The working life of Museum of London

In our latest blog from our team bringing our collections online, we hear again from Ellie and her continuing work with our printed ephemera collection…

Our collection of business cards, invoices, brochures and receipts, provides a snapshot of London’s working life.

The collection will be made available online for the first time next Spring, giving researchers the chance to access the objects from the comfort of their own homes.

I imagine this resource will be well-used by family historians as well as academic researchers, who will be able to search the online information for specific names and trades.

Each of the cards and receipts will have a photograph to accompany the printed information, allowing anyone to virtually delve into the boxes.

As well as showing the aesthetic development of professional branding, the cards illuminate some canny combinations of careers.

I was surprised to find one prudent gentleman whose card advertised his work as both Carpenter and Undertaker.  I have since learned this was a common combination of careers and presumably provided a relatively stable source of income.

The museum’s collection of Valentine’s cards is the largest of the three collections I am working with.

The collection contains almost 1800 Valentines cards, the oldest of which are early nineteenth century, and predate the uniform penny postal service introduced in the 1840s.

The majority of the cards were hand made by workers employed by the stationer Jonathan King from premises in Essex Road, Islington.

The collection includes a number of experimental cards and although there is a great deal of Victorian sentimentality, some of the more unusual cards include those with comic or insulting messages and several featuring photographs of cats.

Whilst some motifs have remained in today’s commercial Valentines cards, it is not difficult to see why cards featuring the ‘Lobster in Love’ did not take off.

Similarly, it is some relief that cards with stuffed birds attached no longer grace the shelves of high-street stationers. I will blog in more detail about the Valentine’s cards in February when the collection goes online.

You can catch up on all our collections online blog posts to date here.