LITMIR.BIZ

      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

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