Meerschaum in Literature: A Favorite of Poetry and Prose

Meerschaum in literature is a rarely discussed but surprisingly wide branch of pipe history. Meerschaum in the 19th century wasn't only a bowl material; it was also the subject of essayists, poets, and painters. According to compilations surveying the period's printed record, the number of poems and essays devoted to the material exceeds what was written about briar, which came to dominate the market in the second half of the same century; briar's own literature, by contrast, remained largely confined to trade, technical, and historical subjects.

Guides Devoted to Coloring

The first cluster of texts grew directly out of the craft. That meerschaum turned from creamy white to amber and then to deep brown with use was a process that fascinated the era's reader, and small booklets were printed devoted purely to this process. Records mention, among these, a twelve-rule coloring guide published under the signature of an "old smoker," and Meerschaums and How to Colour Them, published in London in 1871 under the pen name "Amator Fumi." Today these publications read like a kind of user manual; for the pipe owner of the period, they were a handbook for a pursuit that demanded patience.

A Favorite of Poetry

The earliest known standalone book of pipe poetry is considered to be Isaac Hawkins Browne's 1736 London collection of parody verse, A Pipe of Tobacco. The genre spread in the 19th century; Joseph Knight's 1894 compilation Pipe and Pouch gathered poems on pipes and tobacco into a single volume. This and similar anthologies are covered further in the article on pipe books and publications.

There are also examples devoted directly to meerschaum. Rudyard Kipling included a Swinburne parody titled "The Maid of the Meerschaum" in Echoes, printed in Lahore in July 1884; the poem is built on the idea of a young girl figure carved into a bowl losing her whiteness as she's smoked away. James Russell Lowell included, in his 1888 book Heartsease and Rue, a poem he wrote for a meerschaum pipe given to him as a gift by C. F. Bradford. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the fifth chapter of his 1858 book The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, compared poetry to meerschaum and the violin, arguing that all three only mature through use.

Fiction, Humor, and Painting

The most concrete example on the prose side is David Christie Murray's story "An Old Meerschaum," which appeared in 1882 in Coals of Fire and Other Stories; Bret Harte is also on record as having written a lengthy essay on meerschaum. The humor branch is sharper: Ambrose Bierce, in the 1911 edition of The Devil's Dictionary, defined meerschaum as a fine white clay turned into a pipe so it would turn brown, mocking both the material and the mania for coloring it. Mark Twain, according to reports, was the target of a similar joke: in November 1863 in Virginia City, his friends gave him a fake meerschaum pipe as a gift, and Twain, not catching on, delivered a long speech of thanks.

The material found a place in painting as well. American painter Claude Raguet Hirst (1855-1942) is known for her "bachelor still lifes" composed of books, spectacles, matches, and a meerschaum pipe; the pioneer of this vein is considered to be William Harnett, who worked in New York in the same years.

Why Meerschaum?

The first reason for this interest is considered to be the name itself: the word, meaning "sea foam" in German, made the material open to metaphor from the very first mention. The origins of the name and the confusions it caused are covered in detail in the article on the names of meerschaum. The second reason is that carved bowls often carried a figure in their own right. The third is that the coloring process is one that progresses alongside its owner, making it an inherently narratable process. As briar spread in the 20th century, this literature thinned out noticeably.

The name also passed into geography: records show that Meerschaum Canyon and the mining district of the same name in Grant County, New Mexico, take their name from the sepiolite deposits worked there in the early 20th century.