Will our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces?

May 26, 2023 1:15 AM

In the 1889 novel "Three Men in a Boat", Jerome K. Jerome speculates on whether their everyday Victorian goods will be valued antiques in the future. Were they?

Longer quote:

Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

posted by TheophileEscargot to Home & Garden (15 answers total)

Best answer: My neighbour has willow pattern dinner wear ranged above his chimneypiece, without a word of exaggeration. Is he great? Can't say, but he's at least a nice bloke.

Beyond that browsing eBay would indicate the answer is yes.
posted by deadwax at 3:15 AM on May 26, 2023 [13 favorites]

Victorian china is certainly collectable; I don’t know if the mass-produced blue and white willow pattern stuff is likely to be genuinely valuable any time soon, though, because so much of it was made.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 3:54 AM on May 26, 2023

Well...
Willow-pattern china pieces are technically antiques, because they are more than 100 years old. But they are not highly valued compared to some other 19th century china, in part because there are tons of them, and in part because they aren't trendy. Trends change all the time.
posted by mumimor at 3:56 AM on May 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?

Taking some liberties with the words, I think this is very true in the sense that it's the mass-produced commodities and popular culture of any time period that come to be the widely-recognized earmarks of it. I'd need to be a Victorian expert of some kind to accurately date a very fine piece of china or bespoke furniture, where many people are more likely to know the willow-pattern china. People love a white cup with a gold rim and consider it fancy.

I don't know that it's any different than vintage Pyrex, Burger King Star Wars glasses, Fiestaware, Depression Glass (and fake Depression Glass from other eras). Midcentury modern homes and Craftsman bungalows - literally mass-produced housing! The recognition on the common things lasts longer - I grew up around my grandparents' stuff, some of which is now in my house where my (theoretical) kids and grandkids would see it. It's the commodities that show up in popular media, where only a small part of the population knows which parts of Stranger Things were totally wrong.

I definitely know people with full-on display cases of vintage Pyrex and Star Wars glasses. Somebody somewhere has a home museum of Bakelite telephones. Teacup collectors have white cups with gold rims and the beautiful gold flower inside.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:14 AM on May 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mass-produced items have a better chance of surviving in sufficient quantities to be broadly affordable as collectibles in the coming decades. And collectors are driven by the vagaries of nostalgia and personal taste. But I don't think I'd say that generally the very wealthy will treasure such items in preference to those made of more expensive materials or with more technical skill.
posted by praemunire at 7:30 AM on May 26, 2023

Best answer: a blue willow plate from the early 19th century can sell for $100-$200, while larger or rarer pieces – such as a pitcher – could sell for thousands.

If your piece is from the late 19th or early 20th century, however, you may see prices like $25-$30 per plate.
posted by Phanx at 8:00 AM on May 26, 2023

Well people do collect things from this era but only a large and complete collection is in fact noteworthy - if you had a single willow pattern mass produced plate if would be an unlikely focal point for a room. Essentially that's true of anything once the age of mass production is reached. It's never so rare that individual objects are that interesting. Lyn Never knows people who can have whole collections of these things and who are (probably not?) millionaires running private museums. That's quite different from having single items which are inherently valuable as one-offs.
posted by atrazine at 9:08 AM on May 26, 2023

Antique china isn't trendy. I've seen sets of elegant thin china at thrift shops for more than cheap dishes, but not a lot more. I prefer it to MCM dishes, but I am a geezer. I worked in my uncle's antique shop and learned something about what constitutes quality in antiques. Bone China is sturdier than it looks. Crystal sparkles more than glass. I was given vintage china from the yard estate sale of my childhood next door neighbors and another old friend, and I'm sentimental. I use it more often than big holidays, but not really often.

I've seen more than a few articles about seniors lamenting that their kids don't want old china and furniture. I'm cynical enough to wonder how much trends are influenced by corporations who want you to buy new stuff, then buy more new stuff.

If I had blue willow dishes, I'd mix in Calamityware, which encapsulates our time perfectly. I just gave some of my dishes to a younger friend and still have plenty.
posted by theora55 at 9:17 AM on May 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

My local tool library is decorated with old, beat up hand tools, old farm equipment is a common yard decoration in rural areas, people collect vintage Pyrex and Fiestaware, which are not only newer than Victorian-era, they're also still manufactured in pretty similar forms.

I think some of this is "it's a pain to throw this out" and some is nostalgia for youth / sentimentality.
posted by momus_window at 10:11 AM on May 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

You should see my MIL teacup collection. So yes.
posted by fiercekitten at 11:45 AM on May 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Is the question basically - are standard Victorian products from 1889 now considered fancy antiques?

Basically... yes?

Willow pattern is kiiiiind of a special case and one of the cheaper collectibles tho, because it's been in production *this whole time*, so unusually, it's not now 'rare' in the same way as pretty much any other 'of it's era product', it's one of the only dinnerware patterns to have been in continuous production since it was invented.

My grandmother had willowware. Her grandparents generation had willowware. I didn't get my Nana's set, but I wanted plates and realised if I want a pattern with replacements both in 10 years, and from opshops, then, willowware is the most replaceable option (and lucky blue carp bowls for deep noodle bowls).

I think the author would probably be more surprised to find out that you can still buy Willowware, in normal homeware stores, 133 years after he was writing, but little gold rim teacups and other trinkets from the Victorian era? Sure, they're all fancy antiques now.
posted by Elysum at 8:54 PM on May 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Something to think about: while willow-ware isn't very valuable today, artists' designs from the same period very much are. Here are some examples of fajance from the 19th and 20th century that I just chose randomly.
Just to say that if you are buying new, contemporary stuff, go for the artistic design. That even applies to IKEA. MOMENT designed by the now retired Niels Gammelgaard sells for good prices on eBay.
posted by mumimor at 10:35 PM on May 26, 2023

I can't help laughing at this. I read the book almost exactly a hundred years after it was published, in my mother's small antique shop. The china dog he mentions, with a bit of its tail missing, was sitting on a shelf next to me. It was both hilarious and delightful, and the answer is yes, he nailed it exactly.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 11:36 PM on May 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks all! It seems like Jerome K. Jerome got it mostly if not entirely right!
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:37 AM on May 27, 2023

Wasn't the author just pointing out the truism, that things that had been available in say, 1780, were probably considered antiques by 1889 - and therefore was just noting that the same thing would probably happen to their era's goods, which it has?

It's hard to look around at stuff today, or from the recent past, especially if it isn't durable, but it's already easy to see that many classically 50s, 60s, 70s goods are collectibles, on their way to being antiques.
posted by Elysum at 6:12 AM on May 28, 2023