Watchguard

As time-keeping devices evolved, so did the means by which people carried them. In the seventeenth century, the incorporation of the balance spring into watches allowed clocks to maintain their internal movement at a regular pace regardless of external disturbances or movement; as a result, watches became small, circular, and portable (Tomalin 108). Throughout the eighteenth century, men often carried these watches in a pocket of their trousers while women primarily wore them strung around their necks as jewelry. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the shortening of men’s waistcoats allowed for watches to be easily stored in the front pocket of the waistcoat where they were both easily accessed and readily displayed to demonstrate a man’s status (Cummins 163). Thus, changes to men’s fashion as well as the growing availability of watches led to the near-ubiquitous use of watchguards or watch chains to secure the watch to the man’s person (Davies 60; 83-84)

Watchguards were lengths of metal, cord, ribbon, or woven hair that attach a timepiece to one’s clothing. Whatever their material, watchguards usually included a toggle, clasp, or hook to secure them to a waistcoat button which prevents the watch from falling out of the pocket and also decorates the waistcoat. Watchguards that attached to a waistcoat via a toggle through the buttonhole became known as an ‘Albert chain’ as popularized by Prince Albert from the 1840s onward. The length of watchguards was highly customizable, varying from 25 cm and under to over a meter. Watchguards were often embellished with beads as well as utilitarian or sentimental trinkets—mainly lockets, charms, pendants, seals, and watch keys.

Nineteenth-century magazines, books, and newspapers yield a wide array of instructions for knitted, crocheted, and woven watchguards made from silk or hair and constructed using small wooden frames, makeshift looms, or braiding tables. Most of these instructions appear in publications aimed at women. The instructions in this tutorial, for example, are derived from an article on watchguard-weaving in the The Lady’s Newspaper & Pictorial Times (18 Oct. 1856).

Mid-nineteenth century fiction represents women engaging in watchguard making. In Charles Dickens’s serialized Sketches by Boz (1833-36), Miss Lillerton crafts a woven watchguard: “Miss Lillerton, drawing a small work-table on one side of the fire, and placing a little wooden frame upon it, something like a miniature clay-mill without the horse, was soon busily engaged in making a watch-guard with brown silk” (282).

Victorian print culture appears to identify the crafting of watchguards as women’s handiwork

Click here for a list of scholarly sources, websites, blogs, pincushion patterns, and historical examples. Click here to read my reflection on watchguard weaving.