Victorian Cast Iron Boot Scraper

• Victorian Period - The Victorian period of furniture and decorative arts design covers the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. There was not one dominant style of furniture in the Victorian period. Designers used and modified many historical styles such as Gothic, Tudor, Elizabethan, English Rococo, Neoclassical and others, although use of some styles, such as English Rococo and Gothic tended to dominate the furniture manufacture of the period.
  
  The Victorian period was preceded by the Regency and William IV periods, and followed by the Edwardian period, named for Edward VII (1841 ? 1910) who was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India for the brief period from 1901 until his death in 1910.
• Finial - An architectural decoration, found on the upper parts of of an object. On furniture they are usually found on pediments, canopies and shelf supports. On smaller ceramic or silver items, such as spoons, they may decorate the top of the item itself, or the lid or cover where they provide a useful handle for removal.
  
  Finials have a variety of shapes and forms. They may be urn-shaped, baluster shaped round or spiral, but usually taper into an upper point. Many real life shapes may also be used as finials, such as pineapples, berries, pinecones, buds, lotus and acorns. Sometimes animals such as a lion are depicted, or fish and dolphins.
• Kenrick, Archibald & Sons - Archibald Kenrick & Sons operated an iron foundry at West Bromwich, near Birmingham from 1791 to the 1950s.
  
  The company was founded by Archibald Kenrick I (1760 - 1835) and the firm came to specialise in cast iron kitchen hollow-ware, which became its main product line in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
  
  By the World War I the company had became one of the areas leading metal manufacturers. The interwar years were difficult, but in the 1950s, Kenricks acquired the manufacturing rights to the Shepherd castor for furniture, the market leader. This was to be crucial to the firm's prosperity in the 1960s and 70s.
  
  Kendrick cast iron may be identified by a cast of the full company name into an unobtrusive section of an object, or alternatively, the an abbreviated mark, "A. K. & SONS".
  
  There is a cast iron kettle by Kenrick in the Museum Victoria collection, and a cast iron double lotus shape doorknocker in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

This item has been included into following indexes:

• Archibald Kenrick & Sons (Britain) - cast iron 5
• boot scrapers - cast iron 52