Figural Card Table
Meriden Britannia Company, Meriden, Connecticut, Silver-plated metal, c. 1886–1887
Meriden Britannia Company was one of America’s leading manufacturers of silver-plated wares during the late nineteenth century. Founded in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1852, the firm grew from a manufacturer of Britannia metal into a major producer of elaborate silver-plated objects for the Victorian home.
This unusual card table appears in the company’s 1886–87 catalogue as No. 7700. More than a piece of furniture, it demonstrates how far Meriden Britannia extended the possibilities of electroplated metalwork. The elaborate figural supports and richly ornamented top transformed an ordinary card table into a showpiece suitable for a fashionable late-Victorian interior. The catalogue indicates that the decorated top was originally protected by a beveled plate-glass cover.
The company became part of the International Silver Company in 1898, bringing Meriden Britannia’s independent nineteenth-century history to a close.
A Meriden Connection
The name Wilcox on this piece leads back to one of nineteenth-century Meriden’s most ambitious businessmen. Jedediah Wilcox was a founder and early president of the company established in 1865 as the Wilcox Britannia Company and renamed the Wilcox Silver Plate Company two years later.
Wilcox’s success and ambitions were expressed not only through manufacturing, but also through his remarkable mansion on Broad Street in Meriden. Contemporary recollections described it as the most costly house in the city.
That creates a particularly interesting connection for the Sublett-Miller House. Today, the historic iron fence from the Wilcox-Parker mansion stands in front of our house, while this table represents the manufacturing enterprise with which Jedediah Wilcox was personally involved.
The two objects arrived here by entirely different paths, but together they reconnect the industrialist’s business life and domestic life more than a century later.
Note to self: Make “Wilcox–Parker Mansion” clickable in that paragraph. That link could eventually take visitors to a short page about the mansion and the actual fence they just walked past when entering the house. That would work especially well with the NFC cards.
The Wilcox Mansion, later the residence of Charles Parker
Broad Street, Meriden, Connecticut
Period postcard, date unknown. Collection of the Sublett Miller House
