Needle/Work: Approaches to contextualising and interpreting the 19th century embroidery and plain sewing of Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum

Teague, Jo (2024) Needle/Work: Approaches to contextualising and interpreting the 19th century embroidery and plain sewing of Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum. Masters thesis, University of Gloucestershire. doi:10.46289/DUKL5839

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Text (Final thesis) 14904 Teague, Jo (2024) Needlework - Approaches to contextualising and interpreting the 19th century embroidery and plain sewing of Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License All Rights Reserved. Download (37MB) | Preview

Abstract

In the 1830’s to 1850’s the girls at Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum produced a distinctive style of small samplers and pincushions as a culmination of the needlework education they received. The consistency of the style and high quality of needlework across the samplers reveals both the strictness of training and the high level of skill the girls were expected to achieve. As the work is anonymous and there is little in the historic record of how or why they were produced, I used a mix of creative and historical methods to contextualise the work within 19th century education. Samplers and similar educational needlework have previously been studied through stylistic and biographical methods and this study aims to research their production using re-making, curation and material culture, combined with telling a cultural biography of the sewn objects to comprehend the context of production, the objects themselves and the experiences of the young girls who made them. This includes researching the historic record in combination with material culture and practice-led embroidery methods to produce an historical account that centres on the experience of the orphan and the needlework they produced. The historical account was used as the basis for an exhibition of interventions at the Holst Victorian House Museum July to February 2023-24. This research demonstrates that it is possible to create contextualised historical narrative of working class sewing in a training institution that aimed to produced ladies’ maids. This research utilises curation, remaking and imagination to tell these stories which ultimately produces narratives that appreciates the skills that these girls acquired and the conditions which produced them.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Needlework; Victorian women; Historic sampler; Working women
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain > DA1 History of Great Britain D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain > DA1 History of Great Britain > DA20 England H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > School of Creative Arts
Depositing User:	Anna Kerr
Date Deposited:	24 Mar 2025 16:07
Last Modified:	26 Mar 2025 12:01
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/14904

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