Chloe Wigston Smith's "Novels, Needleworks, and Empire"

Chloe Wigston Smith is professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of York, where she teaches in the Department of English and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

Wigston Smith applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, and reported the following:

Page 99 is one of thirty-eight illustrations, most of which show needlework pieces made by women and girls in eighteenth-century Britain and America. On page 99, however, readers will encounter a hand-colored print, titled “An Emblem of America.” As a print, this illustration is a bit of an outlier when it comes to the material objects that I include across my five chapters, but its appearance on page 99 speaks to the kind of visual, material, and literary entanglements that I trace across the whole.

Page 99 falls about mid-way through chapter two, “Small Marks in Thread,” which studies the material expression of makers on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s the most heavily illustrated chapter and gets to the heart of my story about the images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read. In it, I look at the practice of marking textiles and linens in thread, and propose that this utilitarian form of needlework supported feminine ownership and possession. The chapter centers on the sampler, a type of needlework that taught girls and young women how to shape letters and numbers with their needles. Girls often added their names and ages to their sampler (as well as other brief biographical details) and I’m interested in how this practice encouraged marks of possession. I include detailed discussions of needleworks created by African American girls (including Mary Emiston and Mary D’Silver), as well as a few pieces made by North American Indigenous girls (such as Christeen Baker).

The illustration on page 99 was the visual source for an embroidered picture made by the white Ann Leap in 1801 (Leap had completed a sampler two years earlier). “An Emblem of America” was one of four prints that depicted the continents (John Fairburn also produced “An Emblem of Africa,” “An Emblem of Asia,” and “An Emblem of Europe”). “An Emblem of America” was transfer printed onto jugs made in Liverpool, designed for export to the American market. My comparison of Leap’s needlework with the print and creamware jugs makes me think that Leap used the jug instead of the print as her source, which she probably saw and perhaps used in her father’s tavern in Alexandra, Virginia. I show how Leap didn’t exactly replicate her source image, but rather made her own adaptations and changes. My comparison of these three objects (print, jug, and needlework) reflects my focus across the book to take seriously needlework’s dynamic connections to print and visual culture. Makers, I argue, didn’t repeat what they saw or read, but used their needles to engage in broader political and cultural conversations that moved beyond the borders of home and nation. Experimentation, in thread, was key to their revisions to texts and images, and so in this way, page 99 underlines the imaginative and creative entanglements between visual culture and material culture, which I discuss across my book.

Learn more about Novels, Needleworks, and Empire at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue