The Miser’s Purse
by Laura Camerlengo
CONTENTS
Terminology, Dating, and Attributes
Money Holders, Gifts, and Commodities
The Twentieth Century and Beyond
Introduction
A young woman stands before an elaborately decorated stall at a fancy fair in For Sale (c. 1855-1860) by the British genre painter James Collinson (fig. 1) . The woman is lavishly dressed, in a sumptuous blue silk dress typical of mid-nineteenth-century fashions and a bonnet tied into a large red bow at the base of her neck. The stall is filled with an assortment of interesting items, from men’s suspenders to photographs. Perhaps the most intriguing object in this scene is the maroon purse with silver beads and rings that she holds in her left hand. This style of purse, known today as a miser’s purse, was ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, especially in the Victorian era (1837-1901). These oblong receptacles had center slit openings and sliding rings or clasp closures. They were used to store coins and other small objects of value during period, and were also deeply embedded in contemporary culture, as seen in Collinson’s painting.
References to miser’s purses are found in paintings, literature, and satire, as well as in fancywork guides, etiquette books, newspapers, and women’s magazines from the nineteenth century. As seen in these many sources, the crafting, giving, receiving, sale, and use of miser’s purses reflected specific social mores and conveyed certain meanings during this period. They were made as gifts for suitors or family members, and also sold in lavish fundraising fairs, where the female attendants were on display as often as the purses. Contemporary writers from James Fenimore Cooper to Caroline Lee Hentz and artists such as James Collinson and Ford Madox Brown adapted the purses’ social uses in the works they produced. Both the making and giving of these purses functioned as important literary and artistic devices: to serve as representations of filial or familial love, to foreshadow marriages between characters, or to help young female characters capture the attention of male suitors. Miser’s purses and their makers were also parodied in satire, especially in negative depictions of women, as seen in the writings of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. By examining these sources alongside extant purses from major museum collections such as the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, miser’s purses may be contextualized in nineteenth-century popular culture.
Terminology, Dating, and Attributes
While the exact origin of the name miser’s purse is unknown, it seems to have been inspired by the purse’s design: Its slit opening made it very difficult to retrieve coins once they had been inserted. As the novelist Lydia Maria Child wrote in The Girls’ Own Book, published in 1834, “When drawn up tight, [a miser’s purse] appears to be entirely without an entrance; and those who have never seen one would be sadly puzzled to get the money out.” The term appears to be a designation from the turn of the twentieth century, near the end of the vogue for the purse, and is found in many newspaper clippings, letters, and other ephemera from the period.
Although today they are commonly known as miser’s purses, in the early and mid-nineteenth century these purses would have been called short purses, long purses, or gentlemen’s purses and, as the century continued, long purses or simply purses. Short purses—purses for women—typically measured four to six inches in length (figs. 2 and 3). Long purses, made for men, used twice as many stitches as short purses and measured about seven to ten inches long. Miser’s purses would nearly triple in length by the early twentieth century, measuring twelve to sixteen inches on average (fig. 4). On April 20, 1919, The Washington Post published an article entitled “The Old-Time Miser’s Purse,” which noted, “The old-time miser’s purse, with the long slit through the middle and rings to keep the contents from sliding out…now measures about sixteen inches long and four or five wide.” String purses and stocking purses have sometimes been called miser’s purses, but they are different types of nineteenth-century purses. String purses, most popular in the mid-nineteenth century, had two small pouches connected by interlocking strings (fig. 5). When The Boston Daily Globe published a reader’s request for “directions for crocheting a ‘miser’s purse,’” in the September 30, 1911, issue, the purse the reader went on to describe was a string purse, “made of crochet silk, [with] two small pockets with flaps and crocheted chains between the two pockets.” Stocking purses, on the other hand, took their form from stockings. To create a stocking purse, a stocking was stitched to two metal rods, forming a sac; these rods were then attached to a single ring by metal chains. Like other purses, stocking purses were “intended to hold small gold and silver pieces,” as the American women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book noted in February 1885. Pence-jug purses have been mistaken for miser’s purses as well (fig. 6). Common in the 1840s and later in the 1880s and 1890s, these jug-shaped pouches had a single ring that would slide over the jug’s handle and spout to tighten the top of purse and secure coins.
Although sometimes used interchangeably, purse and bag denote two distinct types of objects, each with its own separate function. As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, a bag is “a receptacle made of some flexible material closed in on all sides except at the top (where it generally can be closed),” and may hold an assortment of objects. A purse is “a money-bag or receptacle and its contents [in] leather or other flexible material.” In contrast to bags, purses are primarily used to store money on the body.
Nineteenth-century miser’s purses developed from the narrower purses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These earlier purses usually had a tied end and a rounded end, and one ring over their slit opening. Typically the round ends of these purses, where coins would be stored, were more tightly worked than the rest of the purse. This may have stemmed from the sixteenth-century practice of storing coins in the toe of a stocking. Like later purses, these were made as single-element constructions—structures created by working a single continuous element with itself—from silk thread by knitting, netting, or crocheting. They could be decorated by changing thread colors or by weaving in images of stylized figures or names during construction. An example of this decoration is the eighteenth-century Italian knit silk purse in the Cooper-Hewitt’s collection, inscribed “S.D. Casparre Nicoletti,” likely the name of the purse’s original owner (fig. 7).
Early nineteenth-century purses bridge the gap between the stylistically simple purses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the elaborately beaded purses of the Victorian era. Though shaped like later examples, early nineteenth-century purses feature wooden or plain metal