The Cut Glass Decanter
This post is part of a series called A history of the world in 100 everyday antiques. My goal is to tell the stories of 100 “everyday antiques” that you could have in your home for under £100. This is a story about a glass decanter I’ve been using lots over Christmas.
A confession about wine
One of the saddest things about 2020 has been not sitting around a table with friends. I love to bring people together and feed them a feast of tasty things.
The other good thing about having people round is that they sometimes bring nice bottles of wine. I’m an ok cook but I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to wine. And this makes it hard when I want to offer people a glass without just immediately opening the bottle they brought with them.
So I have a confession to make…on occasion I have used my status as an antiques geek to pass off generic (but, you know, perfectly alright…) wine as ‘posh’ wine. I’ve even been known to get away with giving quite discerning guests wine from a box (gasp!).
How have I been able do this? Do I forge the labels on my wine bottles or seek out obscure but excellent (and cheap) vineyards? Nope. I just put wine on the table in a perfectly ordinary 200 year old crystal decanter. It’s a pretty good distraction and definitely elevates the perceived quality of what’s inside!
There’s something really gratifying about pouring wine from a bit of glass that’s been doing the same job since before the reign of Queen Victoria. From its seat at the dinner table it’s seen tremendous social change and it’s made so solidly that it’s survived the lot, always maintaining its role.
This aim of this post is to give some context to this lovely everyday antique:
Introducing: The Regency Decanter
My decanter was made in England in around 1830, right at the end of the Georgian period. It’s made of ‘lead glass’, which people generally refer to as ‘crystal’. It has a ‘mushroom’ shaped stopper, three ‘applied’ neck rings and decorative vertical grooves cut into the body topped with half moon cuts around the shoulder. The shape of the body is what antique geeks call the ‘Royal’ cylindrical design.
On the face of it (and according to decanter connoisseurs) this is a pretty standard thing. Thousands of them were made and you could probably pick one up in any antique shop (or on ebay) for under £20.
But that’s not why I like to pour wine from this decanter — I love using this decanter because of the 200 years of history you can feel every time you pick it up. And the quality of the object rubs off on the wine you put in it.
Let’s explore a bit more of that history…
Drinking in the 1830s
Following the French Revolution and throughout the Napoleonic wars (so from 1789–1815) the supply of French wine to Britain was disrupted. Many wealthy aristocrats and merchants decided that it would be more patriotic to drink Port, which was imported from Portugal, instead. But by the time my decanter was made the English were happily drinking French wine again.
My decanter was probably made to contain French red wine from the Bordeaux region, which the English generically call ‘Claret’. This would have come to rich homes in bottles or barrels, complete with all sorts of sediment floating about in it. This is actually the whole point of decanters — to allow you to decant off the wine from it’s original container into something a bit more ‘fit for the table’ and minus all the sediment.
Whilst most of our wine bottles now are 75cl my decanter only holds a pint. You might think that this is a sign of our binge drinking culture — wine glasses are now 7x larger than they were in the Georgian era! But actually the 1830s was a high water mark for binge drinking at every level of society. My decanter would likely have been used as a ‘personal’ decanter for a guest (rather than being shared) and may have been filled up multiple times over the course of a meal. And the meals for the wealthy would have been epic:
Heavy drinking in booming Industrial Revolution Britain became seen as such a problem that a movement of Temperance Societies started to emerge in England to support and encourage people to drink less. The term teetotal to describe a non-drinker was first used in a speech in 1833 at around the time my decanter was first used.
Temperance Societies were generally run by well meaning middle class patrons for the benefit of the ‘working poor’ in the fast growing new industrial cities. They were often tightly linked to campaigns for electoral reform in the UK. It was thought that seeing increasing numbers of people drunk in pubs (rather than behind closed doors like the rich…) was not helping the argument to give more people the vote.
Political unrest
Electoral reform and the threat of a French-style revolution were very much in the air throughout the 19th century. The Great Reform Act became law in 1832. This re-drew the electoral map to remove rotten boroughs and created new MPs for the new industrial populations. But whilst it massively increased the size of the voting population (the number of voters went up by 40–50%) this still only gave the vote to around 8% of the adult population.
You can pretty much guarantee that the original owner of my decanter was a man who had the right to vote. And it’s likely that the decanter sat on a dinner table surrounded by men who could vote … and women who could not … listening to the debate about whether to let a few more men vote.
The decanter had to sit listening on dinner tables for almost 100 years until the Representation of the People Act of 1918 before any of the women at the table or the type of craftsperson who made it would be allowed to vote in elections.
How it’s made
My decanter would have been hand blown on the end of an iron tube before being rolled into its shape on an iron slab called a ‘marvering’ table. This was a highly specialised craft and would have taken years to master.
By the 1830s decanters like this would have been made in a large production-line workshop built around a big furnace. As you can see from the modern video below, making a decanter by hand is a complex process (video includes a surprising techno backing track!).
Pontil marks
When the blowing was completed the tube would be cut off and an iron rod (or ‘pontil’) attached to the base of the decanter so that the mouth and neck could be shaped. Once this was done the pontil would be snapped off leaving a messy nub called a ‘pontil mark’. This is a good indicator that a bit of glass has been hand blown. You can see on the base of my decanter where the pontil mark has then been ground down and removed to make it look nice:
Glory holes
Fun fact: the mouth of the furnace in a glass factory is called the ‘glory hole’.
The name probably developed from the religious connotations of glass coming out of the furnace with a ‘halo’ of light around it. It’s not known how in the 1950s this term became adopted from glassmaking technical jargon into sexual slang for illicit sex between toilet cubicles… but I’m sure you can work it out.
Cutting glass
In the 1700s English merchants and entrepreneurs developed processes for making high quality lead glass on a relatively large scale. This is what we now normally call ‘crystal’ glass — the lead in the glass increases its refractive index, making is very sparkly and ideal for “cut glass” decoration. Don’t worry, the lead isn’t poisonous!
On my decanter you can really tell that the glass has been cut by hand. The vertical cuts in the body are all a little wonky (in a very charming way!) and the half moon cuts on the shoulders are all slightly different sizes and depths.
It would be nice to get all romantic about this but actually the conditions in a glass cutting workshop in this period would not have been great, even though these would have been relatively highly skilled workers. Here’s a video showing modern glass cutting to give an idea of how it works — my decanter would have been cut using a similar wheel:
Design
The tell-tail signs when dating a pre-1900 decanter are the body shape and stopper shape. Here’s a quick visual guide — this is by no means extensive or 100% accurate…
I stop at “crazy Victorian stuff” because there are a tonne of major design movements happening in the late 1800s and (as with all other late Victorian design) things got a little out of hand. The Victorians were very comfortable mashing together design styles and that includes decanters. So there are some pretty weird and wonderful Victorian creations that I won’t attempt to reflect here!
Dating my decanter
My decanter is the ‘cylinder’ shape which came in around 1810 and persisted as the major shape until around the 1840s. It has a ‘mushroom’ shaped stopper, placing it after about 1800.
As you might imagine when folks are having a drink or two, it’s very common for stoppers to get broken and replaced. My stopper fits tightly (no wobbles) and has a healthy amount of ‘nibbles’ chipped off it, which makes me think that it’s either the original one or a replacement from roughly the same period.
My decanter has very basic (relatively cheap) cutting to decorate the glass and introduce a bit more sparkle under candlelight. The vertical cuts around the body and and half moon cuts on the shoulder are intended to emphasise the simplistic neoclassical shape of the body.
The three rings round the neck of my decanter are a standard design feature of late Georgian decanters. They are also a good indicator that the glass was put together by hand because in this period the rings are ‘applied’ as little sausages of glass after the main body had been blown. You can clearly see on my decanter where they’ve been stuck on and that they’re a little wonky…
Back to my confession…
I love thinking about all of the historical changes that objects like this will have lived through. This is something that will have been used and enjoyed on a daily basis for over almost 200 years. And having sparkled through candlelight, oil lamps, gas lighting and electricity it’s fun to put it back next to a candle and see it in its natural state.
Sure, not everyone who picks up my decanter and pours themselves a glass of wine will think about all this. But somehow the glow and sparkle of it comes through and creates a halo effect… that magically elevates the quality of whatever I’ve put inside.
Geek out more on decanters
If you’ve enjoyed this story and you’re inspired to find out more about the history of decanter design or if you have a decanter you’d like to try and date then you should definitely explore the excellent lovedecanters.co.uk.
For the keen collector you might want to look out for a second hand copy of The Decanter: An Illustrated History 1650–1950 by Andy McConnell. It’s mega geeky and a very good guide if you’re looking to explore this world in more detail.
More stories like this
Thanks so much for reading this story about an old bit of glass! It’s a bit of an experiment so I’d really appreciate your comments and feedback.
This post is part of a series called A history of the world in 100 everyday antiques. My goal is to tell the stories of 100 “everyday antiques” that you could have in your home for under £100.
