Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (21 page)

The Fine Arts Club, as I have already mentioned, allowed women to attend meetings from the mid-century, but, even then, it did so rather grudgingly. For the first year after its foundation, female connoisseurs were only afforded honorary instead of full membership and of the 201 members only eight were female. Charles Schreiber joined the club early in its life in 1858, and was an active contributor, exhibiting his first objects there in 1863 and organizing a display of porcelain, lacquer and jewellery for fellow members at the Schreibers' home in April 1866. Charlotte was encouraging and often attended meetings, as well as hosting those that were held at her house, but she never became a member, perhaps because even she felt uncomfortable in an environment that so closely resembled a gentleman's club. While the example of pioneers like Mary Anning suggests that class was one of the factors determining the degree to which women were allowed to participate in a scholarly community, it was clear that even for Charlotte Schreiber, with an impeccable family background, the right upbringing and a place in elite social circles, it was far from easy to earn the respect of male peers or to take advantage of the opportunities offered to male collectors.

Such restrictions inevitably influenced the type of objects Victorian women tended to collect. Instead of ancient classical artefacts and Old Masters, their attention often turned to things that did not appear inappropriately scholarly or assertive, or which many of their male counterparts regarded as trivial. This was not necessarily a mark of defeat. Charlotte was typical in exploiting the lack of interest of most male collectors in objects such as playing cards, fans and especially ceramics, not only creating for herself a new and defined area of expertise but also allowing her to take shrewd advantage of less volatile, and less
expensive, markets. Many male dealers knew little or nothing about these less traditionally popular types of object: ‘ignorance was the prevailing characteristic,' explained Charlotte's son in introducing her journal. ‘Nobody wanted Old Sheffield Plate, Pinchbeck, old English jewellery, needlework pictures, old English glass, pewter, Staffordshire ware, excluding Wedgwood, old steel, brass etc. . . my mother was able to pick up the finest specimens of china and other such articles for quite a moderate outlay.'
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The enthusiasm for ‘specimens of china', especially porcelain, among female collectors was particularly pronounced. England's Queen Mary II had collected oriental porcelain in the seventeenth century, helping to make the craze for Japanese china fashionable and respectable. In his
History of England
, Macaulay looked back scathingly at the way the fashion had taken off, dominating many women's lives: ‘In a few years almost every great house in the kingdom contained a museum of these grotesque baubles. . . a fine lady valued her mottled green pottery quite as much as she valued her monkey and much more than she valued her husband.'
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At first, only noblewomen and women of the gentry could afford to follow in Queen Mary's footsteps but despite, or perhaps because of, this the fashion flourished. In the first half of the seventeenth century, imports of Japanese ceramics peaked while cheaper, less ornamental pieces from China began to flood into the European market, making it easier for less wealthy collectors to join the fray.

There are many reasons why women took to collecting china, and particularly porcelain. Not only were ceramics enormously fashionable, but such a collection was associated with wealth and power and so was also extremely prestigious – owning even a few pieces could go a long way towards boosting social standing. The growing popularity of domestic rituals around tea-drinking also gave women the opportunity to take a more visible role in polite gatherings. Their tea sets placed them at the heart of a new kind
of social event, taking control of the occasion and using their china to orchestrate it. For many, however, the attraction of china was much more straightforward: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women were seduced by the bright colours, the extravagant decoration and the sheer sense of luxury of their porcelain treasures.

By the nineteenth century, this tradition meant that there was a great choice of secondhand ‘old' china for collectors, alongside new china being produced or imported to meet the demands of the market, and the growing sense that china had a history started to change the way in which it was perceived. It was no longer viewed as simply decorative and fashionable – it began to acquire the status of art. When public museums like the South Kensington Museum, and popular exhibitions like the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, included ceramics in their displays, this consolidated the idea that ceramics had artistic merit, and might be worth collecting. The 1860s and 1870s witnessed the publication of a variety of books and pamphlets offering histories of English and Continental ware, as well as enticing the collector with hints on which pieces to look out for, which shops and dealers offered the best bargains and which were the most profitable hunting grounds. Charlotte and Charles Schreiber, beginning their collecting around 1865, were at the vanguard of this Victorian chinamania. They made the most of the fact that knowledge was not yet quite widespread nor the market entirely prepared for the onslaught of collectors. They also set an example for those who came after them with their energetic and skilful ceramic collecting, remaining somewhat critical of those who were ignorantly swept along by what Charlotte called the ‘ridiculous rage' for china.

Increasingly, the wealthy and influential housewives of the middle classes began to collect ceramics, even if modestly. Some men, too, developed a taste for ceramic collecting, but this was
more unusual. China came to be seen as so much a female speciality that a man's enthusiasm for ceramics was often regarded as evidence of effeminacy. Charles Lamb, the English essayist of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, was one of the small number of men who admitted to a fascination with ceramics, and in an essay on ‘Old China' he openly admitted that this was not an entirely masculine predilection: ‘I have an almost feminine partiality for old china,' he confessed.
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In contrast, for women, a small collection of china was considered a proper and reputable outlet for their energies. An enthusiasm for china collecting could be roundly approved by the male establishment: it was useful enough for the tea table and pretty enough to keep a woman amused. It accorded neatly with Victorian ideals about the woman's role in the home, and a few nice pieces of china or a handful of tasteful ‘objets d'art' reflected well on the standing of the household. Surveying the various types of possible collections, one commentator noted condescendingly: ‘CHINA. This is a hobby that ladies should cultivate. . . Women, as a rule, have little taste for collecting books, prints or pictures, but it is a fact that they evince quite an attachment to their ordinary china service.'
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But it was not simply that china was viewed as an appropriate distraction for women, particularly those of the upper classes; it was also usually regarded as personal – instead of family – property. Unlike jewels, classical antiquities or paintings, which would usually pass from father to son, pieces of china were rarely subject to the strict rules of primogeniture inheritance and could often pass quietly from mother to daughter, or from sister to niece. This had the advantage of potentially circumventing the restrictions on female ownership. Unmarried women, though often marooned in a social no man's land, at least had the privilege of owning their possessions. Married women, in contrast, handed over the rights of ownership to their husbands. If they became collectors, by law they could not own any of the objects they
collected, nor choose to whom they left them after their deaths. It was not until 1870 that the government passed the Married Women's Property Act, which allowed women to own possessions they had acquired after their marriages, and it was another twelve years before the same right was extended to objects owned before marriage. Until these laws came into force, a woman's possessions, like herself, were considered to be simply an extension of her husband's property. A few pieces of china, however, were frequently considered to be unworthy of much attention; husbands often allowed their wives to dispose of such a collection as they wished. Bequeathed through the generations in this way, the best or favourite pieces could become heirlooms down the female line.

Collecting was what the Schreibers did together, and they worked side by side in every aspect of creating and developing their collection. But other women were not so fortunate as to have a family which sympathized with the all-consuming urge to collect. Many Victorian men believed that their wives, mothers and daughters would be unable to control themselves if they became too involved with the stimulating world of ‘things'. They feared that such obsession would lead to personal instability, the breakdown of domestic order and even sexual licentiousness. During the Great Exhibition of 1851,
Punch
highlighted a variety of dangerous impulses that might be prompted by the glittering displays. In one cartoon, middle-class ladies are shown resisting police eviction from the Crystal Palace at closing time with a defiant, even violent, show of solidarity, opposing ‘civil power at the point of a parasol'. In another, ‘The Awful Result of Giving A Season Ticket to Your Wife' is a neglected and empty house. Worse still, in another cartoon, flocks of women are depicted relishing the highly physical, sexually charged atmosphere of the Exhibition as they ‘push, and pant, and pinch their way amongst each other' to see the famous and fabulous Koh-i-Noor diamond.
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Over twenty years later, the idea that collecting was somehow at odds with healthy female instincts still lingered. A
Punch
cartoon of 1874 shows a dishevelled middle-class mother bemoaning the breakage of a valued vase. Her oldest daughter tries to comfort her as five younger siblings look on, but a family is apparently no consolation: ‘You child! You're not unique!! There are six of you – a complete set!' wails the mother disconsolately.
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The message was clear: left to their own devices, women could not be trusted to bring self-control and dignity to the collecting and display of lovely objects.

This discomfort with display and a woman's part in it revealed all kinds of Victorian anxieties. During the eighteenth century, the capitalist spirit was frequently seen as a positive attribute which could keep in check other more unruly and immoral inclinations, and act as a counterweight to undesirable behaviour. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, attitudes towards conspicuous consumption had become much more ambivalent. Despite the growth of a commodity culture, the development of department stores, extravagant shopping habits and spectacular one-off events like the International Exhibitions, the Victorians' response to the objects with which they liked to surround themselves was complex. The activity of creating wealth had acquired overtones of coarseness and taint, and the realities of commercial enterprise needed, at least in public, to be separated from the higher moral priorities of family and social or religious responsibility. The display of too many objects within the home ran the risk of being perceived as exhibitionism, which in turn could be linked to degenerate and even immoral behaviour. Women, in particular, who exhibited too openly a preference for ‘things', for shopping and luxury and spending, could be portrayed as artificial and untrustworthy, and even sexually promiscuous.

In the light of these attitudes, it is perhaps no surprise that female collectors were often reticent about their activity and,
officially at least, appeared to be thin on the ground: of the 131 ceramics collectors recorded in 1851 by Joseph Marryat, the first writer in English to address the history of ceramics, only twelve were women. Even though these numbers rose to thirty-three by the late 1860s, female collectors still represented only a fraction of the total.
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But for all the reasons we have seen, collecting was, in fact, not unusual among women. On the other hand, it
was
unusual for women to be high-profile collectors like Charlotte Schreiber and it was also rare for them to make large bequests to public museums to cement their place in collecting history. (It is perhaps revealing that, while Charlotte's name is associated with the collection of English ceramics now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, it was Charles Schreiber who first proposed a permanent public home for it.) Nonetheless, collecting was a popular female pastime. It tended, however, to be a more private pleasure than it was among men, and it was often linked to the home education of children, particularly girls. It was often viewed as a welcome means of self-expression, rather than an historic investment, and it tended to be an aesthetic as much as a scholarly pursuit: Charlotte Schreiber's collection is unique among Victorian women's collections in the range, quality and extent of the documentation that she maintained.

With few opportunities to join the male-dominated art and collectors' clubs, those women who did enjoy collecting had to find more informal ways to meet to discuss their enthusiasm, exchange information and arrange for the buying and selling of objects. Compared to male networks, the female equivalents were small and distinctly less powerful, but nonetheless they brought like-minded collectors together to share ideas. Charlotte's journals are littered with references to helping out her sister collectors. In November 1869, for example, she spent ‘two very pleasant hours' with Mrs Haliburton, a widowed china collector who became a regular visitor and correspondent, and in June 1884 she called on
Lady Camden, in Eaton Square, to discuss china. By the 1870s, Charlotte was already being recognized as an expert and she was able to use her unusual level of access to the male worlds of curating and dealing to act on behalf of her female friends both at home and abroad. In October 1873, while in Rotterdam, she called at Boor's Bazaar ‘to execute a commission for Mrs Haliburton', and a few months later she took a ceramic mould to elicit an opinion from Augustus Franks at the British Museum on behalf of a friend, Dorothy Neville, another active collector.