The maker's (sponsor's) mark EH on these candlesticks was first registered at the London Assay Office on 3 March 1880 by (James) Edward Hutton, London representative of William Hutton & Sons, manufacturing silversmiths of Sheffield. Other, similar marks followed, the last group being entered in the name of 'E. Hutton' on 9 January 1891. In fact, (James) Edward Hutton had died unexpectedly two weeks earlier on 31 December at the age of 52 of acute pneumonia at his house, Elm Lodge, Elm Row, Hampstead. These marks were defaced on 18 April 1894, shortly after William Hutton & Sons was converted into a limited liability company subsequent to acquiring the business and plant of Rupert Favell & Co., manufacturing silversmiths of Bucknall Street, Oxford Street, London. (John Culme, The Directory of Gold and Silversmiths, Woodbridge, 1987, vol. I, pp. 247-249)

James Edward Hutton, who was born in 1838, was one of the sons of William Carr Hutton (27 October 1803 – 26 December 1865) and a grandson of William Hutton (1774-1842), the founder of William Hutton & Sons. He was educated at Ashcroft Academy, Wentworth, near Rotherham, Yorkshire and as a young man was sent to live in London, where he oversaw the firm's rapidly expanding wholesale and export business. At first resident at the firm's London address, 13 Thavies Inn, Holborn, by 1881 he and his family were living in Heathfield Gardens, Hampstead, later moving to a nearby much larger, 18^th century property known as Elm Lodge. Coincidentally, nearly 30 years earlier, in July 1863, Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, took a number of photographs in this house, including several of the Rev. George MacDonald, the Scottish author and poet, and his wife and daughters.