\nAs a practice among middle-class families, did \u201cheirlooms\u201d\u2014 as in, stuff like silver and \u2018fine China\u2019 you intend to pass down to your kids\u2014 last even two generations? Seems like before my grandparents there wasn\u2019t enough middle-class wealth to afford it, it got passed down maybe once, and now millennials don\u2019t care about any of it.
This seems sad at first glance, although in most cases all this stuff was purchased as the result of the same consumerism and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses we decry today, just made superficially meaningful by the passage of time.
I don\u2019t know where I\u2019m going with this. Yo @kontextmaschine finish this post for me.
Intergenerational transfer of wealth on an “outfitting” basis took the form more of housewarming and wedding gifts to set up a household than ceremonial stuff inherited later in life, this was particularly important before furniture became much more affordable with import competition in the 1980s (a set of furniture on The Price Is Right really used to be in the same ballpark as a vacation or a new car, a common shorthand for poverty was using folding card tables and milkcrates for furniture)
I have a sense a lot of “heirloom” things like silver settings (likely, silver-plated) or useless baby gifts (I got a silver spoon and pewter hairbrush we displayed on a shelf and never used) were largely a “lace curtain” imitation of the most visible signifiers of the upper class as the mass-market economy and the middle class expanded in the 20th century but keep in mind that when people kept more of their wealth in household objects there was more of an infrastructure to resell or borrow against them at pawnbrokers etc., so they were more viable as a store of wealth
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