HomeRegency LifeSchoolgirl Embroidery in Regency Britain

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Schoolgirl Embroidery in Regency Britain — 4 Comments

  1. In the cartoon , a girl is hung by her neck. They weren’t trying to kill her but to make her stand taller and even, perhaps, make her taller. Maria Edgeworth was a short young lady who was hung by her neck and subjected to other indignities to make her taller. Edgeworth , Austen, Burney, Wollstonecraft, More all wrote out against the education given to girls. They might be able to sew a neat seam but they , supposedly, had their heads full of nonsense.
    The samplers and other needlework is beautiful. I never would have finished primary school if I had been required to make a sampler. Still, I think it a shame that it has been banished. More people will have to sew something than will ever need higher math, advanced science or a knowledge of Shakespeare.

    • Well, I’m English and 63, only 63 I say because we had to sew a sample of various stitches in primary school. Nothing like as complicated as these, just a line of each stitch in embroidery. This was in the 60s. But I think it faded soon after. 1963-5 in Northamptonshire

  2. Yes, Nancy – I thought that particular “exercise” looked like torture! I, too, wish that I’d been required to learn needlework while I was younger, but perhaps I wouldn’t have appreciated it then, as I do now. And of course, the examples given are mostly of the most gifted in needlework – not every little girl could make such magic with her needle. I think it was a very good thing when girls were finally taught mathematics, science and other highly academic subjects, but we did lose a little something, I think, when we stopped needlework altogether.

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