Just as a gong’s reverberations would resonate throughout Victorian residences, the gong’s history in England echoes the concerns of colonialism and class division present in Western society. At a first glance, the household-gathering gong in the collection of Dalnavert Museum resembles the smoothed forehead of a brown cow whose horns are tied together to support the central metal disc. Upon closer inspection, five pieces of wood constitute the bottom of the structure that connect the two horns attached on either side. Together, these parts reach a height of around thirty centimeters. The square base features not only silver fleur-de-lis embellishments at each corner, but also two silver-plated hooks on the front of the structure in which to hang the gong’s mallet horizontally. The square wooden base is topped with a short pedestal that supports the bovial ornament composed of three cylindrical wooden pieces. Central on the ‘forehead’ of the cow is a front-facing silver-platted badge in the shape of a rudimentary shield. The polished animal horns are connected to their wooden supports by one-inch silver collars, rimmed by additional fleur-de-lis patterns. The horns, that range in colour from a sandy beige to a dusky black, point towards each other, nearly meeting at the top of the formation. Finally, a white cord connects the bestial structure to the silver-plated disc, whose brilliance resembles a mirror. Displayed on the marble-topped table in the entrance hallway, made of high-quality materials, carefully preserved by the staff and volunteers at Dalnavert Museum, this attention-grabbing instrument emanates beauty. While no longer used as a tool to gather household members, when struck with the mallet, this gong’s bell-like sound would have been audible to the entire household.

Gongs in nineteenth-century England were often of “Central Asian origin.”¹ The presence of the gong in English culture was a result of colonial efforts and international trade. Early English travellers to Asia admired gongs for their “astonishing volume” which, as Gundula Kreuzer notes, was sometimes associated with “hellish noise.”² The use of gongs as a signaling device in England has been explored by Kreuzer who notes that in the late eighteenth century, Sir George Leonard Staunton, the British traveler and secretary to the first British embassy to China, observed that: “No guns are fired in China by way of signal; but [by the] circular rimmed plates […which] emit a noise almost deafening to those […] near to it, and which is heard to a considerable distance.”³ Kreuzer comments that gongs, appreciated by Western observers for their potential as signalling devices, were “brought home by explorers or merchants among other sensory goods and curiosities.”⁴ Both the importation of gongs from East to West and their use as tools for communication are useful contexts for understanding the value that the gong from Dalnavert’s collection held for Victorian-era users.

A gong, whose sound can be heard across considerable distances, is the perfect instrument to mark and announce the daily activities of Victorian families. Daily schedules and timeliness were important to middle-class Victorians; consider, for example, the advice of The Handbook of Etiquette from 1860 that reminds its readers: “If you are invited to dinner, make a point of being punctual, to the very minute, if possible.”⁵ Timekeeping was an important task for certain household members, and references to gongs in Victorian-era periodicals indicated that it was one of the tasks expected of maids to “sound [the] dressing gong.”⁶ In the context of hotels, male employees would similarly maintain the structure of the day; for instance, the Illustrated London Magazine noted how, at an American hotel, “John, the waiter, [… would] sound the [dinner-]gong”⁷ to summon the hotel’s guests.

Given that Victorians used gongs in connection to the act of dining, it is noteworthy that some, like the one at Dalnavert, feature animal bones. In the case of Dalnavert’s gong, the inclusion of animal parts in their design connotes servitude, not only because of the rope that binds the horns in place, but also in consideration of the hierarchical food chain. Significantly, as historian Judith Flanders explains, at Victorian dinners “[t]he minute classification by function was similar […] to the classification of the guests by social status.”⁸ Every aspect of a Victorian dinner party intentionally reflected the host’s, guests’, and servants’ social status and class; therefore, the constricted cattle components that constitute the gong suggests a hierarchical worldview, including the ranked power of masters over their servants. The gong showcases class structures within the household while also asserting the dominance of humans over animals of servitude.

Dinner gongs, though a popular feature of middle and upper-class homes, were not without their critics. In 1891, in an essay titled “Unmusical England,” H.R. Haweis lamented that: “so long as we English chose to go into dinner to the sound of a gong we could not be called a musical people.”⁹ Despite criticisms of this kind, the household gong is a noteworthy object because it announces more than the dinner hour. Signalling Victorian-era investment in punctuality, the collection of objects from foreign cultures, and hierarchies both within and beyond the human community, household gongs resonate with significance.