Why is everything Georgian nowadays!

I don't know if its Downton Abbey (or hang on, is it Bridgerton!? Sorry - not much of a telly buff) but it seems that every piece of antique jewellery for sale is listed as "Georgian" or "Regency" at the moment! 

In truth, actual Georgian jewellery is pretty rare; it wasn't made in the same volumes as the Victorian era when vast new gold and diamond deposits opened up, new manufacturing methods drove prices down and a burgeoning, fashion conscious middle class gobbled it all up! So more buyers, more makers and on top of that, fragility (combined with the ravages of time) and the fact that the Victorians couldn't resist pimping up, (aka vandalising) anything plain (which Georgian pieces invariably are) means that very little good stuff has survived. 

I think, giving the benefit of the doubt, a lot of the time this is just a bit of artistic licence (or perhaps wishful thinking!) with sellers just wanting to embellish products to align with whatever is trendy at the time. As for us, as a general policy, we might put a tag onto an item to help compete on google with everything else out there, so for example we might put a "Georgian" tag on something we thing is early Victorian and/or shares characteristics with a Georgian piece. Crucially though, we'll always put an honest description alongside the item. So you gotta do what you gotta do I guess I'm saying!  

The other problem now is that once something is described incorrectly online, it is infectious! Someone else finds a similar piece, uses google lens to see what to compare it to and bang, now you have 2 mis-appropriated "Georgian" pieces. This can be entirely honest  but  it goes on, virally like this until its hard to find the real stuff in a sea of mis-described Victorian, revivalist or reproduction jewellery. And yes, there are a lot of dishonest pieces out there!

So often Georgian jewellery is described as 15 carat gold but in reality this wasn't a standard back then, 12 carat or 9 carat are more likely although admittedly things were a bit more lax back then! But if its got a hallmark and its 15 carat its not Georgian...Its almost as if some sellers think, "well this is a nice old piece, I don't fancy describing it as 9 carat as that sounds a bit naff, so lets go with 15 and hope for the best!"

Books come in handy here as they often predate the internet age and all of this "infected" content. the enthusiasts that wrote them were more scholarly and the information they put down was harder to come by and learned the old fashioned way. 

I'll try and do another post with pics helping you to know what to look for in Georgian jewellery but I can do no better than suggest A trip to the V and A in London - a great start if you want to educate yourself on the history of jewellery (more on the V and A in a later post!) 

We're not professing to be the oracles here, in truth its sometimes impossible to pin a definite date onto a piece of jewellery (especially given that the older piece is, the less likely it will be hallmarked) and everyone is just trying to make a living, so this blog is not intended to be snobby or snipe at anyone! 

Caveat emptor, i'm off to watch Blackadder III!