Under Victorian Glass
The Glass Dome’s usual contents of wax flowers, taxidermy, and hair-work reflected four big Victorian preoccupations of sentiment, fashion, natural history, and mourning.
On any respectable Victorian mantelpiece, there was usually displayed a hand-blown glass dome which was the “star of the show”.
Victorians loved display and made it their theatrical business to “out-display” and show off to as many people as possible.
Under these domes you’d see wax flowers, taxidermy birds, mourning hair-work, or sometimes a mantel clock. These domes looked decorative, but they were more than that. They were statements of the Victorian middle class.
Count Raggiani’s Bird of Paradise, late Victorian example under a hand-made glass dome, circa 1880
The Dome Becomes A Mass Victorian Object
From the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s in Britain, glass was taxed by its weight as standard. This made glass expensive, so production shifted to Ireland, where it was cheaper. When Sir Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister, scrapped the glass tax in 1845, glass was suddenly everywhere. By 1851, Chance’s Glassworks alone poured out over 400 tonnes for the Crystal Palace that housed The Great Exhibition. For the first time, glass objects like tumblers, decanters and domes were available to ordinary middle-class homes, and were no longer reserved for the gentry and their country houses.
Glass Manufacturers in Victorian Britain
Most English glass came from the West Midlands. Stourbridge, Brierley Hill, and Dudley had been glassmaking towns since the Huguenots arrived in the seventeenth century. Thomas Webb & Sons and Stevens & Williams were famous for art glass, but they made the everyday stuff too. In London, wholesale houses like Silber & Fleming filled their catalogues with glass shades, chandeliers and tableware. Provincial dealers ordered domes for their local customers. The supply chain was tight, efficient, and very Victorian.
Silber and Fleming Illustrated Pattern Book of English China 1880
Silber and Fleming were a large fancy goods warehouse established in London in 1856 by Albert Marius Silber (1833-87), of Schleswig Holstein, who came to England in 1856.
In addition to manufacturing its own products the company acted as importers and exporters in British and foreign goods. It traded worldwide and supplied the British government and many railway companies.
They produced this wonderful catalogue which is a useful commentary on the culture of trade and consumer purchasing in Victorian England. This copy has been digitised from the Victoria and Albert Museum Collection by the Internet Archive
See page 134 for models and types of glass shades available.
An interesting advertisement for Claudet & Houghton at 89 High Holborn taken from the official catalogue of The Great Exhibition of 1851
Wax Flowers
Wax flowers were everywhere. Queen Victoria herself ordered ten thousand wax roses for her wedding in 1840. Taxidermy birds of every species, the likes of parrots, parakeets, kingfishers, and birds of paradise, perched on branches under the glass, bringing the craze for the display of natural history to the mantelpiece in the drawing rooms of the best Victorian homes. Darwin’s Origin of Species was still fresh, and everyone wanted a piece of the wild. Mourning hair-work, made from a loved one’s hair, turned the dome into a private memorial. Clocks, bridal tiaras, wax fruit, tiny dioramas, and any other objects placed inside the dome turned them into a display. Ordinary things suddenly became precious.
The Dome was an important showpiece which reflected Victorian preoccupations
The Dome’s usual contents – wax flowers, taxidermy, and hair-work – reflected four big Victorian preoccupations: sentiment, fashion, natural history, and mourning.
The parlour itself was already loaded with meaning in that it was a room set aside purely to receive guests and therefore was a direct advertisement of a family’s taste and standing, curated chiefly by the women of the house.
The dome was the parlour’s showpiece in miniature; it was a domestic descendant of the Wunderkammer, the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, scaled down for the newly prosperous middle class. It also provided a practical service: gaslight deposited soot, coal fires produced ash, and city streets were filthy with mud and horse dung, so sealing wedding flowers or a hair memorial under glass was as much about preservation as about display.
The Victorian Dome's Rise and Fall
Domes appear in Britain from at least 1822 and were an established fixture by the 1840s–50s; they peaked in the 1860s–80s, when the parlour’s cultural authority was at its height.
The fashion collapsed almost as fast as it rose: by the 1880s, since the Arts and Crafts taste for simplicity was turning against the over-furnished Victorian interior, and the parlour itself was giving way to the more informal sitting room.
Today’s collectors are now looking for original Victorian domes, particularly those with their contents intact, for precisely the qualities that industrial glass production eliminated, that is the waviness of the glass with its imperfections and the ever-so faint colour of hand-blown work.
This article is part of the Victorian Taxidermists section. Explore more research here →
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