The Lancaster Merveilleux is a tailboard plate camera made by J. Lancaster & Son of Birmingham, a British manufacturer active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a folding tailboard design, it is a wooden field camera intended for use on a tripod with glass plates, sitting in the affordable end of the amateur and semi-professional market of its day.

The single UK auction hammer result on file shows a Merveilleux tailboard selling for £62 in July 2025, which gives a narrow snapshot of what the model is worth today rather than a true range. At saleroom level, wooden tailboards like this typically sell for two-figure to low three-figure sums, with condition of the bellows, woodwork and any original brass fittings driving where a given example sells for within that band.