Quiet Victorian Jewelry Making?

lonestarlibrarian

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Was torn between "Research" and "Brainstorming"... please move it if I've picked incorrectly.

The WIP is set in Victorian times, and the character is a jeweler who specializes in making paste duplicates of real jewelry.

(In 1724, French jewel designer Georges Frédéric Strass came up with “paste,” a kind of leaded glass that he cut and polished with metal powder until it appeared to shimmer like a diamond in the light. These white “diamante” or “strass” were a hit with glamorous Parisian high society.)

My problem, though, is that my character is running this side business out of his boardinghouse room. And most people didn't know he was in the biz, and he's not anxious to advertise himself, y'know? :)

So, I'm trying to figure out what kind of jewelry he'd have the most success with duplicating surreptitiously. When I think of modern jewelry-making, I think of bulky lapidary machines, dusty polishing wheels and grinders, propane torches, etc, etc, etc.

Then I think perhaps he gets his cabochons from elsewhere, and just focuses on getting them set. But it's not like he has a handy-dandy Rings-and-Things catalog where he can just go order jewelry components in bulk. He's specifically a duplicator, and copying something that's preexisting.

I'm about to the point where I'm going to have him deal exclusively in pearls. Stringing pearls should be a pretty quiet, unobtrusive task, and people go out of their way to match pearls, so the uniformity is a plus? But as nice as pearls are, it's also boring and blah, and the kind of thing someone comes up with when they can't think of anything else, and I don't want to make my guy so small-fry that he's not worth the reader's time. :)

Does anyone have any suggestions as to something that would lend itself to something that could be carried out in this kind of environment, where you're closely surrounded by neighbors (for plot purposes)?
 

jclarkdawe

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I assume we're talking illegal. Remember that selling illegal involves convincing someone that they're getting a deal and not giving them a lot of time to actually look at it. In other words, all those normal tests you'd do on a piece of jewelry won't be done. Someone looking to test the jewelry is not who you want to sell to.

Now personally I prefer the pocket watch for this business. Take an expensive broken pocket watch, swap out the insides from a cheap pocket watch, and sell it as the good watch. The Rolex scam still exists and has been around for years. Swapping the innards is relatively simple and fairly low tech. I'm sure it could easily be done in a room.

Jewelry would be the same approach. You get an expensive setting, probably stolen. Sell the real jewels and then replace in the setting with glass. (Most of the money is in the jewels and not the setting.) Again, assembling the setting with the fake jewels would be fairly low tech (super glue is used now) and could be done easily in a room without anyone noticing.

This is still done. Glamour, if there is any glamour in it, is taking an expensive and known setting (think Queen Elizabeth's crown) recutting the jewels into undetectable and selling them, and then taking the setting and making it look like new. Think how many people would want to have Queen Elizabeth's crown and how much they'd pay.

Advanced marketing of this starts with your advertising (that the crown is stolen) and involves a machine shop to make multiple settings. The trick is to keep everything separate until the end so that it's harder to figure out what's going on and reduce the value of everything. It's better to be busted with $5 of pot compared to $5,000,000 of pot. But with multiple settings, you can sell the crown several times.

Jim Clark-Dawe
 

Siri Kirpal

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I assume it's important to the plot that he be engaged in a less than legal activity, as in these are forgeries. If that's not the issue, you could go with CWatts idea.

If it is the issue, yes, stringing pearls is definitely the easiest. If you don't want to go that route, then he would either have to string paste beads, and maybe hang a pendent from the string, or he would have to buy his chains for necklaces elsewhere. You should avoid metal working, which has the fire problem, and the smell problem.

ETA: Cross posted with Jim. His idea is better.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal
 
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benbenberi

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A complication if the character is doing his illegal stuff in a boarding-house room is that he doesn't have absolute control of the space -- there's going to be someone (the landlord/lady or their hired help) expecting regular access to the room to clean it, and they're going to get very curious if they're not allowed in. So not only does he have to be very quiet and smell-free, he has to be very clean while he works, and be meticulous about putting every bit of evidence away in a (small, discreet, locked, not-suspicious-looking) container whenever he's not actually using it.
 

braveboy

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Read some of the "Lovejoy" books by Jonathan Gash for a real education on Victorian jewelry (and how to fake it) and also a lot of other antiques.. plus, for good measure there's always
a good story thrown in.