- Joined
- Nov 26, 2016
- Location
- central NC
Chatelaine (USA), ca. 1860; silver, gold wash, ivory, enamel, glass. Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Institution.
A wide variety of items hung from the waists and wrists of Victorian chatelaine-wearers. In the book, “Chatelaines - Utility to Glorious Extravagance,” co-author Genevieve E .Cummins outlines the many types of chatelaines she found in her research: sewing chatelaines with pincushions, scissors, and needle cases; chatelaines for artists, with paint boxes and containers for brushes; mourning chatelaines, with space to carry reflective reminders of a loved one’s loss.
Cartoons from Punch Magazine showing how chatelaines were “useful” to Victorian era mothers.
Literary references to chatelaines can be found as early as 1839, but they appear to have fallen out of fashion a few decades later. As with today’s culture, they came back into style in 1863, when Britain’s Prince Albert Edward (later Edward VII) married a Danish princess who wore a chatelaine in public. In 1887, Jeanenne Bell wrote in a book about Victorian jewelry, that, “the Young Ladies’ Journal felt it necessary to explain to the younger generation what a chatelaine was.”