Victorian Fairings And Their Values

Victorian Fairings and Their Values (1975) by Margaret Anderson – Lyle Publications
ISBN: 0902921355
Condition: Fair

Victorian fairings are one of those wonderfully specific collecting fields that prove humanity is capable of becoming deeply interested in absolutely anything, provided enough examples survive and somebody eventually writes a book about them.

Margaret Anderson’s Victorian Fairings and Their Values is exactly that book: a 1975 guide to the colourful, sentimental, comic and occasionally baffling little ceramic figures once sold at fairs and popular entertainments during the nineteenth century.

The Victorians, it turns out, did not spend all their time mourning relatives, building railways and looking severe in photographs.

Sometimes they bought slightly ridiculous porcelain ornaments.

And thank goodness they did.

Fairings were generally inexpensive decorative figures, often made in Germany and sold or given as prizes at British fairs. They depicted domestic scenes, courtship, marriage, drinking, arguments, children, animals, popular sayings and the everyday comic disasters of respectable life.

In other words, they were essentially Victorian memes.

Only heavier.

And breakable.

Many were deliberately humorous, often showing couples in situations that suggested marriage might not be the uninterrupted state of bliss advertised beforehand.

There are flirtations.

Domestic disputes.

Bedroom scenes.

Drunken husbands.

Embarrassed wives.

Children behaving badly.

People caught in compromising circumstances.

The entire range has the unmistakable feeling of a society that publicly valued propriety while privately enjoying the sight of other people making fools of themselves.

Some things never change.

The figures were often brightly coloured, cheaply produced and sold to ordinary people rather than wealthy collectors.

That is part of their charm.

They were not grand museum pieces intended to demonstrate dynastic prestige.

They were the nineteenth-century equivalent of the amusing souvenir somebody buys on holiday and then spends forty years wondering where to put.

A mantelpiece, naturally.

The Victorian mantelpiece was one of civilisation’s great storage systems.

Clocks.

Photographs.

Vases.

China dogs.

Fairings.

Possibly something commemorating a royal wedding.

If there was a horizontal surface, the Victorians regarded leaving it empty as a moral failure.

Today these little figures have become collectable precisely because so many survived from a world in which they were commonplace.

A cheap ornament in 1875 becomes an interesting antique a century later.

This is the economic miracle collectors rely upon.

The original purchaser probably spent a few pence and went home pleased.

A later collector spends considerably more and begins discussing glaze, mould numbers and restoration under strong lighting.

Civilisation progresses.

Margaret Anderson’s book was produced during the great twentieth-century boom in antiques and collectables publishing, when virtually every category of object eventually acquired its own specialist guide.

Furniture.

Glass.

Silver.

Toys.

Ceramics.

Postcards.

Buttons.

And, naturally, Victorian fairings.

The underlying principle was simple.

If people collect it, somebody needs to catalogue it.

If somebody catalogues it, values must be supplied.

And once values are supplied, every attic becomes potentially exciting.

That explains the irresistible appeal of books like this.

You open the book.

You look at a photograph.

You remember something vaguely similar in a box inherited from an aunt.

For approximately thirty seconds, retirement becomes financially secure.

Then you discover yours has a chipped hat and was made in 1972.

Still, the dream was pleasant.

The values in the title are, of course, now historical values.

This book was published in 1975.

Any monetary figures should therefore be treated as a fascinating record of the collecting market at the time rather than a reliable guide to what something is worth today.

A fairing listed at a particular price in 1975 may now be worth more.

Or less.

Or vastly more if it is rare.

Or considerably less if somebody has glued the head back on with something resembling bathroom sealant.

Antiques are like that.

Condition, rarity, subject, maker, desirability and collector fashion all matter.

So does whether the object has survived a century and a half without being dropped by a child.

The book itself is therefore useful today not just as a price guide but as a historical reference.

It helps identify designs.

It shows the range of subjects produced.

It records terminology.

And it captures what collectors in the mid-1970s considered important.

That last point is especially interesting.

Collecting fashions change.

Objects move in and out of favour.

Entire categories become fashionable, unfashionable and fashionable again.

Some collectors patiently wait decades for everyone else to rediscover what they already knew.

Fairings themselves are appealing because they sit somewhere between social history and comedy.

They often show ordinary life rather than grand events.

A couple arguing.

A husband returning home late.

A woman reacting suspiciously to something.

A child causing trouble.

A mildly suggestive scene accompanied by a caption that would have made perfect sense in 1880 and now requires three minutes of interpretation.

These are tiny windows into Victorian humour.

And Victorian humour was often much less restrained than the popular stereotype suggests.

The Victorians were perfectly capable of jokes about sex, marriage, alcohol and domestic misery.

They simply put them on ornaments and arranged them neatly beside the clock.

Respectability restored.

There is also something inherently amusing about the phrase Victorian Fairings and Their Values.

It sounds as though the fairings themselves possess moral principles.

Honesty.

Industry.

Temperance.

Moderate household expenditure.

Unfortunately, the values in question are financial.

Which is perhaps even more Victorian.

For collectors, the illustrations are likely to be the main attraction.

Identifying fairings can be surprisingly difficult because similar designs appeared in different forms and colours.

Manufacturing was not always perfectly consistent.

Details changed.

Captions varied.

Damage and restoration complicate matters.

And after more than a century, some examples have undergone repairs ranging from expert conservation to enthusiastic intervention with whatever adhesive happened to be in the kitchen drawer.

A reference book helps bring some order to all this.

Or at least gives you something authoritative to place beside the object while continuing to disagree about it.

The volume also belongs to a charming pre-internet age of collecting.

Today someone finding an unusual ceramic figure can photograph it, perform an image search, browse auction archives and join three specialist forums before lunch.

In 1975, you needed books.

Several books.

Possibly a dealer.

Perhaps an antiques fair.

And a willingness to spend an afternoon searching an index.

Knowledge was slower.

But arguably more satisfying.

There was no instant answer.

No algorithm suggesting twelve vaguely similar ornaments from online marketplaces.

No seller describing every ceramic figure as “RARE VICTORIAN ANTIQUE POSSIBLY ROYAL”.

You had to actually investigate.

Dangerous levels of patience were involved.

The physical design of specialist books from this era has its own appeal too.

They were made for people who expected to use them.

Collectors carried them.

Dealers referred to them.

Pages were marked.

Prices were pencilled in.

Books accumulated the same sort of history as the objects they described.

A pristine reference book is pleasing.

A slightly worn one often feels more authentic.

It has probably been somewhere.

Possibly an antiques fair in a draughty village hall.

Possibly several.

This particular copy has indeed acquired some character of its own.

Condition: Fair. The book boards are slightly warped, as though the volume has been compressed or squashed during storage over the years.

The book is otherwise usable and intact, but the covers no longer possess the completely flat confidence they presumably enjoyed in 1975.

They have developed a gentle historical opinion about geometry.

This is not catastrophic.

The book has not curled into a tube.

It has not become triangular.

It simply looks as though, at some stage in its long life, several heavier books may have leaned upon it with excessive enthusiasm.

Given that it concerns Victorian ceramics, surviving a period of mild compression seems relatively minor.

No fairings were harmed in the process.

For collectors of Victorian ceramics, fairings, antiques, decorative arts, social history or vintage price guides, this remains a useful and entertaining specialist reference.

It would also make an excellent companion to an inherited box of mysterious china figures that nobody in the family can explain.

Open the box.

Open the book.

Begin matching.

Then spend the evening alternately convinced you have discovered a valuable rarity and wondering why your ancestors kept an ornament showing a drunken man falling out of bed.

That is collecting.

A mixture of scholarship, optimism and bewilderment.

Condition: Fair, principally due to the slightly warped boards caused by long-term storage pressure. Internally still a perfectly serviceable reference volume and suitable for reading, identification work or placing beside your fairing collection while silently judging whichever relative stored it underneath the encyclopaedias.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where the ceramics may be Victorian, the prices may be from 1975, and the book itself has been gently reshaped by several decades of shelf-based archaeology.

Keep browsing: See more Antiques books Other books by Margaret Anderson