Academic literature on the topic 'Victorian Needlework'

Abstract Australia’s gold-rush history has long been dominated by narratives of male adventure: of landscapes where men lived side by side, mateship took on increasing importance in the pursuit of gold, masculine behaviours and manners were emphasized and domesticity was shunned. In the early years of the rich discoveries of gold, men often travelled alone to the colony of Victoria in their search for wealth. This article examines a situation this unique environment created: where men unaccompanied by women – although women, too, were present on the diggings – were required to adopt practices perceived as feminine. It focuses in on needlework to explore the tensions that emerged given sewing was a defining female occupation during the nineteenth century, inhabiting a central place in the female experience. As this article highlights, sewing became an essential practice for men on the Victorian goldfields in order to keep themselves clothed, warm and dry. I consider how men approached their sewing tasks given needlework’s inextricable link with women, and the various strategies they used to frame their sewing in letters, diaries and memoirs – sometimes for close friends and family alone, and other times for wider dissemination. Drawing on sociological frameworks on constructions of gender, masculinity and manliness, I then consider how a shifting engagement with domestic practices may have strengthened rather than challenged identity on the goldfields.

Lydia J ——, daughter of a widow with five children, was admitted to the Boston Female Asylum, an orphanage run by women, in 1826, at the age of four. When she was 11 she was apprenticed to a Boston physician and his wife. On her eighteenth birthday, Lydia agreed to remain with the family as a salaried servant, but six months later she left “to learn the business of dressmaking.” Lydia’s specialized training in a needlework trade supported her until her marriage, four years later, and in all likelihood at later periods in her life.’

Feminist historians have been strong advocates for the recognition of women’s domestic lives, yet housework remains an underexplored area of labour history. Scholars of material culture have explored individual aspects of domestic life on the goldfields, particularly needlework; however, the broader focus has remained on women’s activities outside the home. Although typically interpreted through narratives of masculine adventure, hardship and goldseeking, the goldfields were also domesticated landscapes. Both men and women consciously made attempts to create home, even when the concept of home was transitory. Commonly, the task of transforming an industrial landscape into a domestic one fell to women, who had been assigned the “natural” responsibility of household labour for centuries. The expectation was that women would attend to the daily labour-intensive work of creating and maintaining home.

Abstract Considering Victorian presentation of women as angelic, that is, spiritual, beings, it is rather surprising how much their presence was manifested by material objects. Baskets of needlework, tea equipage and novels lying around in a parlour were an unmistakable sign of the house being occupied by women. Indeed, my contention is, the objects did not clutter Victorian interiors, either real or imagined, merely for practical reasons or to produce the “reality effect.” They are a material representation of the immaterial and function as metaphors for angelic women’s spiritual qualities. Rather than functioning merely as details to enhance the illusion of the real (and thus as elements of style) or simply reflecting the Victorian world (and thus as empty forms), material objects are essential in constructing a middle-class (feminine) identity. My paper concentrates on Rhoda Broughton’s Not wisely, but too well and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South with an attempt to show how objects help construct a feminine ideal and, simultaneously, reveal the ideal to be just a construction. Broughton’s Kate Chester and Gaskell’s Margaret Hale find themselves in situations where their middle-class status might be compromised. Still, they both manage to reassert their position through effectively manipulating the signs of middle-class respectability. The “flimsy and useless” things they surround themselves with point to their “essentially feminine” qualities. Yet, the very superfluity of the objects reveals their relation to the characters’ economic status. They are, then, the site where the material and immaterial meet, where the borders between the economic world and the domestic world blur.

Dress was charged with meaning in the British colonies. Its visual cues made dress an obvious vehicle for formulating identity in material ways, and as a communicative device it was a means to measure migrants of unknown social origin — though not always with success. This article explores children's clothing in south-eastern Australia during the decades spanning the mid-nineteenth century, when the Port Phillip District transformed from a pastoral settlement into the thriving gold-rush colony of Victoria, attracting migrants from around the globe. In particular, it focuses on the material practices of mothers in clothing their children. In considering the links between a mother's domestic needlework and expressions of identity, it develops the concept of clothing as a visible indicator to observers of a mother's care of and devotion to her children, while acknowledging the circumstances that may have influenced her sewing — shortages of labour and materials, isolation and the financial uncertainty of life in a new colony.

Mineral-sands mining in the semiarid and arid zone of south-eastern Australia is now a widespread disturbance that may adversely affect large areas of remnant vegetation, including mallee (Eucalyptus spp.) with hummock grass or spinifex (Triodia scariosa) understorey. No broad-scale restoration projects have been undertaken to revegetate mallee Eucalyptus species with spinifex. We report on the survivorship and relative importance (spatial coverage) of hand-planted tubestock 10 years after establishment in 2001, which included mallee Eucalyptus, Triodia scariosa, Acacia spp. and Hakea spp. These taxa are the dominant plants in a semiarid dune–swale system on a former mineral-sands mine licence area in semiarid, north-western Victoria. Mean survivorship of tubestock was 0.58 ± 0.04. Spinifex (Triodia scariosa), needlewood (Hakea) and several mallee species (Eucalyptus spp.) survived substantially better than the average of all tubestock-planted species, although Acacia spp. had low survivorships. Although the plantings were undertaken in the early stages of the most severe drought in the instrumental record (the ‘Millennium drought’), several taxa survived well and species such as spinifex established and developed ground coverage greater than the benchmark values for the ecological vegetation class of the location. We conclude that hand-planting of tubestock can achieve restoration objectives for this component of spinifex–mallee vegetation, even under extremely arduous conditions associated with long-term drought. We also herald the importance of taking a long-term view to the assessment of revegetation success, in this case 10 years.

Cette thèse traite de la question des travaux d'aiguille dans la littérature et la culture victorienne. Ils apparaissent de manière récurrente dans les romans britanniques du dix-neuvième siècle et cristallisent bon nombre de sentiments contradictoires qui sont au coeur de la formation du sujet féminin. En dépit de leur omniprésence dans la culture victorienne, les travaux d'aiguille, associés à l'assujettissement des femmes, ont longtemps été déconsidérés par la critique. Cette thèse se propose de porter un nouveau regard sur l'artisanat féminin. A travers l'étude de sources très variées - romans, poèmes, manuels de couture, extraits de presse et les objets eux-mêmes - nous nous attachons à explorer les paradigmes complexes articulés par cette praxis, ainsi que la manière dont les travaux d'aiguille ont participé à l'articulation d'un « je » féminin. Considérée par les Victoriens comme l'activité féminine par excellence, la couture était pratiquée par toutes les femmes de tous âges et de toutes les classes sociales : ainsi, elle était au coeur du vécu et de l'identité féminine. Néanmoins, les travaux d'aiguille s'articulent autour de contradictions: il s'agissait d'une pratique à la fois amateur et professionnelle; ils encourageaient et cristallisaient la domestication des femmes, tout en imitant les modes de production industriels; ils étaient critiqués par bon nombre de femmes qui aspiraient à une plus grande ambition intellectuelle, mais étaient investis par d'autres comme un extraordinaire moyen d'expression. Ainsi, au dix-neuvième siècle la couture n'était pas une activité solitaire, mais plutôt une pratique sociale et discursive qui était pleinement engagée dans les problématiques sociales, économiques et culturelles de son temps<br>This thesis deals with the question of needlework in Victorian literature and culture. Needlework is a constant and recurrent motif in nineteenth-century novels, and crystallises the many complex and contradictory feelings of satisfaction or resentment, creativity or censorship, elation or utter dejection that are crucial to the formation of the nineteenth-century female subject. In spite of its ubiquity, however, it has long been ignored or dismissed by critics as trivial, unimportant or revealing of the limitations imposed on Victorian women's lives. This thesis seeks to complicate previous assumptions by taking needlework on its own terms and exploring the complex and sophisticated tenets that underlie it. Relying on a large range of sources - novels, poems, magazines, craft manuals and material objects - this work examines the ways in which sewing has participated in the articulation of female subjectivity. Because it was construed as the ultimate feminine occupation and was undertaken by virtually ail women, regardless of age or social class, it was central to their identities and experience. However, needlework was fraught with contradictions: it was both amateur and professional; it enshrined the domestication of women, but it was closely allied with industrial modes of production; it was resented by many intellectually ambitious women, but was invested by others as a formidably evocative means of self-expression. Rather than a reclusive activity, then, Victorian needlework was a highly sociable practice which was fully engaged in the social, economic and cultural issues of its time

Abstract Chapter 5 moves even further away from more traditional ideas about “authorship” to focus on the notion of “writing” as a more experimental act. Paper and text-related materials had talismanic, decorative, and artistic purposes. Needlework skills helped authors revise manuscripts or craft blank books to be filled with composition. Writing needn’t include ink, as Victorian women were adept at exploiting. Embroidery on paper, pinpricks through paper, cut-out silhouettes, and needle-books inscribed or shaped like books locate the work of women’s hands in a continuum of craft. Samplers provided a mode of composition so labor intensive that the makers sometimes invested them with magical significance. The Victorian novelist and botanist Anna Atkins made albums of seaweed, ferns, flowers, and lace using cyanotype technology, an early form of camera-less photography that marked the shadow of the object directly on the page. Atkins also made these “photograms” of her handwriting, turning text and autograph into ghostly absence.

Abstract This chapter attends to a 1665 needlework picture of the Book of Esther, part of the textile collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, to demonstrate how women's biblical embroidery functions as biblical commentary. This needlework is one of many extant renderings of the narrative; in fact, Queen Esther was the most popular biblical heroine featured in seventeenth-century domestic embroidery. Stitched Esthers do more than present a model of feminine virtue: this Esther communicates readings of character and narrative that counter dominant interpretations. Increasingly, scholars attending to early modern women have recognised ways women’s textiles are akin to women’s texts. The museum’s Esther announces a keen reading of biblical text and underscores a connection between biblical language and embroidered image. The Book of Esther relies on an abundance of structural and linguistic patterns to bolster its themes, and the needleworker astutely translates these patterns onto her visual display.