Inside the Museum of London

As of today the whole of the Museum’s collection of  Victorian Valentine cards  is available online, so be sure to take a look and find your favourites via this link . 

Collection online project assistant Ellie, who will be talking about some of her favourites at the Museum’s Pleasure Garden Ball tonight, continues her blog posts focusing on the collection with a look at the more unusual cards in the collection…

As everywhere seems festooned with cards and hearts today, I thought it might be refreshing to share some of the more unusual valentine’s in the museum’s collection in more detail. Today I’m going to tell you about the insulting and comic valentine’s cards which are now online.

As well as the romantic cards, King’s shop sold a wide selection of less affectionate valentines. These ranged from gentle teasing and novelty valentines to some with really spiteful messages. This example, featuring a wooden leg, is at the gentler end of the spectrum. The paper used in this card suggests it was produced in a similar style to the sentimental cards and with a similar purpose in mind.

There are a range of these novelty cards, and many, like the ‘lobster in love’, are lift-the-flap cards. When the lobster is raised it reveals the message ‘I have a lady in my head’. These were produced between 1860 and 1880, by which time the symbols of valentines cards were quickly becoming established. There was still space for invention so these would have been an alternative and experimental range of cards. Sadly for me, the lobster experiment did not take off and failed to last through the years as a romantic motif.

As the cards were collected from shop stock, we don’t know quite how many of these were sold – the wooden leg card, for example, must have had a fairly finite market. The entrepreneurial spirit of these early valentine merchants evidently identified a gap in the market: why limit valentine purchases to your one and only sweetheart when you could send cards to all the people you disliked as well?

The spiteful cards certainly look striking, a lively contrast to the romantic cards which tended to be rather repetitive. Unlike the sentimental cards, the insulting cards are not ornate and they certainly weren’t made of expensive, embossed lace papers. On the whole, the insulting cards are cheaply printed and crudely hand-coloured. As well as a caricature they include mocking rhymes, explaining in no uncertain terms why the recipient can never hope for romantic feelings from the sender. In the museum’s collection the majority were designed to be sent to men, as they mock specific trades and work. For example the poem in the card above end with the lines: ‘You may cut people’s lips but you’ll never kiss mine/ I’ll not have a shaver for my Valentine’. There are also some designed to be sent to women; these tend to mock the recipient’s appearance or behaviour. It is possible that they were sent with flirtatious intent, although it’s hard to imagine any recipient being forgiving enough for that plan to work.

Be they silly, rude, spiteful or menacing these strange cards reveal much about Victorian relationships.

Catch up on Ellie’s previous blog posts here.

Ahead of tomorrow’s Pleasure Garden Ball, one of the musical acts for the evening take us on a stroll through the history of pleasure gardens and their musical links…

Imagine a place where the beautiful people gather to hear the latest songs performed by the most fashionable musicians on outdoor stages, where fancy dress events end in disorder and debauchery, there is dancing all night, and the ordinary folk don their finest to indulge in a bit of celebrity-spotting….

You may be forgiven for thinking that I am talking about Glastonbury, with Shirley Bassey and her diamante-encrusted wellingtons, or Kate Moss rocking a straw cowboy hat at the Isle of Wight Festival, but I’m referring to the 18th century pleasure garden, where princes, countesses, actresses and working people alike gathered to find refuge from the filth of the city and indulge in pastoral delights for the princely sum of a one shilling entrance fee.

My music group, Lady Georgianna (external link), have recently completed a tour performing music of the 18th century pleasure garden. We wanted to recreate the experience as far as possible, and found ourselves delving deeper and deeper into this fascinating frivolity as we compiled the programme.

Being seen on the scene in the pleasure gardens was an essential part of the social season, which also involved attending plays, concerts and events at which the wealthy socialised and young ladies hoped to find an eligible bachelor. Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea was considered the more fashionable; Horace Walpole wrote that “You can’t set your foot without treading on a Prince, or Duke of Cumberland”. Clearly the ‘Made in Chelsea’ of its day!

Then, as now, dancing was an essential part or the entertainment, affording a rare opportunity to get close to the opposite sex. In keeping with the idea of Arcadian rusticity, Vauxhall Gardens featured maypoles in its grounds. English country dancing too, elevated to an art form in the 18th century, was very popular amongst all members of society.

The music of the early pleasure garden was initially provided by the songbirds that lived in the many trees, but by the 18th century, purpose built stages, or orchestras, were constructed in the gardens in which musicians performed. George Frederick Handel was a frequent patron of the pleasure gardens and, in 1738 a marble statue of Handel went on display in Vauxhall, one of London’s most famous pleasure gardens.

The famous musicians of the day performed in the pleasure gardens including the nine year old Mozart at Ranelagh. When researching our repertoire, many of the songs have inscribed on them the fact that they were performed by certain singers or actors at Vauxhall or Ranelagh even though the name of the composer might be missing. Not so very different, then, from the pop songs of today that are associated with the singer rather than the person that actually wrote them.

It’s nice to know that, although the pleasure gardens fell out of favour in the 19th century, their spirit is alive and well through events such as this the Museum is hosting and the many music festivals, large and small, that take place the world over. If only they still cost a shilling!

To book tickets to attend tomorrow’s Pleasure Garden Ball visit the Museum of London website here.

Following on from collections online project assistant Ellie’s first blog post about the Museum’s collection of 19th century valentine cards (which can be read here) and in advance of the collection being made available on our website soon – Ellie now turns to how these cards were made…

The Museum of London’s collection holds almost 1800 cards produced in the city, in the workshops of Islington stationer Jonathan King and his contemporaries. King ran his workshop with his mother, where staff would assemble cards from parts of paper lace and printed scrap motifs. If the cards met with King’s approval they would be sold in his shop on the Essex road, alongside a selection of cards produced by others.

Not all of the cards were to King’s satisfaction. King kept bound albums of card designs and annotated them with notes on their design. Often these notes relate to improvements to arrangements or suggestions for re-working a message, providing a detailed insight into the ways the conventions and clichés of sentimental stationery were composed and marketed.

One card design bears a markedly different annotation. The front of the card, shown below, depicts a sailing ship with portholes, behind a lace paper border of trees and foliage. The museum has two versions of this card and inside each is a handwritten message. King has recorded that: “Painted by Ross who married a woman who sold walking sticks in the gutter & could not read or w living about Yourk [sic] Rd or Agar towns.  He brought this pattern in to show me I did not like the combination of ship & trees & did not tell him to do any.  He went right off & drow [ned] himself.  His Daughter workd for me up to 1900’.

In the other King has written: ’Ross Artist he went off  & drownd himself because I did not find out that the port holes opened.  He thought so much of the idea’.

There are happier stories too, and King records the cards he chose to send to his sweetheart, Miss Emily Ashford. From all of the designs in his shop, he chose this solemn and poetic card. Evidently it was effective, as Ashford and King married the following year.

I’ll be talking about the cards at the Museum’s Pleasure Garden Ball tomorrow night, hopefully see you there!

Ellie’s final blog post focusing on the more unusual cards in the collection will be avilable tomorrow ahead of the launch of the full collection online.

Over the last few weeks in between pouring over the carefully timed, actioned packed programme for our Pleasure Garden Ball, our Adult Events team have been enjoying themselves preparing for what has become our annual Valentine’s Day Late event.

They have mulled over serious quandaries such has how many people will want to decorate and wear their own masquerade mask? How can we help spark some new romances on the night? And just how many bars do we need?

Last year’s Valentine Late – part of the Adult Events informal learning programme – saw the Museum full with visitors, who learnt seductive Latin dance steps and sampled a new age aphrodisiac.

This year we’ve decided to mark the special day Georgian style, by hosting a Pleasure Garden Ball with a modern twist.

So what makes this year’s Late worth a visit? Well…where to start? There’ll be 18th century music and dance lessons, masterfully overseen by Lady Georgianna and the Covent Garden Minuet Company; pop-up theatrical performances courtesy of The Mask of Joy; love/lust poetry with the good people of Write Queer London; intriguing talks about Georgian fashion, playbills and pleasure; historic Valentine cards on show and the chance to meet that special someone in speed dating sessions hosted by cabaret darling Steve Nice, in the shadows of the majestically gilded Georgian Lord Mayor’s Coach. Oh, and there will be two bars…

One vital part of any 18th century ball in the public imagination is masquerade masks. We anticipate that some of you will come along with your own elaborate facial attire probably similar to those in this image from our collections online resource linked to here.

But just in case you don’t have a spare one of those…we’ll be encouraging visitors to design and don their own mask at the Museum. Therefore over the last month the desks in the Adult Events team office have been cluttered with glitter, sequins, feathers and different shaped mask templates. A couple of weeks ago the team had a bit of a craft afternoon and made up some pretty lurid and shocking sample masks…

It was quickly established that craft may not be the team’s forte and so the help of the Museum’s wonderful Design team was sought. They came up with some much more fitting and elegant – masks that visitors can decorate and spend the evening with their face beautifully concealed, and chose to be whoever they want to be this Valentine’s!

So in the build up to Tuesday night the Adults event team will be cutting 800 or so identically sized pieces of elastic for the masks – never a dull moment!

To book tickets to attend Tuesday’s Pleasure Garden Ball visit the Museum’s website here.

Next week the Museum’s 19th century valentine card collection will be available to view on our website as part of our collections online project and this is the first of a series of three blog posts about the cards – the other two will go out next week in the lead up to Valentines Day.

Collections online project Assistant, Ellie, will be talking about the cards as one of the activities at the Museum’s Pleasure Garden Ball on Valentine’s Night. There will be a stall where Ellie will be talking about the cards and bringing some of them out of the stores for the evening, so come along and say hello if you’re coming to the ball.

Here, Ellie talks about working with the museum’s Valentine card collection…

At this time of year Valentine’s Day can either feel like a touching celebration of love, or a highly commercial, sentimental enterprise. If it seems that the shops are full of Valentine’s cards at the moment, it’s certainly not for the first time. For the last few months I’ve been working with the Museum of London’s collection of almost 1,800 nineteenth-century valentine cards, and now it seems the commercial and the romantic functions of Valentine’s cards aren’t anything new!

London’s relationship with valentines cards goes back at least two hundred years – by the mid 1820s, an estimated 200,000 valentines circulated annually within London. With the advent of the standardised penny postal service they really took off – by the late 1840s the number was reported to have doubled, and had doubled again by the 1860s. London-made valentine cards were even exported to America, where they were sold advertised as the latest London fashions. The other parts of this card collection are now in the archives of the Hallmark card company.

The sending of cards through the penny post provided a means to maintain the playful aspects of formal courtship, allowing the sender to decide whether to aspire to anonymity or provide clues to their identity. By the mid nineteenth century some valentine traditions had already been established and card makers adapted these to their designs. Springtime rebirth, flowers, birds and rhymes were already popular valentine motifs by this time, and the sentimental Victorian image of cupid was not far behind. Paper scraps were collaged with hand-painted illustration and lace paper to build up the cards, some of which are several centimetres deep. Birds were such a favourite motif that some of cards in the collection went as far as integrating stuffed birds into their collages.

Many of the cards are built up with layers of lace paper and ornamented with scraps and cut out sheets. The museum has some of the sample sheets in his collection, such as this translucent sheet. It includes a number of duplicate affectionate lines, printed onto transparent paper ready to personalise dozens of cards.

Perhaps as a way to alleviate the anxiety of articulating affectionate desire, many of the cards integrate proposals of marriage. Valentine makers sought to extend the market throughout February, so there is even a group of cards intended for the 29th of February, so that women could use them to propose to their sweethearts in the leap year tradition.

Of all the engagement cards I find this the most striking. It reads ‘I am ready to face you at any time respecting our engagement’. If that wasn’t convincing enough, the head of the boar’s head folds down to reveal the message: ‘You are a darling’.

Our collections online programme aims to bring greater online access to our collections over the next three years, including the addition of over 90,000 objects to our website. To discover more about the work involved in bringing the collection to you follow our Project Assistant blogs here.

Vauxhall, 1785 by Thomas Rowlandson

Pleasure gardens competed for visitors, vying with each other to offer evermore exciting entertainments. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens offered a wide variety of entertainment, including lion-tamers, trampoline clowns, fortune tellers, ventriloquists, monkeys, dogs, jugglers, horses who danced to a waltz and fire walkers.

Tournaire's Equestrians, Vauxhall Gardens, 1846

Costumes from the Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

The Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

To mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II the Museum of London will be staging an exhibition in June 2012.

Celebrating the capital’s enthusiasm and affection, ‘At Home with the Queen‘, will feature Londoners photographed in their own homes with their cherished souvenirs of Queen Elizabeth II.

Here, exhibition curator, Julia Hoffbrand, updates us on the search for people and souvenirs to feature:

“Right. Just back from a very extended Christmas and New Year break. Mince pies and lie-ins behind me, I sit down, coffee in hand, to look at my inbox. Lots of enquiries, some general briefings for the Museum’s collections online resource, and some stray spam asking if I want strange things I’ve never heard of. And then on to the ‘At Home with the Queen’ inbox and post pigeon-hole.

Hurrah! Several new submissions have arrived whilst I’ve been away. They’re great! I print them out and put them with all the others received so far to review after the closing date for submissions on 31 January.

The exhibition’s beginning to look good.

I’m really pleased and excited by the range of Londoners who’ve sent in photos of themselves so far – a real mix of ages and backgrounds, some quite unexpected. Older people who remember the Coronation, people in their 20s and 30s who’ve inherited their grandparents’ commemoratives, and kids with books about the Queen which their parents read aloud to them before bed.

It’s fun working on an exhibition where Londoners themselves provide the content – you have no idea what’s going to arrive next and, barring the obscene and offensive, anything goes in this exhibition. It’s what Londoners make it – my role is to bring everything together and with the exhibition team create a display people want to visit and enjoy.

I’ve been really encouraged by the positive reactions I’ve had from people whenever I mention ‘At Home with the Queen’.  A brief chat at my local fish and chip shop where I put up a poster reveals that the owner once met the Queen when he was a kid and will hunt out his photo for the exhibition. A conversation at the library (and another poster later) uncovers a woman who has two Golden Jubilee shot glasses bought she says, at a petrol station on the way to Devon in 2002 (she says it’s a long story ….).

The next step for me is to start writing the design brief for ‘At Home with the Queen’. This outlines the exhibition’s content, structure and ‘feel’ for the designer to work from. After this, I’ll revisit our stores to choose a small selection of the Museum’s commemorative objects to display alongside Londoners’ photographs (I have had a quick look already and had these by my desk):

We’re hoping to also display some of the objects that appear in people’s photographs so I’ll need to speak to our design department to find out what display cases we can use …

A blog post from Jon in our conservation team on the work looking after and preparing our objects for display.

As this years’ intern within the applied arts section of the conservation department at the Museum of London I am very grateful to have been given the exciting opportunity of experiencing the build-up and installation of the Museum’s major new exhibition – Dickens and London.

In the months before installation began, conservators were busy ensuring all the objects and artefacts were suited to being placed on display. Within the new exhibition objects of a range of materials are installed including shop signs from Dickensian London, documents written in Dickens’ own hand and furniture from Dickens’ house.

This required the knowledge and expertise of our whole conservation team, particularly specialists in paper, textiles and the applied arts.

Within the Applied Arts section we work to conserve many artefacts of Victorian social history; however, as an admirer of Dickens it has been incredibly rewarding being able to work on objects with a particularly close connection to the man himself – such as this chair he was often photographed in.

Dickens’ chair is on open display within the new exhibition, so work was required to stabilise and secure the aged leather upholstery, predominantly around the back rest, where the degraded material had begun to laminate and fall away.

In addition to this, surface cleaning was conducted to remove dust.

Modern ethics within the field of conservation maintain that minimal intervention should be practiced when conserving artefacts – this means altering the original material and structure as little as possible, whilst ensuring the object is sturdy enough to be displayed or stored. We also aim to make every process and alteration reversible, so our changes could be ‘undone’ if needed in the future. For Dickens’ chair this meant adhering loose leather with a removable adhesive to consolidate the fragile material.

Historic leather can suffer acidic degradation due to reactions with sulphurous pollutants in the air. Testing the pH of the leather of Dickens’ chair revealed the leather had become particularly acidic – it was therefore thought appropriate to treat the leather with an aluminium compound – a process that effectively re-tans the leather – neutralising acidity and reversing some degradation processes.

Preventive conservation is also a key role of the museum’s conservators and collection care staff. With regards to this we have been carefully monitoring light levels (particularly important where objects such as Dickens’ handwritten manuscripts are displayed!), ensuring the environment within the gallery is suitable for the collections and that the cases are dust free – the latter involving several days spent cleaning the inside and outside of display cases!

It has been brilliant to see the culmination of many people’s knowledge, ideas and skills work together to create such an exciting and enchanting exhibition.

You can hear more about the conservation work for the exhibition as part of our free drop-in activities for families during February half term on Thursday 16 February between 11.30am to 1pm and again at 2pm to 3.30pm.

I know you have all been waiting for him so I won’t make you wait any longer. After a great deal of effort we have managed to secure an interview with perhaps the most busy man around Xmas (plus his helpers, our Victorian photographer and the mystic Gypsy lady) , of course its our Santa.

Welcome Santa, are you ready for this year?

Of course, I am looking forward to making all the children around the whole world have a special day and seeing the joy on their faces when they open their presents.

That’s great news to hear Santa. It must be tough going what with all of that exercise you are getting. Are you feeling fit enough to lift all those presents?

Don’t worry about me as my elves take good care of me. They have done their elf and safety.

Good to hear, so what can we expect to happen this year?

I am planning to do all my travelling at night so I will have some time to spend in my Grotto here at the Museum of London Docklands. That means I can meet lots of families and offer them some presents when they come to see me and hopefully have a photo with everyone involved so we can all remember this special occasion.

Anything you would like to say to everyone before you leave on your errands?

Yes, I wish everyone a merry, merry Christmas and look forward to seeing you soon.

If you want to meet our Santa then book a meeting with him on 0207 0019844 or on the day when you visit the Museum of London Docklands.

Santa’s Grotto is open daily until 23 December 2011.

If you are unable to visit Santa why not come along and meet Scrooge from 27 December 2011 to 1 January 2012!

You can also enjoy some festive family fun if you time your visit to Santa or Scrooge to coincide with our December events schedule. More details on our website here.

Its that time again. December is upon us and we have another fabulous Grotto about to start at the Museum of London Docklands . No need to take my word for it though, just take a look at this tantalising glimpse of the Grotto entrance.

Here is another picture too of what it looks like right in the heart of our Grotto

If you want to see more and meet our Santa then book a meeting with him on 0207 0019844 or on the day here at the Museum of London Docklands.

Santa’s Grotto is open daily from 10 December until 23 December 2011.

If you are unable to visit Santa why not come along and meet Scrooge from 27 December 2011 to 1 January 2012!

You can also enjoy some festive family fun if you time your visit to Santa or Scrooge to coincide with our December events schedule. More details on our website.