With the double function of allowing one to see (and adorn) oneself, and decorating one’s home, mirrors were a popular and aspirational item of furniture in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and may be among items you have inherited from your ancestors.

Mirrors have been around for centuries but it was not until 1835 that a chemical technique for coating the back of a glass surface with metallic silver vastly improved the quality of the reflections they could produce. From then onwards, mirror production increased dramatically and more and more families were able to afford what were, after all, non-essential and indeed luxury items. A hundred and fifty years ago having a mirror, or mirrors, was still to some degree a signifier of wealth and social status. Poor families who had worked their way up into the middle classes and immigrant families who had arrived in Britain with nothing might calculate their rise to relative prosperity in terms of the number of mirrors they owned. Correspondingly, when times were hard, mirrors were often the first items of domestic furniture to be pawned.

The drawing rooms of all people of substance in the Victorian era would have sported a large, wall-hung overmantle mirror – a sheet of glass (often long and rectangular, but sometimes a square, oval or circle) framed with silver, gold or dark polished wood, sometimes gilded. Smaller mirrors were often hung strategically to ensure that they reflected as many of the candles, oil lamps, gas lamps and, later, electric bulbs in a room as possible and thus increased the amount of available light. They might also reflect an important architectural feature in the home, a piece of expensive artwork or the view outside. Pier glasses were placed between two windows to increase the sense of space and light. And some positions for mirrors were frowned upon: two mirrors facing each other, for example, were thought to bring about bad luck.

In the late Victorian period, mirrors were commonly attached to pieces of furniture such as sideboards, bureaus, desks (inside the drawers), washstands and dressing tables. Mirror and brush sets – in which one or both pieces may have a monogram of the initials of the original owner – were often given as wedding or christening gifts. Many of these were made from 1885 onwards in materials as diverse as celluloid, tortoiseshell, silver, gold plate, ivory and porcelain.

Beliefs about mirrors
Victorian superstitions about mirrors attached themselves to the most important times in family history: birth, puberty, marriage and death. Little children, it was deemed, should not look into a mirror until their first birthday had passed. Young girls might espy the face of their future husband in a mirror on Halloween, or else perceive a skull foretelling their imminent death. It was suggested that a couple who first caught sight of each other in a mirror would have a happy marriage. And on her wedding day, a bride should look into a mirror just once – for luck – before leaving the house for the church.

After a death it was common practice in many Victorian homes to cover all the mirrors in the house. It was thought that the mirror’s reflective surface might capture the soul of the departed and prevent it from going to heaven, or alternatively that if a mourner looked into a mirror in the room where the dead body resided, he or she might be the next to die. Covering the mirrors also ensured that there was no consideration of physical beauty by the mourners at this serious time. Religious Victorians would have scoffed at such superstitions, yet they persisted at all levels of society.