Category Archives: Textiles

Made for a Grandson: A Nursery Rhyme Cloth Book ca. 1897

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Children were reminded constantly to take care of their books before the rise of untearables on cloth, board, and textured paper in the second half of the nineteenth century.   Cotsen has hundreds of examples of these books and pamphlets for the unintentionally destructive hands of babies and toddlers—or careless older children–  should anyone want to write a history of the genre.

Nursery Rhymes. [New Orleans?, 1897]. (Cotsen 18522)

 

One of the most interesting examples in the collection is a nursery rhyme collection made by a grandmother for “petit cher William,” which she gave him on September  1,1897.  Two pieces of cloth are sewn together with blanket stitch around three of the four edges.  The style of the illustrations look American, but there aren’t any definitive clues pointing to her state and city of residence. The title is embroidered on the dark red cloth cover and illustrated with paper cut-outs of Mother Goose holding a goose on a lead, now partly torn away. Although the inscription is in French, the rest of the book’s text is in English, copied on differently shaped slips of paper attached to the cloth pages, as seen to the right.

(Cotsen 18522)

Grandmère’s large selection of rhymes for William includes many familiar ones, such as “Pat-a-cake,” “Humpty Dumpty,” and “Little Bo-Peep,”  with others like “Richard and Robin” or “Come, butter, come,” which appeared in the first nursery rhyme collections from the 1740s, but have dropped out of the canon.

The rhymes are illustrated with cut-out pictures.  The  black page has an especially nice example of her collages.   “This little pig went to market” consists of a hand with “O. N. T,” which almost certainly comes from an Our New Thread advertisement for Coats and Clark.   She then pasted pictures of the pigs on its fingertips, then wrote the text on curlique shapes, which resemble Struwwelpeter’s uncut nails. Below it is “There was a little man, and he had a little gun.” The “little man” is a little boy in soldier’s helmet, not hunter’s green.  Opposite him is  “See-saw, Margery daw” illustrated with a sawhorse, with one child balanced against the three at the other end of the plank.

(Cotsen 18522)

Displayed on this page of beige cloth are several eighteenth-century rhymes: “Lucy Lockit lost her pocket” in the lower left is acted out by a girl dressed in mourning and her adversary in a rather short skirt waving a parasol.  Above them to the right is  “Old woman, old woman, shall we go a’shearing?”  a humorous take on a failed attempt at courtship.  The “old woman” has the head of the Cheshire cat pasted on a body to which has been added an ear trumpet.  Shouting into it is a much smaller pig dressed in a suit. (Was the choice of animal for the man was deliberate?)  She also divided the page in half diagonally to accommodate the long rhyme “When I was a little boy, I lived by myself,” with the main character illustrated by three figures in completely different costumes.

(Cotsen 18522)

Manuscript nursery rhyme collections usually contain unrecorded appearances of songs and this one is no exception.  It falls within the time period when Frank Green’s song “Ten Little N*****s” was considered amusing and performed frequently at Black minstrel shows.  In the upper left hand corner of this page is a rhyme about organ grinder’s monkey, which turns out to be an early, possibly unrecorded, version of the tongue-twisting song “I wish I was in Monkey land / The place where I was born,” sometimes called “The Malalankey Song.”  The verbal pyrotechnics start in the second stanza “I wililish I walalaas in mololonkey Lalaland.”  While unfamiliar to me, it turns up in on blogs, Reditt, and several Youtube videos, some of which call it an Indian, i.e. South Asian, children’s song.  Unfortunately, Grandmère illustrated it with a grotesque Illustration of old black man, a reinforcement of the ugly old stereotype familiar to Americans.

Homemade books like this one for a grandson deserve to be appreciated for what they preserve, both the good and bad.  It simultaneously displays the creativity of a woman fashioning a unique object for a beloved child that will introduce him to an important genre of poetry for the young while also reflecting typical attitudes of her time, which make us uncomfortable today.

A Woman’s Work at Her Needle Is Never Done

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“Work” with respect to girls and women used to be synonymous with “needlework.”  Not just the stitching of samplers, but “plain sewing,” the making of shifts and shirts, aprons and babies’ caps for members of the family.   Those tasks were not relegated to the servants: princesses and queens were supposed to cheerfully perform  this necessary work as well.  Virtuous female characters from the Bible and classical literature were cited as examples.  It was said the daughters of Queen Charlotte were expert at tapestry work and fine embroidery of all kinds.

But times were changing according to the anonymous author of The Little Needle Woman: Or the Pleasures of Work.  Published with the Approbation of The Princess Royal of Lilliput, for the Entertainment of the Ladies of Great-Britain and Ireland  (Gainsborough: H. Mozley, 1792).  He or she exclaimed:

Needle—work, the cares of domestic affairs, a serious and retired life, is the proper function of women; and for this they were designed by Providence.  The depravity of the age has indeed affixed to these customs which are  very near as old as the creation, an idea of meanness and contempt; but then what has it substituted in the room of them?  A soft indolence, a stupid idleness, frivolous conversation, vain amusements, a strong passion for public shews, and a frantic love of gambling.

If dexterity with the needle was as important as claimed above, then surely this little pamphlet has illustrations of obedient little girls hard at work.  Just one–the frontispiece shows a girl sewing while she watches the baby in the cradle.  But there is also a picture of a girl practicing the piano while her mama watches, which directly contradicts the rant in the introduction.…To be honest, there are more illustrations in 18th-century children’s books of boys mistreating animals in than of girls sewing.  Only one I’ve found in the collection so far is The Brother’s Gift, which was first published by Francis Newbery in 1770.  The story is straightforward enough.  Kitty Bland returns home from boarding school “perfectly spoiled,” having picked up affected manners.  Like most boarding school misses, she can’t spell correctly, write neatly, read aloud nicely, or, most important of all, sew carefully.  In spite of all this her older brother Billy loves her too much to let this continue  and explains kindly why it is to her advantage to learn all these things—and stop spending so much time staring at herself in the mirror.  Here she is hard at work.And here is her thimble.

If Kitty applies herself, she might one day produce a map sampler like this one in the Victoria and Albert Museum.Or aspire to needle paintings  in worsted like Mary Linwood, who exhibited her full-size copies of old masters in a  gallery on Leicester Square in London for decades.  Here is one after the famous animal painter, George Stubbs.