We have a sampler in our sitting room inherited from my family with the quotation from Ecclesiastes 12:1 ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth while the evil days come not nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say I have no pleasure in them’. This was embroidered by Sally Crossland aged fifteen in 1813, and I have often wondered how and why such a quotation was chosen by her or for her. Although we will never know how and why, I now have a far better understanding of the circumstances in which such samplers with such quotations were worked in Scotland from the above publication by Naomi Tarrant, who is a former Curator of Costume and Textiles at the Royal Scottish Museum, now the National Museum of Scotland.

These samplers are a revelation of the life of young girls and their handiwork in Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period when we know so very little about the life of young girls and what occupied their hearts and their hands. The author has dedicated her study to the sampler makers, known and unknown, who laboured to produce these ‘efforts of an infant hand’ and infants they sometimes were. Sally Crossland was one of the older ones among the many names commemorated on samplers, some of them younger than twelve and a few of them as young as seven or eight. Who were they and from what sort of families did they come? The author has spent a great deal of her time and research work on which this book is based investigating the family background of the girls and their social and educational position. Mostly the girls were from the families of professional classes, daughters of lawyers, merchants or burgesses, who lived in the larger towns and cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth and Aberdeen, although the evidence indicates that by the later part of the eighteenth century the social background was widening. The education of girls is part of the explanation for the growing numbers of samplers throughout the period, although surprisingly there are very few surviving samplers which were worked by daughters of the nobility, even though these children might be expected to have had the opportunity of a good education.

An important chapter (Two) places the making of samplers within the context of education of girls in Scotland, for it is now thought that the majority of samplers were made in a school of some kind, or with a sewing and embroidery teacher, rather than at home with the mother or female relative. Parish schools were created through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while private schools were set up by individual teachers. Enlightened estate owners started schools for the children of their estate workers, as of course did enlightened mill owners such as the Owen family at New Lanark. Some of the samplers provide evidence for the teacher or school that had taught the girl the arts of sewing and embroidery; for instance, Margaret Sheddon’s beautiful (and beautifully preserved) sampler dated 1812 records that it was done at New Lanark School, and names Robert and Mrs Owen and Miss Dale – who may have been the teacher (pl 2.3). Reading was of course the dominant purpose of the establishment of such schools and reading the Bible the prime purpose. It was used as a textbook and thus the source of many of the texts woven into samplers (although by no means all).

Apart from the quotations from the Bible (or poetry), what else was included in a sampler apart from the girl’s name? The main function of a sampler was to show the child’s skill in embroidering the letters of the alphabet, so these are usually the dominant motif, in capitals or cursive script. Strangely, the alphabet in a Scottish sampler is nearly always embroidered in alternate red and green letters. Otherwise there is little to distinguish a Scottish product from ones produced elsewhere in Britain, although it appears to have been customary to include the initials of parents and other relatives, and siblings. These initials frequently have little crowns woven over the top, of different designs. Do these signify anything in particular? Many questions like this are raised in this magnificent volume and the author’s analysis of the different elements in the samplers is superbly illustrated by the 121 full coloured plates. This is a very important volume for helping our understanding of the history behind these labours of love that some of us are privileged to own.