Antique Chambersticks between £0 and £0
A chamberstick is a low candleholder set on a dished pan with a handle, made to be carried from room to room and set down beside a bed.
What Are Chambersticks?
The form is simple: a socket for the candle, a wide dish beneath it to catch the wax, and a handle to carry it by. That drip pan is what separates a chamberstick from a table candlestick. It developed as a portable light for moving about the house, and it lasted until gas and electric light made carrying a candle pointless.
Brass dominates. It appears in 38 of the 67 titles on Sellingantiques, cast or in sheet, English, Dutch and French. Ten titles call the object a candlestick or candleholder rather than a chamberstick, so the pan and handle in the photographs tell you more than the wording does. Pairs are the significant alternative, at 20 titles.
Away from the brass run, materials scatter widely: bell metal, bronze, paktong, pewter, sterling silver, Old Sheffield Plate, iron, toleware, porcelain enamel, walnut treen, Tunbridge Ware, olive wood, marble, and cloisonné with micro-mosaic. Each turns up once or twice. Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau metalwork forms a small group of its own, with hammered pewter, brass and copper, iron and silvered bronze among them.
Dates run from 1700 to 1920, though only 26 listings carry a clean year. Eleven are recorded simply as 19th Century, ten as 18th Century, five as 17th Century. Titles are often more precise than the period tag, so an English piece given as C1680-C1700 sits under a 17th Century heading and a c1770 one under 1750.
What Sets Them Apart
Material does most of the work. Sterling silver, silvered bronze, paktong and Old Sheffield Plate sit at the top of the range, along with a marble Grand Tour souvenir. Plain single brass chambersticks and small candleholders sit at the bottom. That gap is wider than any difference of decoration within the brass run itself.
Age and number push in the same direction. Seventeenth-century Dutch and Swedish sheet brass and eighteenth-century French and English pieces sit well above the run of brass chambersticks from around 1900, and pairs occupy much of the upper half. Fifteen listings carry a 17th- or 18th-century tag.
Working extras count too. Side ejectors that spring the candle stub out sideways, snuffers, a vesta case on an extending Victorian example, an adjustable shade and glass chimneys all appear on higher-placed listings. A named design movement does the same: Arts and Crafts appears in eight titles, and those pieces cluster towards the top.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for chambersticks between £0 and £0, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
Two pairs of squat travelling candlesticks came through as "Brighton buns", one cast brass, one olive wood. The trade name turns up nowhere else.
The Antique Chambersticks between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Drip pan
- The shallow dish beneath the socket that catches falling wax. It is the feature that makes a chamberstick a chamberstick rather than a table candlestick.
- Sconce
- The socket the candle stands in. One Dutch example in the archive has a tulip-shaped sconce.
- Snuffer
- The small conical cap for putting the flame out, sometimes clipped to the pan. A pair of Edwardian brass chambersticks retains theirs.
- Side ejector
- A sprung mechanism inside the socket that pushes the candle stub out sideways. It appears once, on a large 18th-century pair.
- Paktong
- A Chinese copper-nickel-zinc alloy that looks like silver, used for one 18th-century chamber candlestick.
- Brighton buns
- Trade name for squat travelling chamber candlesticks. Two pairs appear, one cast brass, one olive wood.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is a chamberstick different from a candlestick?
A chamberstick sits low on a dished pan with a handle, so it can be carried and put down. A table candlestick stands on a foot with no pan and no handle.
The wording in listings does move around. Ten of the 67 titles on Sellingantiques call the object a candlestick or candleholder while showing the pan-and-handle form.
What are antique chambersticks made from?
Brass runs through the category, in 38 of the 67 titles, both cast and sheet.
Beyond that the materials scatter: bell metal, bronze, paktong, pewter, sterling silver, Old Sheffield Plate, iron, toleware, porcelain enamel, walnut treen, Tunbridge Ware, olive wood, marble, and cloisonné with micro-mosaic. Each of those turns up once or twice.
Do chambersticks come in pairs?
Often enough to matter. The word pair is in 20 of the titles, roughly three in ten.
Sampled pairs include Victorian cast brass, Edwardian brass with their snuffers, French brass of about 1890 and French 18th-century cast brass. Pairs sit through much of the upper half of the range.
How old are most chambersticks for sale?
The dated field spans 1700 to 1920, with 26 listings carrying a clean year.
Much of the rest is broad: 11 given as 19th Century, 10 as 18th Century, 5 as 17th Century, plus a handful tagged Victorian, Edwardian, Regency and Georgian. Where decades are given they cluster in the 1900s and 1910s, with some in the 1890s.
Which chambersticks are unusual in the archive?
Mechanical types surface rarely: a pair of large 18th-century side ejectors, an extending Victorian one with a vesta case, and a candleholder with an adjustable shade.
Figural work is scarcer still. Two griffin-mounted examples and a pug dog candlestick are the only ones in the samples, and one sheet brass piece given as Dutch or Swedish is the single Scandinavian-linked origin.
Are chambersticks a common category on Sellingantiques?
Around nine are listed in a year.
Thirty-four different dealers have offered one, close to one apiece. It is a category almost every dealer meets once and few stock in any depth.