From Tauranga City Library’s archives
A monthly blog about interesting items in our collection
Our catalogue description of this item, written a few years ago, reads:
Woven/machine-embroidered bookmark celebrating 50 years of Victoria’s reign. Includes portrait of monarch. Reads: “Queen of an Empire on which the sun never sets VICTORIA 1837. 1887”. Originally filed as ephemera (EPH 1/35). Condition note: damaged; enclosed in card and transparent seal.
Now I can confidently say that our bookmark is woven, not machine-embroidered. It is a typical example of a ‘Stevengraph’ – a type of woven silk novelty devised by Thomas Stevens (1828-1888), a Coventry weaver. The many pictures, bookmarks, portraits, and greeting cards produced by Stevens and others represent an early example of industrial diversification, invented to use jacquard loom machinery which might otherwise have been redundant. Coventry was the centre of silk ribbon weaving, and in the 1860s its factories and workers began to suffer from a free-trade agreement that allowed cheap French imports into England. Thomas Stevens, clearly a lateral thinker, adapted the looms to produce colourful items on popular subjects. Stevengraphs depict football matches, famous ships, famous people, buildings, events in history, mail coaches – the list goes on. Events such as exhibitions and jubilees were obvious opportunities to produce a commemorative Stevengraph like ours. The attractive silks proved irresistible to Victorian souvenir-hunters and are still appealing to modern collectors.
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| Photograph taken by Stephanie Smith, Tauranga City Libraries. |
Our example has had a hard life. At some stage it has been ripped across the bridge of Her Majesty’s nose, adding an unfortunate beakiness and squintiness to the royal visage; worse, the tear has been mended with a tape which has stained the silk. I would like to think that the damage indicates that its former owners were avid readers and used it so often that they wore it out.
Sources:
http://www.stevengraph-silks.com/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevengraph
This archival item is on our schedule for digitisation, and will be added to Pae Korokī once digitised. For more information about other items in our collection, visit Pae Korokī or email the Heritage & Research Team: Research@tauranga.govt.nz
Written by Stephanie Smith, former archivist at Tauranga City Library.
