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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 rings and tassels, and were worked in basic patterns, such as lengthwise stripes, from single-element constructions. These purses would have complemented the austere women’s fashions from the first two decades of the early nineteenth century, in particular the unadorned columnar gowns that are associated with the era. Single-element constructions were ideal for miser’s purses because they could easily collapse to slip through a purse’s rings, but were flexible and strong enough to secure coins without breaking or tearing. Although the constructions and designs of miser’s purses were ultimately determined by their makers, a survey of patterns found in the American woman’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, as well as in contemporary fancywork guides, shows that there were chronological shifts in the preference for netting, knitting, and crocheting throughout the nineteenth century. Netting was most frequently recommended in the 1840s and 1850s, while knitting was favored from the 1860s through the 1880s. Crocheting, however, was the dominant technique throughout; fancywork writers recommended this construction method recurrently from the mid-1840s through the early twentieth century. The continued popularity of crochet likely resulted from its perception as being especially sturdy; as Mrs. Jane Weaver asserted in the July 1862 issue of Peterson’s Magazine, crochet was “the most durable style of work for purses.”

Contemporary needlework guides also noted, with varying degrees of specificity, what types of silks should be used to create a miser’s purse. A writer in the June 1854 issue of Peterson’s stated that the “beauty of a purse depends on the extreme fineness of the silk employed for it,” but did not elaborate on what exactly constituted fine silk. In The Handbook of Needlework Decorative and Ornamental, Inc. Crochet, Knitting and Netting from 1846, Lydia Lambert noted that both coarse and fine silks of various sizes were not only well adapted for embroidery, but for netting and knitting purses. By the late nineteenth century, coinciding with the rise of product advertising and marketing, writers endorsed specific brands of silk threads and purse twists (multi-cord threads). In 1887, the anonymous author of Needles and Brushes and How to Use Them: A Manual of Fancy Work recommended “one-half ounce E.E. Corticelli Purse Twist or one-half ounce No. 300 Florence Knitting Silk” to crochet and knit purses. The silk companies themselves issued promotional pamphlets that marketed specific products for purses. Massachusetts-based Nonotuck Silk Company published the series How to Use Florence Knitting Silk in 1883, in which the firm suggested using a half-ounce of Florence silk for crocheted or knit purses.

Occasionally other materials substituted for silk threads, such as supple cloths like velvet and wool, leather, chain-link metal mesh, and hair. Some pattern makers recommended woven fabrics for miser’s purses since “the consequence of a dropped loop in knitting…rendered [a purse] utterly useless,” as Godey’s Lady Book stated in May 1852. Beadwork was also used for Victorian miser’s purses, but as embellishment rather than for structural integrity, and lightweight silks were recommended to line heavily beaded purses. In 1921, Arthur D. Little, an industrialist from Cambridge, Massachusetts, constructed two miser’s purses with threads made from animal byproducts after hearing someone quote Jonathan Swift’s adage, “You can’t make a silk purse of a sow’s ear.” Little made the threads from a mixture of sows’ ears, formaldehyde, and acetone. The mixture was forced through a silk-spinning mechanical spinneret from which emerged a brittle thread, which was then soaked in a glycerin solution to become flexible. Although these purses were a technological achievement, they were more useful as promotional products than for daily wear. “We admit frankly that it is not very strong or very good silk, and that there is no present industrial value in making it from [the] glue,” the company stated in On the Making of Silk Purses from Sows’ Ears: A Contribution to Philosophy, published the same year.

Victorian miser’s purses were often adorned with glass, metal or marcasite beads as well as rings and tassels. Celluloid, an early plastic, was sometimes used in lieu of metal to make the rings and tassels. Steel was most commonly used for miser’s purse beads, tassels, and rings after the late 1850s, and remained in use well into the early twentieth century. In 1919, the Los Angeles department store Hamburger's advertised “cut steel beads [for]‘miser’s’ purses that look anything but miserly” in the Los Angeles Times, and—perhaps speaking to the deterioration of handicraft skills in the early twentieth century—offered the help of an on-site expert instructor to teach shoppers “the art of making purses.”

Indeed, miser’s purse patterns became more detailed as the nineteenth century progressed. Those found in early nineteenth-century fancywork guides and women’s magazines provided very brief explanations, if any at all, on purse construction. It was assumed that their readers already knew how to make most fancywork items—a point emphasized when the well-to-do Charles Bingley remarks in Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, “I scarcely know any [woman]… who cannot… paint tables, cover screens, and net purses.” Even the Russian dramatist Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol sarcastically remarked in his 1842 political satire Dead Souls that all good housewives knew how to knit purses. But as the nineteenth century progressed, purse patterns became increasingly detailed and specific. Women needed more instruction to make purses as the emphasis shifted from fancywork skills to liberal arts educations.

The creation of handcrafted items was particularly important in the nineteenth century. With the rise of industrialization and the onslaught of mass production, it became the accepted rule that men would work outside the home, while women would remain in the domestic sphere. Coinciding with this change, a new ideology developed—the so-called cult of domesticity—which held that women were society’s moral authorities and that they should create nurturing households for their husbands and children that would serve as sanctuaries from the rapidly changing world. Women not only learned to sew practical items, such as clothing and household linens, but how to make more fanciful objects to beautify their homes and families.

Nineteenth-century miser’s purses feature myriad designs; however, color and pattern trends are evident in both surviving guides and purses. Blue, red, and green were the colors most frequently suggested and used for miser’s purses. Green was an especially popular color for men; not only were shades of the hue recommended in many guides and magazines, but green purses appear in nineteenth-century literature. In both William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847 novel Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero, and Caroline Lee Hentz’s 1853 novel Helen and Arthur, or, Miss Thusa’s Spinning Wheel, a young woman constructs a green silk miser’s purse for her potential suitor and brother, respectively. After the chemist William Henry Perkins discovered the first aniline dye in 1856, a pink-purple color known as mauvine, purses in this and similar synthetic shades, such as fuchsia and magenta, were popular through the 1860s (fig. 8).

Certain color combinations were recommended by guide authors to make these purses more functional. Crafters were instructed to use different colored threads for each sac to help the user distinguish between each end’s contents. Red with green and blue with brown were cited by many fancywork guide authors as ideal pairings, and these are frequently seen in surviving purses (fig. 9). Silver and gold color beads were suggested to mark off the respective ends that held silver and gold coins when both types of coins were in circulation, though Godey’s writers warned in October 1859 that gold-tone beads would tarnish with use—or “suffer from that ill-usage which all useful purses are preordained to undergo.” Other writers suggested that purse makers give their purses one square and one round end, or add fringe to one end and a tassel to the other to further distinguish between the two. Godey’s Lady’s Book noted in 1859 that “[it] is now the general plan to gather one end in, and leave the other square for the sake of distinguishing the gold [coins] from the silver, by any light, however dim…. If the two ends are different…then there must be fringe at one end and the tassel at the other.” Other authors recommended alternative fasteners, such as clasps, to create “two distinct purses in one.” Few of these purses have survived, suggesting that this fastener was not commonly used (fig. 10).

Patterns found in Godey’s Lady’s Book and other women’s magazines reveal that purses with bands of flowers and leaves were preferred in the late 1850s (fig. 11). In the 1860s, Godey’s featured purses with cone-shaped beaded accents, such as this knitted blue-and-white purse from the magazine’s October 1863 issue (fig. 12). Crocheted purses with ombré roll stitches were fashionable in the late 1870s (fig. 13). Godey’s August 1877 issue offered comprehensive instructions on how to crochet a purse with these round stitches in blue and claret ombré (fig. 14).

Some writers and editors even copied purse patterns from other purses and publications, which may explain the proliferation of certain designs. In June 1854, for example, Peterson’s Magazine published a gentlemen’s long purse pattern that was said to be an imitation of the latest miser’s purse style from Paris. Deemed “an unusually elegant pattern” by the author, Mademoiselle Defour, the black netted silk purse was darned with a “simple zig-zag pattern…entirely in gold [thread with] two very handsome tassels in black and gold, and slides to correspond.” In March 1858, Godey’s featured a “crochet purse, in colored silks,” which was copied verbatim from Peterson’s Magazine’s December 1857 issue. This blue purse featured bands of “flowers in crimson” and “leaves in green” with one round and one square end.