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Somebody Just Scored
A boy has kicked the ball and it\'s still in the air — top right, clear of the churchyard trees, going. Behind him a woman has ripped her hat off and thrown her arm up, and a girl beside her has both hands raised mid-clap. Nobody in this picture is composed. The village church rises behind them with its spire and two small crosses, and down in the foreground somebody\'s hat and bat and a scatter of balls lie abandoned in the grass. Underneath, in small capitals FOOT-BALL.
It\'s printed in black and then hand-colored over the top — a soft green through the grass and shrubbery, puce and rose in the clothing, a bit of straw yellow. The color is applied with the loose, hurried hand these were decorated with, landing outside the lines as often as inside. The alphabet stands raised around the rim, and a pink lustre line runs the outer edge.
These are ABC plates, or alphabet wares — children\'s dishes with the alphabet molded into the rim, made by the Staffordshire potteries through the 19th century so a child got a reading lesson with every meal. Most carried a moral or a proverb. This one is from the other kind, the far better kind: the series that just showed children playing. Kicking a ball on a Sunday afternoon with the church right there watching. [Unmarked / bearing only a small impressed mark on the reverse.] English, Staffordshire district, [mid-19th century].
Five and a half inches is small enough to go anywhere. Prop it on a shelf in a boy\'s room where a modern kid can work out that children have been doing exactly this for two hundred years. Set it on a brass easel on a desk. Or hang it in a stairwell cluster with your other alphabet plates and let this one be the loud one in the group — every other plate on that wall is telling somebody to work harder, and this one is a goal celebration.
Size: 5.5\" in diameter.
Condition: Wear throughout, and I\'d call this a well-loved plate rather than a collector-grade one. The pink lustre line around the rim has lost paint in several stretches and is missing entirely in places. Two chips on the reverse rim edge — visible in the photos. Crazing across the entire surface with darkened lines and scattered age spotting. General surface wear to the transfer and the hand-coloring, heaviest at the rim. A paper label remnant adhered to the reverse. Please study every photo closely; they\'re part of the description.
Handpicked because a hundred and fifty years of moral instruction on dinnerware, and here\'s one plate where the kids are just allowed to be having a good time. Carefully packed with love and sent on its way to you.
