If you go to Stourbridge to watch the glassmakers, as I suggested you should do when talking about cut glass, see if you can find one of the small workshops where they still make glass toys “at the lamp.”

Here you will find people working over a jet of gas with rods or tubes of coloured and clear glass, of specially soft quality, which they twist or blow into all kinds of shapes and figures. This is the source of those fantastic figures and animals, even whole fields of huntsmen, horses and dogs, which one finds in the shops.

Glass is a wonderfully suitable material for making conceits and fancies in this way, and it is no wonder that this branch of the industry has been going on for centuries, nor that glassblowers in the main houses have always liked to show off their skill in blowing and manipulating small pieces. People working in the glass trade used to call these things “Triggers,” but of course nowadays it is difficult to know whether a piece was produced “off hand” in this way or made in the ordinary way of business over a lamp.

Antique Collector MagazineAnyway there are the engaging pieces to collect, and many families they fall into. There are small hats in clear glass or in colours—bowlers, curly-brimmed top hats, jockeys’ caps, firemen’s helmets, clowns’ hats, many of them meant as toothpicks or match holders. There are glass eggs, said to be used as handcoolers, glass boots, shoes and slippers, the last, I believe given to brides when they set off on their fateful journey. Many of these things were not originally designed as ornaments, at least not primarily —you could have slippers, boots and shoes in the form of bottles holding perfume, ink or beer.

But for anyone who can be enchanted with the really tiny, there are all those little wares made for dolls houses, much smaller than china ones. There are tea-sets, bottles, decanters, jugs, dishes and plates which seem to have been made for Queen Mab herself, for they certainly come

“In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the forefinger of an alderman.”

I have seen them in “Nailsea” stripes, in “Bristol” blue and opaque glass, in opaline, in fact in practically every sort used in making their larger fellows. It is amazing sometimes, how closely they follow the styles of their various periods, as though the children of those days, who looked like miniature replicas of grown-ups in their dress, wanted their dolls ware also to be exact replicas of what mamma and papa used in their dining room. Amazing too, considering the bad tempers sometimes shown in nurseries, that so many have survived. But I suspect too that many were bought by grown-ups for their charm and interest.

If you do go in for these little things, however, you will have to be very eagle-eyed, for they often get “lost” with other things. In one of the big London salerooms the other day I saw a cardboard box containing perhaps twenty various miniature pieces of glass—in a sale of porcelain.

The glass animals, birds and so on, which are such a feature of the fancy goods and glass shops today are a long history—and no doubt will one day be as eagerly collected as its predecessors. As far back as the seventeenth century, glassmakers at Nevers in France were modelling little figures of animals and people and making them up into groups such as a Crucifixion. One country or another has continued this tradition right down to the present. Even last Christmas I pulled a cracker with a nephew and found in it an enchanting little gazelle made of some kind of opaque glass, quite different from the types seen in the shops.

There were replicas of things like umbrellas, flower pieces, tiny swords and musical instruments, which people bought in the nineteenth century as small gifts for children.

Much more ambitious, but still, I suppose, to be classified as toys, are the wonderfully intricate models of ships, their rigging made of spun glass. These as well as fountains with birds and, indeed, if one is to believe their advertisements, any kind of toy, were made by the itinerant glassmakers travelling the countryside with their lamps and rods of glass.

Sometimes it is possible to pick up quite a nice little lot of toys at sales. At Sothebys in 196o this lot went for only ten pounds : a white opaque guild pipe with a ruby rim (no doubt one of those used in processions), a blue-glass snake weight with gilt markings, a clear glass fluted trumpet, a dark blue and clear glass snake-headed lazy-tong ornament, a green glass pig flask, a clear glass pipe, a bellows flask, two flasks with latticinio decoration, three gild walking sticks, and a crystallo-ceramic profile head of Wellington in papier mAche frame.

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