The Concealed Revealed: The 'Afterlives' of Hidden Objects in the Home

Fig 1.

Shoe found by Laura up the chimneybreast of her Norfolk house. Photo: M. Gaskill.

The shoe lives in a Fox's biscuit tin in the pantry. Its custodian is Laura, a media-relations manager at the University of East Anglia, from the United States but currently living in a Norfolk village with her husband and two young sons. She wants to keep the shoe safe from pets, children and the elements, but has plans to display it in the future: perhaps in a glass case with pride of place on the mantelpiece. When Laura does take the shoe out of the tin, she does so gingerly, tentatively, and while she enjoys showing it to visitors, who are often eager to see it, she worries about its preservation. 'I thought it's probably quite delicate so it needs somewhere quite safe and tucked away', she told me. 'That said, my children are absolutely enthralled with it as well, they love it… They're very good, they won't go and play with it, but they do like to bring it out and tell people about it.' Laura smiles as she admits, 'It is my best party trick so far and I have just gone to town with the shoe story. It's going to be my living legacy'.

Laura's words and her treatment of the shoe speak of care, of affection, even, to an extent, of reverence. And yet, to both the untrained and the trained eye, it is a fairly ordinary shoe (Fig. 1). Old, certainly – experts at the Northampton Shoe Museum have dated it to the nineteenth century – but still there is nothing particularly remarkable about its appearance. A well-worn and damaged ankle boot, with a side fastening, a thin leather sole, and fabric upper, which, judging by its size, was probably made for a child or young adult. So what makes this shoe special enough for Laura to feel the need to cherish it so highly and safeguard it so protectively?

It is not the shoe of one of Laura's ancestors, retained out of sentimentality; nor is it known to have belonged to any historical figure of note, retained for posterity. In fact, the identity of its original owner is completely unknown, and it almost certainly has no filial connection with Laura. So why, then, does she feel inclined to keep it 'safe and tucked away'? Why are her children 'enthralled with it'? And why does she declare it, only half in jest, her 'living legacy'? The answer lies in its enigmatic provenance: it was found up the chimneybreast of Laura's nineteenth-century house, most likely hidden there deliberately at some point in the past. Laura's shoe is a concealed deposit.

This paper is concerned with how such an object – seemingly innocuous, economically worthless, and ostensibly alienable – can, through its status as a concealed deposit, generate a range of emotions in people today, and how it acts as mediator between the past from which it has come and the present in which it finds itself. The material for this research has been drawn from interviews conducted over the course of 2015 and 2016 with people like Laura, who have discovered concealed deposits in their homes. All quotations, unless otherwise specified, are taken verbatim from audio recordings of these interviews.

The use of oral material to explore the afterlives of objects is not new, but this is the first time that focus has been shifted entirely from the historic concealers to the contemporary finders. This paper therefore adds an important element to the current historiography by demonstrating that the concealed deposit's biography has significant relevance beyond its moment of concealment, which is often when researchers tend (prematurely, in my opinion) to end their investigations.

INTRODUCING THE CONCEALED DEPOSIT

The concealed deposit is a broad category, used for objects that appear to have been deliberately concealed for no obviously practical purpose and probably with no intention of retrieval. The location of concealment should discount accidental loss (a coin that...