Vintage and Antique Pill Boxes

Manufactured pills were a product of the Victorian Era, so it’s no surprise that elaborately decorated pill boxes (also spelled "pillboxes") arrived around the same time. Made out of everything from wood and bone to gold, silver, and stone, pill boxes quickly became must-have ornamental accessories. Because of their diminutive size, pill boxes are often mistaken for snuff boxes. In fact, the utility of a pill box is its size rather than its original purpose, which is why Victorians frequently used the smallest antique snuff boxes they could find to hold their pills. Another type of box repurposed for pills was the patch box, which dates to the early 18th century. These small containers were made to hold the black beauty marks women wore to draw attention to their features. Anticipating the look of the portable pill boxes of the 19th century, patch boxes were decorated with Italian micro mosaics, accented with gemstones, or shaped into miniature porcelain figurines. Like compacts, women carried them around throughout the day, along with a few other essential fashion accessories. Favorite boxes of pill-popping Victorians included small containers produced in the U.K. and France during the Georgian Era. The smallest of those boxes were made to house a few pinches of portable snuff, but their size and design made them perfect for pills, too. Among the most highly sought Georgian boxes were those made from 1753 to 1756 at a factory called York House in the Battersea district of London. Named for the Archbishop of York, the factory’s previous resident, York House briefly boasted an Irish partner named Henry Delamain, a potter who was skilled in a technique called transferware, which was a key component in the enamel boxes made by numerous Battersea enamelers. Because they were only produced for a short period of time, York House boxes were difficult for Victorian Era collectors to come by. Making matters worse was the fact that undecorated York House boxes, as well as the source engravings used in the transferware process, were sold to competitors both in London and places like Bilston, Birmingham, and Liverpool after the Battersea firm went bankrupt. This meant that York House designs were subsequently found on boxes produced by other manufacturers, while York House bases were often topped by lids made elsewhere. In the end, many Victorian box collectors, looking for fashionable containers for their new pills, settled for mass-produced, but handsome enough, enameled transferware boxes made in the Midlands. In the mid-18th century, Birmingham was already an Industrial Revolution factory town, so it is not surprising that a fair number of enamelers set up shop there. To save time and make their products more affordable, many Birmingham enamelers decorated the lids of their boxes, but left the sides as raw metal, often chased with vertical lines, curlicues, and other ornamentation. Panels of mother of pearl were also popular. Another center was Bilston, whose population included a number of French enamelers. The transfer-printed designs on the tops of Bilston boxes ranged from figures to landscapes, painted in monochromes as well as contrasting colors. The nearby town of Wednesbury was also a source of pill boxes, snuff boxes, and fanciful bonbonnieres, whose shapes followed the contours of human and animal heads, birds, and dogs. In the 1970s, new Bilston boxes produced in traditional styles found new audiences, who were drawn to their nostalgic qualities. Germany was another source of tiny 18th-century boxes for 19th-century consumers. The House of Fromery in Berlin excelled at enameled boxes, while Johann Heinrich Stobwasser’s Brunswick firm produced lacquered snuff boxes that were particularly in demand by Victorian Englishmen—no doubt they were attracted to the work of the German lacquerer for the tiny erotic paintings on the undersides of his papier-mâché lids.