When it comes to nonfiction, I think next to memoirs, social history is my very favorite type of book to read. Especially if it has to do with women's history. I think it was Buried in Print who first mentioned Lynn Knight's The Button Box to me some time back. It was still in hardcover, however, so I thought I would mentally tuck it away for later, which means it eventually fell out of my head when more new books squeezed in. Recently when I was lamenting my poor showing on the nonfiction reading front, she reminded me of Lynn Knight's book and serendipity as it is now out in paper, so yes, I had to order a copy.
It's just what I need and I think I have settled down into a most fascinating book about all sorts of things with a jumping off point of a family treasure passed down from one generation to the next--a button box! The subtitle of the book is "the story of women in the 20th century, told through the clothes they wore." When the Spectator says in a blurb on the front cover--"a delicious gem of a book" I have to most strongly concur!
It sounds as though many stories were passed down in Lynn Knight's family, which surely inspired her to write this book. Those stories and her grandmother's button box!
"As a very small child, I spent Friday afternoons at the house my grandma Annie shared with my great-aunt Eva. The Quality Street tin lodged on a window sill beside the one for Blue Bird Toffees which held my grandma's cotton reels."
It must have been quite a magical sound--those buttons swishing in the tin that she would take out as a child to play with--"that stood in for both sweets and currency in the games of shop" she would play with them. Knight's own button box is a "Victorian writing case with zig-zag bands of marquetry and inlaid mother of pearl," which is a collection of her own buttons as well as some of her mother's and grandmother's. It is these buttons that she pulls out of her button box and uses as inspiration to tell us not just about the button's significance--family and personal memories, but also as a peek into the history attached to it--it's own social history.
My teaser is from the first chapter (there are twenty-seven in total) about jet buttons, which were ubiquitous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apparently they were everywhere back then. Real jet buttons were a "form of fossilized wood that can take on a high polish". But it is prone to flake and chip and most people couldn't afford the real thing, so the next best and with a similar effect were buttons made of glass which would sparkle just as nicely against black fabric. Black, death, Victorian--yes, you have it. Mourning in the Victorian era was big business! There was quite a market for grief apparel, and the most splendid was velvet known as "Luxury of woe".
"The mourner is reassured that there is something to suit every sentiment, 'from a grief prononcé to the slightest nuance of regret'."
"Buttons added to the ornamentation of beaded and bejetted clothing. Flowers, like the delicate ones in my handful of small 'jet' buttons, provided incised decoration; birds, too. Like other buttons of their type, and jewelry, they achieve their effect by combining matt and polished decoration; gold or silver luster added an even more ornate finish. Some jet buttons imitated fabrics on which they were sewn, recreating a taffeta sheen or the hazy shimmer of watered silk."
The Victorians went so far as to even having mourning jewelry that looked downright ghoulish, but by WWI the trends had changed. By the 1920s black dresses had taken on a much different meaning--as in "the little black dress". I have never owned a little black dress myself, but they are considered a "blank canvas" that changes meaning depending on what you want from the look--from sophistication to servility. Alas, I likely will only need a little black dress, at this point in my life, for mourning rather than seduction, but you never know. I'll take the seduction road, thanks very much.
Can you see how fun this read is going to be? I am ready to move on to the 'black currant button'. This is probably going to sound pretty nerdy, but this book has not just end notes but a ten page bibliography as she makes many references to books, literature from the periods she writes about. I can't wait to peruse that bibliography! Now I wish I had a button box of my own.