Juliet Nicolson

A box of delights | 11 February 2016

Lynn Knight extracts a rich history of birth, marriage, mourning — and top-to-toe glamour— from a box of Victorian buttons

How could you possibly justify a whole book about buttons? How could the mention of a humble wooden toggle, a diamond clasp, a ‘blue side buckle’ inspire such an unusual and irresistibly delightful account of more than a century’s worth of women’s lives? You might wonder. But as Lynn Knight sorts her way through her Victorian grandmother Annie’s old treasures, a rich hoard of buttons of infinite shapes, sizes and textures, all packed into an old sweet tin, the smell of the lemon-scented geranium in Annie’s house comes hurtling through the door of her mind and returns her with a technicolour clatter to childhood. This is a book to make you smile, a story luminous with nostalgia.

Knight discovers that the handling of a button, the sight of a button, the sound of the rattle of a button, revives whole landscapes of memory. A button, as she demonstrates, is capable of transforming the simplest of garments. Visually and stylistically a button can be the making of an outfit, my own dreary, dark-as-the-night navy coat made gorgeous by three buttons covered in violet-coloured velvet, a cardigan without buttons feeling like a face without features. As reminiscences of ‘the shiver of silk’ and ‘the shock of that red chiffon’ return to Knight, she explores the wider significance of the button, and its quiet part in contributing to women’s understanding of their ‘security, identity and independence’.

Knight had the good fortune to inherit Annie’s precious tin and its contents, the buttons indivisibly associated with the garments to which they were once attached, allowing her to uncover stories about women both in her family and unknown to her. She devotes one chronological chapter to the role that each of some two dozen different buttons — plus the odd rogue thimble, velvet flower, and even a doll’s house doorknob that found its way into the tin — has occupied over the past century.

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