Samplers

We have two samplers which came from Norfolk.  I have always been very fond of these – imagining the little girls who made them.

Victorian girls would have been incredibly skilled in comparison to modern girls.  Even when I was at primary school in 1970s – the “samplers” we produced were crude things done in cross stitch on large weave sheets and we only spent about an hour a week on them.  Victorian middle class girls would have spent many hours embroidering on actual fine linen, while working class girls in the National Schools would have worked on things like underwear.  Of course a lot of this was because women’s lives in the period were so restricted that there wasn’t actually much else for them to occupy themselves with – it is incredibly sad to me that magazines of the period have lines in them like “A piece of fancy work which will use up a great deal of time” – and this for some useless matchbox cover.

But anyway – these are our two samplers

I looked into the history of the one on the right.  The inscription says “Sarah Jane Helm Aetatis 9 AD 1855”  The “Aetatis” bit stumped me for a while particularly as the 9 looks a bit like a “g”.  Then I worked out that it means “at the age of 9”.  This means that Sarah Jane was born in 1846.  Luckily she had a moderately uncommon name and I was able to look her up on Ancestry – sure enough the only Sarah Jane Helm born that year was in Yorkshire and in the census of 1851 she is a “farmer’s daughter” (one of eight children) which would have placed in the social class where samplers like this would have been made.  If Sarah Jane lived to be 80 (which she may well have done – I have not bought a membership of the site to look into it in more detail), she would have seen WW1 and the birth of radio and powered flight.  She would also have seen a considerable change in women’s lives including getting the vote.