Was silverplate considered an affordable thing back in the 18th century?

There are many 18th century candlesticks around that were once silver plated. They are usually made of heavy bronze or brass.
Bronze was probably relatively expensive back then, but what about the silverplating? Wouldn't well-off households have been able to afford solid silver candlesticks instead of resorting to plated ones?
So was silverplate generally for the middle classes or for all of them and at what point did it become the "affordable option"?

 

Silver plating only started when electricity had been discovered and made widely available. Think last quarter of the 19th C.

Before plating (electrodeposition) there was either chemical or physical coating or casing of base metal objects.

If treated at all bronze or brass objects may have been mercury gilded. Some gold is dissolved in mercury (happens at room temperature so take off your gold rings before playing with mercury)
The object is then painted with the mercury amalgam and placed in an oven. The mercury evaporates, the gold remains bonded to the base metal. The more gold in the mercury, the thicker and more durable the gold coat. Candlesticks may have started out gilded.
This does not work for silver.
For silver take a plate of copper an inch thick and solder a plate of silver 1/10th inch thick to it. You can do both sides to make a silver/copper/silver sandwich.
Roll out the sandwich as thin as you need and make stuff with it like you would with solid sheet silver.
This is called Old Sheffield Plate. When done with gold it is either rolled gold or gold filled depending on where you live.
OSP was used to make candlesticks by the end of the 18th C.

Nowadays pieces of OSP usually have extensive wear-through to the copper.

To get back to your original post, there are no 18th C candlesticks around that were originally silver plated.

If you mean the 1800s instead of the 18th C. about all that can be said is that people bought what they could afford, as cheaper production became possible, more people could afford better (more valuable) looking stuff.
Until well into the 19th C. there really were no middle classes as we know them today. Income gaps between the lower class and even the petty bourgoisie were much larger than we are used to today, especially in terms of cash and disposable income.

As posed, your question does not really have an answer, as society and consumption were so very different a couple of hundred years ago.

 

If you've a mind to do it, you can research old merchant records for prices. You can also research probate records to view the types of items to see what people of various means might have possessed.

I'm no expert but I think the 18th C silver plated objects were primarily over copper.

 

I've done research in the past for various things using the York County Probate records which are from the Williamsburg, Virginia area so here is a link to the records with "candlestick". Just a quick looks seems to have lots of brass. Sheffield plate was invented in the 1740's but not so much for candlesticks until later I don't think. American imports may have lagged.

http://research.history.org/DigitalLibrary/inventories/search.cfm?q= candlestick&start=1&numShow=20

 

"And at one time, they were all silvered--the silver has been polished off over the centuries, but traces of it remain on the bottoms."
- http://mjhdesignarts.blogspot.fi/2014/12/18th-c-french-louis-xiv-and-louis-xv.html?m=1 on some 18th century candlesticks.

There was also a silver plating technique called 'argent haché' that was invented in the early 1700's and dissapeared around 1800. A lot of the (french) 18th century candlesticks I've seen were described as that.

 

Wow!!! Very interesting!! Good thing the one I picked didn't have any teeth laying around....they'd have inventoried them!!!!!

 

If they had dentures, darned tootin'.

 

And at one time, they were all silvered-

But not silver plated, and I have my doubts about all silvered. Or originally silvered.
The only explanaition of the process I could readily find was in a French chemistry book of 1784, where is is described as an amalgam process with mercury that is rather more complicated than the fire gilding process.
I suspect the commonest silvering process was that used by clock makers to silver dials that were usually made in brass. Silvering the whole dial or just the chapter ring made them much easier to see.
http://www.davewestclocks.co.uk/silvering_clock_dials.htm

This is quite a simple process for silvering any brass or bronze item. The silver finish is not all that resistant to handling and will tarnish over time. Polishing the tarnish will tend to remove the silvering which is a very, very thin layer. It is simpler to just re-silver.
It would not be hard to understand why the method quickly dies out.

 

Silver chloride is not really silverplate