The Victorians seemed to have an infinite appetite for elaborate rituals that enshrined their chastity. William Foote was betting on this when he borrowed a considerable sum to finance his disastrous Médaillons-Secrets.

Foote was a journeyman silversmith, apprenticed to Rigby & Wycliffe of Bond Street, By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, Jewelers. With his intuitive understanding of the role of jewelry in courtship, Foote hoped to create a sensation with the invention of an elaborate ivory locket, in which one might secret away some personal keepsake — a portrait, a note, a lock of hair, a drop of perfume — and provide the only key to one’s beloved.

He arranged for the most prestigious magazines of the day to publish breathless accounts of how coveted his creations had become among the fashionable ladies of Mayfair. And while he did attract the attention of countless dowagers in the months before Christmas of 1879, the insincerity of this manufactured ritual was obvious to the recipients of Foote’s lockets, who treated them with disdain. When a vaudevillian at the Gaiety Theatre witheringly satirized them in a song called ‘Foote’s Fetish,’ it produced a wave of delight among the debutantes who now carried these unwanted gifts with open mockery. Some wore a médaillon that was open, others carried two at once. At her debut, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle gave her key to a coachman, with the instruction that it be dropped into the Thames. Lady Elizabeth Statham-Norreys created a scandal by revealing that the locket she carried itself contained a key. The ridicule itself created a market that Foote was reluctant to acknowledge, and unable to satisfy, and the resin replicas that began to appear only heightened the deliciousness of the satire.

Published December 26, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.