Since they have had the means to do so, humans have made concerted efforts to decorate much of their dishware, but many objects remain more useful than they are beautiful. Take, for example, this modest enamel coffee pot, made in the early twentieth century by Elite Manufacturers in Austria. Twenty centimeters tall and ten centimeters in circumference, the body of the piece is rounded, with a slight incline. The pot has a long spout, beginning just under halfway down the piece and going up to the lid, and a rounded handle, extending from the back of the lid to the lower third of the pot. The one-piece lid is attached to the body of the pot by two screws. Made of metal, the whole piece is light blue with specks of white, with additional ornamentation in the form of three rounded bands at the base of the pot and similarly rounded definition on the lid. The pot has some chipping, primarily around the lid and handle attachment.

Dishware makes up a large part of Dalnavert Museum’s collection. This is immediately apparent to visitors, who enter the museum through the kitchen. Visitors see more and more dishware as they move through the space, from the many items in the dining room, to the large tea set in the parlour. Many of these pieces are opulent, dramatic, and gilded; and then there is also a small, enamel coffee pot, which normally resides on its own little elevated perch on the woodstove.

This coffee pot almost feels anachronistic, resembling, as it does, camp ware which one could purchase at any sporting goods store today. However, it has the identifying feature of a true Victorian coffee pot, the long, low spout, which differentiates it from a teapot or chocolate pot.¹ It is also not alone among artifacts in the kitchen at Dalnavert in its unglamourous, but era-accurate, nature. There is a low, likely also enamel, kettle or teapot on the stove, as well as plenty of earthenware jugs in the pantry, each showing the behind-the-scenes reality of food storage and preparation in the period. Gorgeous as they are, gilded teapots generally cannot be used to make tea on their own. The day to day messes of preparing food on a woodstove need to be considered, and its not the greatest plan to just place a delicate, fully metal teapot on the stove and hope it makes it out unscathed. Though not much to look at, pots like this coffee pot allow for the preparation of beverages directly on the stove, without the fuss of keeping them tidy enough to present to guests.

There’s also the question of who used a coffee pot like this one. When we consider the visual dominance of more lavish dishware at Dalnavert, we might also wonder whether this coffee pot would be moving from its kitchen perch to the dining room or parlour. The question of movement, and limited movement, in a house like this, reminds me in turn of the servants who would have once lived and worked in what is now Dalnavert Museum.

The “About” section of the Dalnavert website shares quite detailed information about Hugh John Macdonald, his wife, and his children. When we turn to the servants, who were a fundamental part of the operation of a household of this scale, we learn that there was a cook and a maid, both of whom lived in the house, and about whom we know nothing else. Even a long-term, live-in nurse was only recalled by her first name, Hattie.²

The anonymity and lack of information about these working-class women prompts me to speculate about them. While it’s certainly possible that a coffee pot of this sort, however dull compared to dishware displayed in the home, would have been used by members of the family, I would argue that it would very likely be used primarily by the servants. Virginia Sheehan, writing about the culture surrounding maids and their employers in nineteenth-century Ottawa, argues that cheaper dishware, or less visually appealing dishware, would not be used to serve food to the family in a high status household.³ The case she is examining is that of a house which once belonged to a jeweler and his family; I am sure the same would be true of the Macdonalds.

If we can assume that the pot would have been for the use of the servants, the question remains of whether or not they would have had access to coffee. By the late 1890s, coffee had gone global, and Canada would have been purchasing it from sellers in the UK, who re-exported coffee they had imported from South America. Though coffee is immensely popular in Canada today, tea was the leading drink of yesteryear, as Canada continued to follow Britain’s lead; the “Empire Marketing Board,” in the early twentieth century, reported that Canadians showed a “slight preference” for tea over coffee.⁴ While the servants in a house such as Dalnavert would, hypothetically, have had access to coffee beans, there’s no guarantee that they would be able to afford them, or that they would prefer them over tea.

Visually, this unassuming object reminds us that what we, culturally, consider the Victorian era was not all ornamentation and opulence, and that materially, it was not as long ago as it may seem. Intellectually, this artifact led me to consider questions of quality, identity, status, and the availability of staples in the nineteenth-century home. I hope this simple coffee pot intrigued you as well.