This Victorian Life: Modern Adventures in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Cooking, Fashion, and Technology

by Sarah A. Chrisman

Because washbowls and their corresponding pitchers started as matched pairs, they make a particularly good example of something archivists call “survival bias.” Survival bias is the tendency of artifacts to survive—or be destroyed—out of proportion to their original numbers. It works against fragile or common items and in favor of sturdy or unusual ones. Survival bias is the reason sturdy meat grinders and cherished wedding dresses appear in antiques stores in larger numbers than fragile champagne flutes or boring work clothes. At any given time, there are far more work clothes than wedding dresses in the world, but the latter get saved while the former are generally used until nothing is left of them. This is also why extremely small shoes survive into antiquity in greater numbers than normal sizes do. People who don’t understand survival bias assume that the prevalence of size 3 or smaller shoes in antiques collections mean that everyone in the past had tiny feet. In fact the opposite is the case: these very small shoes survived because they weren’t wearable by most people.