When Timothy Millett was apprenticed in the family’s coin-dealing business, he was fascinated not by Roman gold or Renaissance bronze, but by the oddities that sometimes showed up in lots of coins from coins – considered by experts as “numismatic sweeps” – which were of little or little. without value or interest. The teenager was snagged by one of the giant Georgian “cartwheel” pennies, defaced with the splendid inscription “Gibbs Lord Mayor, Pelted with Rotten Eggs 1845” and Gibbs’ head inserted under Britannia’s buttocks on the reverse ( cat 037). Millett discovered that Michael Gibbs, nicknamed Gobble Gibbs, was an infamous con artist posing as a philanthropist, and that the egg-skinning was not a chance impulse; after Gibbs was elected Lord Mayor, newspaper advertisements were placed ahead of his inaugural procession through the City of London in search of “up to 500 boxes of shoddy eggs”.
This piece, a brilliantly slanderous, wearable, and enduring memorial to a truly bad egg, began Millett’s collectible life. This book lists and illuminates his second collection. (His first, convict tokens commissioned or made as souvenirs by men about to be transported, is now in the National Museum of Australia; see Millett’s previous publication, Convict Love Tokens: Hearts of Lead Convicts Left Behindedited with Michele Field.) With 17 essays by coin experts, collectors, historians and cartoonist Martin Rowson, collected in five parts covering topics such as “Love and Memory”, “Politics” and “Image and representation”, it is also a Plea for these metal scraps to be taken more seriously.
Although some are the sophisticated works of professional engravers, many more are crudely fashioned, marking a moment of joy, disaster or outrage in otherwise unrecorded and ‘plebeian’ lives: engagements, weddings and births, but also travels at sea which could well end in a permanent separation. , imprisonment in irons, execution or the lapidary bellows of political protest. Some are simply cheerfully rude; someone stuck a long clay pipe into young Queen Victoria’s mouth, and added ‘I love’ to her tiara and ‘shag’ to her chin (cat 047). More seriously, a noose was engraved around the King’s neck on a George III halfpenny, with crudely drawn images of a haunch of beef, a mug of beer and a loaf of bread. The outrage, with contemporary resonance, was about soaring food prices; in lowercase, the added prices included one shilling (12 pence) and nine and a half pence for bread, which had risen from just nine pence (cat 118).
In these tiny spaces, the imagery is often remarkably powerful; there is a world of longing for a happy, simple life in the man with a stick who walks to a cottage with a smoking chimney, the sun setting and his dog bounding past him in the hope of supper (cat 003 ). The piece was already an heirloom, a silver crown of Charles II aged 70 on the date of the inscription “Saml Harwood born June 17, 1758”. The back has the date 1777 engraved in a more amateurish manner. The age of nineteen would have been young for Samuel to marry, so did that rather mark his death and the end of this Arcadian dream?
As cultural historian Susan E. Whyman points out in her essay on worker self-representation, “Behind every surviving token are individuals who longed to be remembered.” Millett particularly cherishes pieces where the life of the owners or people depicted can be recovered. John Jones, shown “double ironed for attempting to escape from Newgate”, on one of a group of tokens made in the prison, is a naked, executed corpse on the reverse (cat 010). Some, sardonically, keep their secrets. I really, really want to know more about the giver and recipient of the engraved silver token: “EW’s gift to WH for tying his shoestring” (cat 205). Has their relationship evolved into a slipped stocking garter?
• Sarah Lloyd and Timothy Millett (eds.), Tokens of Love, Loss and Disrespect 1700-1850, Paul Holberton Publishing, 360pp, ca. 900 illustrations, £45 (pb), published 24 January 2023
• Maev Kennedy is a freelance journalist specializing in the arts and archeology and a regular contributor to The arts journal
