We present an extract from Irish Dressers and Delph, Homemaking Through Time, the new book by Professor Meredith S. Chesson.
Irish Dressers and Delph: Homemaking Through Time explores how kitchen dressers and delph can teach us about our past, and help people transform their house into a home in the past and today. The book describes how people living in coastal areas of Counties Galway and Mayo, including three islands off the west coast of Ireland, used their dressers and delph collections to craft meaningful lives over the last two centuries, and how their dressers and delph connected one generation to the next.
Why dressers and delph?
This book explores the complex interplay between our homes, possessions and our understanding of who we are and who we hope to be by focusing on homemaking in a specific case study: how people use Irish dressers and delph to transform houses into homes. I do not attempt to answer the question 'How Does a Home Feel?’ because every home feels different. Instead, I strive to show how people in western Connemara use their belongings, especially dressers and delph, to make a home feel as they wish, be that welcoming, austere, edgy or even off-putting to others. This book describes how contemporary people utilise these furnishings to personalise homes and then compares these efforts today with archaeological evidence for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homemaking from excavations in the historic village on Inishark.
about the life histories of this home and its former residents.'
In many ways, dressers and delph exemplify the sticky voicefulness of everyday belongings. Many dresser- and delph-keepers recounted that until thirty or forty years ago, dressers and delph graced the kitchens or sitting rooms of most western Irish homes. In older homes, especially those built before the mid-twentieth century, the main room contained the hearth for cooking and warmth, a dresser, table, chairs and stools, and perhaps a settle bed, bench or wardrobe for storage. Henry Glassie in Passing the Time in Ballmenone (1982) argues that an old Irish house’s hearth and dresser acted as key features of order and welcome: ‘The old house has two wishes, comfort and generosity. It holds them in balance between closed rooms and open kitchens, and symbolizes their easy coexistence on hearth and dresser.’ Together, hearths and dressers anchored the home, symbolising hospitality, generosity and constancy despite changing seasons and years.
In many ways, dressers and delph exemplify the sticky voicefulness of everyday belongings.
In many old houses, this pairing of hearth and dresser endures. Patrick's old home in Cashel, County Galway offers a fine example. Dresser and hearth stand on opposite sides of the main room, embracing the room’s contents like bookends. Upon entering the home, the first thing one encounters is the old dresser on the right, beyond which is a blue-painted door leading to one of the side rooms. Situated against the back wall, a small cooker with a hanging dresser for ready access to cooking tools and vessels stands adjacent to a wardrobe, in front of which a table has been placed. Turning more to the left, one sees a very large hearth with built-in stands supporting hot kettles and pans. On the far side of the hearth, another blue door leads into a bedroom. Turning again to face towards the front of the house, a generous window sits above a settle. Most of life’s necessities and comforts abide within this room. Even though no one has resided in the house for many years, the feel of home still lingers – due primarily to the well-maintained dresser, its displayed heirlooms, the hearth and settle.
embracing the room's contents like bookends.'
Like others in countless older homes, Patrick's dresser offers an extraordinary wealth of information about the life histories of this home and its former residents. Though the house was uninhabited at the time, Patrick had carefully covered the dresser shelves with plastic sheeting to keep the dust off the delph. Patrick and his friend Francis recounted that the dresser originated with the construction of this house around 1914. They did not know if the residents acquired the dresser as a gift or made it themselves, but described that it was always part of the home. Plate by plate, jug by jug and shelf by shelf, Patrick's dressers and his delph tell intimate histories of his family’s life in Cashel, evoking a rich and abiding sense of heritage. Matched sets of blue Finnish plates, green English plates and hexagonal tureens, and Johnson Brothers’ Eternal Beau pattern plates and tureen, two Carrigaline milk jugs and four Arklow jugs testify to the dresser-keeper’s aesthetic style and engagement with international markets and fashions in homewares through the early and mid-twentieth century.
Researching dressers and delph taught me to nourish a profound appreciation for the potency of people’s everyday decisions to craft meaningful lives and overcome social, economic and political challenges, both great and small. Moreover, I discovered that the ways people use and fill dressers and furnish homes change through time, offering insights into shifting ideas of creating and maintaining a proper home, to uphold social, economic and moral responsibilities to oneself and one’s family, and to preserve their sense of personal, community and even national identity.
Irish Dressers and Delph: Homemaking through time is published by Cork University Press - find out more here.
About The Author: An archaeologist based at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, Professor Chesson has been travelling to the western islands of Inishbofin, Inishturk and Inishark and mainland towns of Clifden and Cashel since 2011, researching, excavating, examining and cataloguing dressers and delph and conducting interviews with locals about their family heirlooms. In this research, she has catalogued more than 1600 objects and 21 dressers.
To find out more about Professor Chesson and her colleagues' research into the tangible histories of Inishbofin, Inishturk and Inishark, go here.
