Gender and the Material Turn

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, a British girl started a sampler (Fig. 9.1).¹ It was an ordinary thing to do and her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother had doubtless done the same. At the top of the linen canvas, she arranged letters and numbers in six horizontal bands, practising her stitches and motifs (heart, crown, ships). Her attention to letters and numbers was not unusual. It followed the shift from pictorial samplers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to the alphanumeric samplers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that, as Rozsika Parker has noted, ‘provided evidence of a child’s “progress” on the ladder to womanhood’.² Beneath the rows of letters and numbers, the girl added the title ‘The Pleasures of Religion’ followed by three lines: