Irish Needlework Samplers

By Mary O'Callaghan

A young girl in 18th or 19th century Ireland would have expected to live a quiet, useful life, but not one that was going to involve something that people would be praising her for centuries later. If her family was not well off, she would have been lucky to get any education before the introduction of the free Irish National Schools in the 1830s. After that, she would probably have got a basic primary education. In the 1841 Irish census, 41.46% of Irish females were literate, compared with 53.93% of males. Only 18.41% of females could both read and write, while 23.05% could read only. If the girl's family was well-off, she would generally have got a reasonably good, but still fairly basic, education, perhaps from a governess or in a private school. Whether from a wealthy background or not, the girl would probably have been very religious. If the girl was from a well-to-do family, she wasn't supposed to work. The only fairly respectable job for a girl or woman from the upper or middle classes, who had fallen on hard times, was that of governess. If the girl was from a lower middle class or working class background, her options were still pretty limited. She could generally just go into service or work in a shop or a factory, though some also became teachers in the 19th century. There were lots of jobs which, no matter what her background, there was no way the girl was going to be allowed do them, as she was female. She wasn't going to get to be a lawyer, a politician, an engineer or a priest. Nor would she get a job as a postman, a carpenter or a miner. The girl wouldn't be getting a vote, so she couldn't make her mark that way. If she married, she would probably marry young. Her husband would then own everything, and she would be seen under law as being his property. She was likely to have many children, and some of them would probably die young. There was a strong chance that she wouldn't live very long herself. Hence, apart from through family life, that young girl heading into adulthood was unlikely to really be able to make her mark on the world. The idea that she would create items that would be on display in museums 200 years later would have seemed pretty far-fetched. And yet this is just what happened, in the case of some young girls. These girls left beautiful gifts for posterity. They left the needlework samplers that they made during childhood and their teenage years. They left samplers which were framed and displayed by families, and which were passed down through families, sometimes being recorded in wills. A family also often passed down the history of the young girl who made the sampler. The samplers are still valued and some are displayed in museums and in grand houses. Usually museum items are created by master craftsmen and, occasionally, craftswomen, who have had many years of training and many years of experience. It is very rare for museum artefacts, which generally need to be of very high quality, to be made by children and teenagers. And yet this is the case with samplers. There is another unusual feature of these artefacts. Samplers are folk art and little remains of folk art. As Maureen Wlodarczyk notes, "Those things, often called "folk art" in the antiques trade, are scarce due to their fragile nature or purely utilitarian purpose". Yet we still have some samplers. Moreover folk art very rarely has the name, age, location and perhaps school of the creator. Again, samplers are the exception. In this book, the author looks at the nature of samplers, particularly Irish ones, and what we can learn from them. She describes particular types of samplers, such as map samplers. She looks too at why Irish girls made samplers, and at the contents of the samplers, including motifs and texts. This 2024 book has about thirty-five colour photos of samplers and an appendix list of Irish, or probably Irish, samplers.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CCCQZD6R
• ISBN13: 9798853733992
• Release Date: July 2023
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 231 Pages
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 0.5" x 7.0"