glory box

English

Alternative forms

• glory-box

Etymology

Probably related to UK dialect glory hole (“place for storing odds and ends”).

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Noun

glory box (plural glory boxes)

1. (Australia, New Zealand) A lady’s storage box containing items saved for her wedding or married life.[From 1915.]
   • 1985, Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond, 1900-1965, Melbourne University Press, page 148,

     Every girl who hoped to marry had started early on her glory box, sewing and embroidering household linen, buying sheets and towels on cash order.

   • 2003, Jane Malthus, Chris Brickell, “Producing and Consuming Gender: The Case of Clothing”, in Barbara Lesley Brookes, Annabel Cooper, Robin Law, editors, Sites of Gender: Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890-1939, page 124:

     Trousseaux and glory boxes could be slowly built up while women were engaged in the paid workforce, before marriage heralded the loss of an independent income.

   • 2004, Kerry Greenwood, The Long Walk, unnumbered page:

     ‘ […] You can work on my daughter′s glory box. She′s had to get a job in the pub and she hasn′t had time to finish it and she′s getting married in December.’

   • 2011, Zoe Boccabella, Mezza Italiana, unnumbered page:

     She said that her mother brought them out to Australia in a baule — a huge glory box — along with blankets, kitchen utensils, crockery, and 32 litres of olive oil in tins. Tucked in this glory box, the linens travelled in the hull of a ship from Naples across oceans and seas, on a train from Sydney to Stanthorpe, by horse and cart to Applethorpe and later by ute to Brisbane.

Synonyms

• bottom drawer
• hope chest (US)

See also

• trousseau