'Remember me': Domestic textiles in Britain, 1790-1890: Memory, identity and emotion
Women repeatedly stitched the self-memorialising command ‘Remember Me’ into their domestic needlework production. The thesis ‘“Remember Me”. Domestic Textiles in Britain 1790–1890: Memory, Identity and Emotion’ presents items of domestic needlework as objects of selfhood, akin to life writing. These often-overlooked objects reveal how makers sought to be remembered by their contemporaries, and how they passed objects between generations to do emotional memory and legacy work for anticipated future audiences. Whilst situated in the period 1790–1890, the nature of these palimpsest objects – often subject to repeated reusing, repurposing, and recycling – allows us to track emotional behaviours that begin or end outside of this frame, an arc of emotional behaviours through space and time. Framing analysis within the life-cycle allows study of the synchronic and diachronic changes in makers’ emotional lives, expressed through their material production as they aged. In doing so, this study historicises domestic needlework as emotional care work and elevates textile items and vernacular stitched practice as valuable tools of cultural transference. This research offers new insights into under-studied groups by examining the importance of emotional objects to both makers and users. The needle might be wielded with agency to subvert traditional moral narratives associated with the needleworker; by the poor, by the disenfranchised, and by those otherwise marginalised. New research into male participation in public needlework competitions challenges established narratives and reveals how the emotional benefits of engaging in domestically situated stitched production were available to some men as well as women within the gendered parameters of conventional needlework. By heeding their stitched command to ‘Remember Me’, we gain new insight into the quotidian lives of makers in the past.
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