, the number of workers was close to 400; the St. Johns Stone Chinaware Company was reported to be the largest pottery in Canada. Edward Macdonald died in 1889. In 1893 a disastrous fire swept the pottery. By the end of the century Macdonald's nephew had sold the business to a group of ceramists from France. Within two years of the sale the pottery had closed its doors.
Stone china (ironstone) from St. Johns never replaced the heavily-promoted imports to any significant degree, but the company did obtain a market for its wares, largely in country districts. A typical customer for this type of tableware was Hiram Boomhour, a farmer from Clarenceville (about thirty kilometres from St. Johns) who, according to his son's reminiscences, purchased a set of thick white St. Johns ware in 1880 or 1881. At this same time, J.D. Laflamme was stocking St. Johns stone china in his country store in Ontario. From the invoices of the MontrΘal supplier, it is known that the wholesale price to Laflamme was eighty-five cents for a dozen cups, presumably with saucers, and eight dollars for a dozen ewers and basins.
Porcelain
Earthenware creamware, pearl ware, and the ironstone chinas accounted at all times for the greatest proportion of ceramic wares in Canadian homes. There was, however, an increase in the use of porcelain, partly because of the greater range of readily available porcelain wares. Until about the second quarter of the nineteenth century, British potters, who were the main suppliers of the Canadian market, had left dinnerware very largely to the earthenware makers. Accordingly, when government officials, garrison officers, prosperous merchants, and other people of fashion used British-made tableware, they were likely to take their tea from porcelain cups but their dinner from earthenware plates. With gradual improvements in the manufacturing of porcelain, costs were cut in the production of larger items of dinnerware and more potters began to produce it. From the 1830s, there is increasing mention in Canadian advertisements of porcelain dinner services, as well as tea sets, from England. In 1837, Thomas McAdam, a MontrΘal importer, was advertising English "dining services" in porcelain, pearl ware, and ironstone.
At this period, porcelain was not necessarily cheap. Some of McAdam's dining services cost sixty pounds. How expensive this was may be judged from the fact that a domestic servant living in the home of her employer might earn less than twelve pounds a year, according to figures given in the MontrΘal Gazette in 1831. Nevertheless, increasing supplies of expensive wares came on the market during the Victorian era and there were always people who could afford to buy them.
It was an opulent age. Lavishly gilded and expensively painted porcelain appealed to the same Victorian taste which preferred coloured gem stones to diamonds, filled drawing rooms with extravagantly carved furniture, and encouraged architects to design imposing facades for houses. Among the most lavish of porcelain tableware was the hand painted dessert service. A service of this kind was purchased in the mid-1880s by Richard White, president of the Gazette, for the frequent dinner parties required by his position in MontrΘal. Of English bone china, this dessert service was as typical of its period as White was typical of many who used such services. The centre dish was massive, the borders "Jewelled", and each of the twenty-four plates was meticulously painted with a different scene.
A greater range of items readily available and a growing number of people who could afford them accounted for some of the increased use of porcelain; but the main reason for its wider use in the Victorian period was that ultimately porcelain became cheap. At the same time as there was costly porcelain, meant to impress, there was also porcelain which, if not quite for everyone, was at least a possibility for many who had not thought of owning it in the days when a 'set of earthenware dishes', in Scherck's words, was sufficient for the country housewife. By 1899, Eaton's was selling English porcelain tea sets, admittedly with sparse decoration, for $2.60. These forty-piece sets were available at less than the cost of 3╜ pounds of some of the teas listed in that same 1899 catalogue. By the mid-nineteenth century, foreign wares were also contributing to the availability of cheaper porcelain in Canada. Cheap French porcelain began to be used in some hotels (such as the St. Lawrence Hall in MontrΘal) before the 1870s, and was advertised in the Winnipeg Daily Times in 1881 and in the Calgary Daily Herald in 1895.
Ornamental Wares
Table and toilet wares were the necessities; ornamental wares were the delight of the Victorians. Ornaments "to fill a space and gratify the eye", in the words of an 1898 Toronto advertiser in Saturday Night, had an honoured place in the Victorian home, whether manor house or log cabin. Robert de Roquebrune, describing the drawing room of the manor house at St. Ours as his mother had arranged it in 1874, spoke of porcelain ornaments on the shelves of the whatnots. Catharine Parr Traill in her Canadian Settler's Guide (1855) had earlier advised that even in a log cabin it was desirable to have a shelf for "little ornamental matters".
Of all the ornamental matters , none gained greater popularity than those made of Parian, a Staffordshire-invented porcelain dating from the 1840s. Parian was originally meant to reproduce sculpture in a size and at a price satisfactory to buyers who had neither the accommodation nor the money for original art works in marble. It closely resembled marble in appearance. So popular did it become that it was purchased by many who could well have afforded the original marble sculpture. Sir William Macdonald, the MontrΘal tobacco magnate, bought Parian ornaments for the house he furnished for his mother and sister. Parian ornaments were placed in Rosemount, the house made ready for the Prince of Wales when he came to MontrΘal to open the Victoria Bridge in 1860. Canadian advertisements for busts and statuettes in Parian reflect the unabashed admiration of the Victorians for human greatness and reveal their heroes and heroines: Wellington and Napoleon were selling in Toronto in 1856, Florence Nightingale in Winnipeg in 1867, and Ned Hanlan in Saint John in 1882. Hanlan was the Canadian who was champion oarsman of the world.
Good quality Parian was not cheap, but some of the cheapest of the Victorian ornaments were, in fact, made of porcelain. Four or five small figures in poorer-quality unglazed European porcelain (bisque) could be purchased for a dollar. In recollections given over thirty years ago, an elderly porter at a MontrΘal auction house remembered spending his first earned money, at age eleven, for "a little bit of bisque an ornament". He bought it for his mother, "because she didn't have much but she fancied an ornament". At twenty-five cents, it cost all that he had earned.
The rooms of the rich were crowded with the more costly Parian groups and figures, with Worcester vases, with Doulton stoneware in the aesthetic taste of the 1880s, with drawing room pottery. Those who could not afford expensive ornaments bought cheap earthenware figures, often depicting royalty; the cheaper types of commemorative jugs; or, at the very least, a fancy cup and saucer, intended more for show than for use.
Other Wares
Behind the scenes were other wares which had no place on the dinner table or the whatnot, but which were essential to the running of a Victorian household. These were the coarse, dark-bodied earthenwares and stonewares: redware milk pans, salt-glazed butter pots, storage jars and the like, referred to by an 1867 Kingston newspaper as stone crocks and all that class. It was in this category that Canadian potters made their principal contribution to the ceramic wares in the home. Many of these potters operated on a very small scale. Some were farmers as well as potters. This was the case with Jean-Baptiste Dion who employed only three workers at this pottery in Ancienne Lorette, near QuΘbec City, in 1859. The greatest concentration of potters was in Ontario, where advertisements and price lists show pie plates selling at twenty cents each in 1876 and "CROCKS of every description" for as little as "2 cents up" in the 1880s. Bedpans, chamber pots, spittoons, churns, and flower pots were some of the other items furnished by Canadian potters.
Yet even in the manufacture of the commonest articles for kitchen and storage cupboard, Canadian potters had to compete with experienced potters from overseas, especially if they worked in areas near port cities. A striking instance of this competition may be found in the New Brunswick Courier (May 12,1849): a potter working on the outskirts of Saint John advertised milk pans and butter crocks; in another column, an importer announced "100 PACKAGES" of the same articles from England, adding that he "Hourly expected" 5,000 additional pieces by the next vessels into port. In 1862, one of the Staffordshire potters employed at the Elmsdale Pottery, then just outside Halifax, told a reporter from the Morning Sun that the local clay used to make jars and crocks was "as good as he was accustomed to make up in England". Yet during that same summer, one of Halifax's influential importers was advertising "Best hard burned English" jars and butter crocks.
Ceramics as Material History
It would be difficult to overestimate the place of ceramic wares in the Victorian home. Those who would follow Macaulay's advice and try to understand an era by recapturing the everyday scene find that not only were dinner tables set with ceramic wares, kitchen cupboards stocked with them, and bedroom washstands fitted with ceramic basins, but young people played at carpet bowls with ceramic balls, conservatories were adorned with ceramic fountains, fireplaces were surrounded with ceramic tiles and furniture was inset with them (a fashion the Toronto Daily Mail, in 1881, felt made for an artistic appearance ).
The ceramic wares enjoyed by the rich appeared in less expensive form in the houses of the not-so-rich. The very poor, unable to afford a set of anything, made do with odds and ends, in the same way they dressed in whatever they could find to keep decent. In her last book, Pearls and Pebbles, published in 1895, Catharine Parr Traill recalled one wretched cabin in the backwoods where the discouraged wife had only a "few articles of household use ... a few crockery cups and cracked saucers, some tin plates and mugs and a battered tin teapot minus a handle".
Ceramic wares were a staple in the Victorian home; even in the poorest home there were a few fragments of earthenware. Anything that becomes a staple becomes an important item of commerce. This was the case with pottery and porcelain, not only in the cities where specialist china merchants conducted business, not only in general stores in towns and villages, but also on the frontier. The first issue of the Saskatchewan Herald, first newspaper west of the Red River and east of the Rockies, carried one local advertisement on August 25, 1878. It announced to the settlers of the Battleford area that Mahoney & Macdonald's store had the staples they needed; those staples included groceries, clothing, crockery. To estimate the number of people engaged in the crockery trade in Victorian Canada would be to count every general storekeeper in the land as well as scores of city merchants and trade auctioneers. The wares they sold became the familiar objects of the Victorian home. They were part of the "every day" of the past; they remain as material history today.
