Schools, in which he gives his view of the importance of needlework in the education of girls. He thinks that, apart from the value of the art, it would be worth while to spend half the school hours in sewing, for the sake of the effect on the girls’ characters. He speaks of the order, quiet, cleanliness, and cheerful repose with activity, which prevail in afternoon school hours devoted to sewing,—a real training for the home, while the occupation also tends to impress the intellectual lessons of the morning. Looking forward a few years, the sense of the fitness of the training to make good wives and mothers must be very strong; for one may almost divide into sheep and goats the cottage households in which the wife and mother is a capable needlewoman or not one at all. The sewing mother, with her children round her, makes the husband proud of his home, while dirty brats, playing out of doors in rags and tatters, with an idle or a muddling mother within, are more likely to deter a man from coming home than to tempt him from the public-house. I, for one, feel obliged to Mr. Norris for what he has said on behalf of the girls, whose education is so deplorably perverted or neglected in the classes of which he speaks. I think, moreover, that it would be well if needlework were thoroughly taught, as formerly, to girls who, when wives, will not be the heads of cottage households.
There would be no occasion to make growing children sit on hard seats, without backs, or rests for the feet, as I have elsewhere complained, on the part of a past generation. Due care should be taken to vary the posture sufficiently often, to afford a sufficiency of light, and to let the spirit of enterprise enter into a girl’s project of work. Such points being duly attended to, there will be no difficulty in getting the children interested in the employment. For one that twirls her thimble on her finger, and looks at the clock, there will be scores who will be unwilling to leave their job for play or dinner. In their own drawing-rooms, in after life, the difference will be seen between those who have been trained to the needle and those who have not. The ease and mastery of a thorough needlewoman, who works out her thought on her material, and produces something perfect in its way, are perceptible to the veriest old bachelor who calls sewing “working,” and working “sewing;” while there is something annoying to “real ladies” (as their maids say), as well as to gentlemen, in the awkwardness of unskilful hands, which tangle the thread, and pull the stitches, and break the needle, and leave the skein of cotton or silk on the floor, and produce something ugly, after all their toil.
These last are apt to discourse of the unhealthiness of needlework. To them it is no doubt laborious. They stoop, and put themselves in a constrained posture: they pore over their work, and set their muscles to work expressly and consciously with every drawing of the thread. There must be much fatigue in this. It cannot be denied, either, that prolonged sewing is very hurtful, and constant sewing probably fatal. Any mechanical action which employs a few muscles almost exclusively must be bad; and any diligent needlewoman can describe the sensation between the shoulders, and the nervous irritability which constitute real suffering when the needle has been plied too long. Young wives, preparing the infant wardrobe for the first time, have often done themselves harm by getting into this over-wrought condition over their enchanting employment. They are very wrong. They should stop before they feel irritable or weary, and they should at once go for a walk, or pass to some active employment. It is nonsense, too, in these days of marking inks, to strain their precious eyesight over the pedantic marking methods of our grandmothers, who made a great point of marking fine cambric as true as coarse linen. But needlework is not to be condemned because some women still pursue it without moderation or good sense.
Some months since I was petitioned to speak up for fancywork as a solace to invalids and sorrowful people. I certainly can do it with a safe conscience; for my needle has been an inestimable blessing to me during years of ill health. It is sometimes said that the needle is to a woman what the cigar is to the man—a tranquillising, equalising influence, conservative and restorative. It is at least this; and I should imagine more. We are apt to underrate the positive pleasure there is in mechanical employment, pursued with aptness and skill. Mr. Chadwick is fond of telling of a man in a chalk-pit who admitted to him that, during years spent in simply cutting square blocks of chalk, he had never, he believed, failed to enjoy an actual relish, on each occasion, of the act of producing his block of chalk. I can well believe this from the perpetual pleasantness of setting stitches, when it is effectually done. But in fancywork—the elaborate fancywork of invalids—there is much more. If I say that it is somewhat like the gratification of the artist, I shall be told that it is infinitely better to paint or draw; that better effects are far more speedily produced, and so on. It is true that any good drawing is of a higher quality than the best needlework; but then the work is of a totally different kind. Needlework is a solace for women far too ill to draw well, or to commit themselves to the excitements of art. Each is good in its own place; and, in its own place, I claim for the much abused fancywork (I include woolwork) of the drawing-room some respect, over and above mere toleration. I mean, if it is good of its kind. Bad fancy-work no more deserves toleration than bad pictures or bad music.
My readers may perhaps have no idea how many professional needlewomen there are in Great Britain; and they may not have considered into how many classes the whole may be divided. There is no branch of industry in which it is so difficult to ascertain the numbers, because, as I said before, there are so many women who take in work to employ some spare hours profitably. They take pay, but are not professional sempstresses. Again, there are about 100,000 shoemakers’ wives, most of whom, no doubt, help to support the family by shoebinding. Drawing the line as well as they could, the Census Commissioners of 1851 returned the number of sewing women in Great Britain as being (without the shoemakers’ wives) 388,302.
These are divided into five classes; and a sixth