Historical Tidbits: School Supplies

Daily Diary, May 17, 2022, Day 625: I had two walks yesterday, did my exercises, had a good hour and a half phone date with a mentor that was filled with insight and laughter, and I worked on writing up the following Historical Tidbits! No new words written on the novella, but a good day over all.

This weekend, I was writing a simple paragraph explaining why the three children who lived in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse (main site of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series) weren’t there for lunch. I’d decided to send them to the Silver Strike Bazaar (see Pilfered Promises), where they were going to get back-to-school supplies. But that meant that I needed to figure out what those supplies would be in 1882.  My first stop was local newspapers, but after a quick search in key words for August and September of that year didn’t bring up anything quickly, I moved on.

Next, I started doing a google search and found a blog piece Slates, crayons, and quills: Back to school supplies of the past from the National Museum of American History. This article gave a quick overview, with some good pictures.

My most productive move, however, came when I pulled out a copy of the Bloomingdale’s Illustrated 1886 Catalogthat I own. Much to my delight, there were two pages listed as school supplies in the catalog index. Most prominent was a whole section of pencil boxes that ranged from paper, to wood-framed, to ebony-wood boxes. These boxes came with things like rulers, erasers, lead pencils, pen holders, and school knives.

Yes, “school knives!”

From the blog post I had already learned that knives were seen as a school supply because they could be used to sharpen pencils or the tips of quill pens (hence the origin of the name--pen knives), but I shuddered at the idea of school children going off with their pencil boxes filled with knives. No wonder wooden school desks frequently got carved up—see the lid of a 1890s school desk.

The Bloomingdale’s 1886 Catalog also listed “noiseless slates,” that were more expensive than “school slates,” which you could buy for between 30 cents and 60 cents per dozen—depending on the size. Again, imagine the sound of a room filled with the squeaking sound of chalk from 40 students (usual size for urban school room at this time) writing on their slates!

A section in the catalog called miscellaneous listed (in addition to pens and pencils of different types) writing books, slate sponges, pencil sharpeners, pen wipers, blotters, book clamps and book straps (instead of book bags, which apparently was a later invention), copy book covers, pads of paper, and tin lunch boxes.

This last listing was a good reminder that articles you find online are not always going to be accurate. I looked up the history of lunch boxes, and an article I found in the Atlantic said that lunch boxes were first produced commercially in 1902. This was apparently wrong, given the Bloomingdale’s 1886 Catalog listing—and the original article this information was gleaned from by the Smithsonian was no longer available on line for me to double check.

I actually found it interesting that the school supplies listed didn’t differ all that much from my experience going to school in the 1950s. I, too, had a pencil box, with pencils, a special pen for writing in cursive, and a small pencil sharpener, and I sat in at a wooden desk, marred by scratches, and I carried a small tin lunch box. Just no knives!

For those who would like to pursue changes in “educational technology,” further, do check out this academic article I found that examined the implications of the shift from slates to notebooks on both learning and teaching.

Finally, to just highlight the danger that doing research can do to a writer trying to meet certain goals, on Sunday, I got sidetracked when I saw in the Bloomingdale index the listing for “tidies.” Tidies? What in heaven’s name were they? Obviously, I had to look at the two pages listed and from the pictures in the catalog they appeared to be another name for a doily or antimacassar (those little pieces of cloth, often lace, or crochet, that you put on the backs and arms of upholstered furniture or to protect table tops. What was fascinating was that in 1880s, the word tidy, or tidies, was much more prevalent in use than either doily or antimacassar. By 1900, doily became the preferred term.

Now, I have to come up with a way to use tidy (or tidies) in one of my stories!