Object Type
'Bonbonnieres' were small boxes for comfits or sweets. Tiny lozenges flavoured with roses, violets, liquorice, mint or cloves, for instance, would freshen the breath, calm a cough or settle a stomach.

Places
These charming boxes drew their initial inspiration from porcelain versions from Meissen, Chelsea and the French soft-paste factories. But the huge variety of novelty designs for enamelled bonbonnieres was a manifestation of the competitive imaginations of the many toy makers of the West Midlands. A 'toy' was a small luxury item or trinket. Although the word shares with our modern understanding of the term the meaning 'a trifle chiefly for amusement', the word toy may in this context be a variant on the word 'tye', meaning a small (usually metal) box. Bilston was a major centre for the production of these popular novelties, but they were also made in Wednesbury and in Birmingham, dubbed by Burke the 'toyshop of Europe'. Thousands of people worked in the West Midlands toy trade, and few bonbonnieres can be accurately assigned to particular towns.

Materials & Making
This coiled snake's scales were made by light incisions through the painted enamel colours before firing. The earliest embossed hollow shapes were formed by careful hammering or pressing by hand. Then a method was developed of striking the thin copper sheet laid on a concave hardwood 'anvil' with a similarly shaped convex hardwood mallet. Copper could also be spun on a hardwood shaped chuck to form a circular hollow shape. Separate hollow parts were laced together and beaten smooth. After 1769, steel stamps were invented by a Birmingham toymaker, and the process was further facilitated by the 1790s when more durable cast-steel dies were introduced for stamping out the forms.