Workbox

338 years ago, in a village called Shacklewell, a Quaker girl plied her needle, laying fine silk threads across card and making the smallest of stitches to fasten them down. Hannah Downes, the teenaged daughter of a wine cooper, had no inkling that the needlework she wrought would be the key for twenty-first-century viewers to untangle the knotty history of Quaker women’s art before 1800. Hannah’s embroidered workbox, completed in 1683 and in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1935, houses not only Hannah’s needlework, but also that of at least four generations of descendants, spanning nearly 200 years. The box and its contents, passed down primarily through the female line of Hannah’s descendants, illustrate how central needlework education was to female members of the middling sort, both Quaker and non-Quaker, and how needlework styles changed from the eve of the Glorious Revolution to the middle of the Industrial Revolution.

Hannah Downes, ‘Embroidered Workbox’. 1683. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Hannah, a London Quaker born to two Quaker parents and eventually the wife of two Quakers also of the city, was deeply immersed in the capital’s early Quaker community. Though a relatively large number of samplers and other needle-worked objects made by Quaker girls in seventeenth-century London have survived, Hannah’s suite is the only one in a public collection known to have been made at a specific Quaker school. While the box includes the eighteenth-century needle-worked pictures and Victoria era purses of her descendants, it is Hannah’s seventeenth-century objects that make up the bulk of the box’s contents. In addition to the workbox, Hannah made two samplers, a sampler woven around a strip of whalebone, a woven cane string, beadwork fruit, a gold and hairwork trinket, two straw-work needle books, two embroidered pincushions with two matching boxes, a purse shaped like bellows, and a needle lace purse. It is actually Hannah’s second sampler, wrought in 1684, that enables us to link it to a specific school: its inscription reads, ‘HannaH DOwneS wrOUght thIS At ShACkeLWeLL In 1684’. Shacklewell, situated in Hackney, was the first official Quaker girls’ school, established by the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, in 1668 in order ‘to Instruct younge lasses & maydens in whatsever thinges was civill & useful in ye creation’ (Fox, Journal). Some of Downes’ objects are typical of well-educated seventeenth-century schoolgirls, such as samplers and bead-worked goods, while others seem to be distinctive to Quakers and other girls from nonconforming Christian sects, such as woven cane strings and bellows purses.

What unifies Downes’ objects is their vibrancy and ornateness. They are brighter, more colourful, and often of finer materials than similar objects made by non-Quaker schoolgirls in the late seventeenth century. This is surprising, given that Quakers promoted plainness of behaviour, speech, clothing, and furnishings from the sect’s beginnings in the late 1640s. Fox expounded often on the importance of plainness, writing in 1657, ‘keep in your plain fashion, that ye may judge the world’s vanity and its spirit in its vain fashions, and show a constant spirit in the truth and plainness’ (Fox, Collection). The contrast between the plainness endorsed by Fox and the lack of plainness in needlework stitched at the school he founded is jarring. The complicated contradiction between Quaker doctrine and Quaker girls’ and women’s art lies at the heart of my thesis. Assessing and understanding this disjunction is no easy feat. Almost no documentation about the artistic education and production of seventeenth-century Quaker girls and women survives. Given this, then, we must read Downes’ objects like we would a will, letter, or journal, yellowed from age and handling.

Suite of objects made by Hannah Downes and her descendants, 1680s-1860s, photograph taken circa 1935. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Studying Downes’ suite reveals the use of highly decorative, high-quality materials, evidence of not only her family’s, but also the London Quaker community’s, wealth. The back of Downes’ workbox, for instance, is covered in a patterned brocade with woven silver threads and opening the box’s interior compartment reveals a pair of kidskin gloves so supple they fit into a walnut shell. Additionally, the two scent bottles in the box have caps with etched flowers, in contrast to all other known scent bottles found in early modern boxes, which have unadorned pewter caps. Such details suggest a level of conspicuous consumption made possible by her family’s economic standing and the fact that many elite London Quakers (or Friends), including Downes’ second husband and son-in-law, were involved in the textile industries and therefore had access to superior haberdashery. The Friends’ reputation for textile-based supremacy was so ubiquitous it was mocked in satirical texts such as The Quakers Art of Courtship (1689): ‘if it were not for Friends how should so many thousand poor Families be kept on work for the Weaving and making of Ribbons, Laces, Flower'd Silks, Fans, Feathers, Vizors, Bulls, Beads, Nose Jewels, Farthingals, Pickadiles, and the like; Jewellers, Tailors, Lace-men, Embroiderers […] might go hang themselves, did not Friends support their Trades, and lay out their Stocks for the Maintenance of their Families’.

Another clue in the Downes suite demonstrates that it was not just Quaker fathers, brothers, and sons who were involved in the textile trades; Quaker girls and women were, too. Part of the verse on Downes’ 1684 sampler, the one that mentions Shacklewell, reads, ‘That I MaY Learn Both Art and SkILL TO Get MY LIVIng WIth MY HandS SO I MaY Be Free FroM aLL BandS AnD MY OWne DaMe I Then MaY Be And Free FroM ALL Such SLaVerY That CoMeS ThroUgh Want Of HOUSeWIferY’. Downes’ surprisingly proto-feminist inscription asserts that the art and skill that is required when stitching will lead to her own financial success, allowing her to become emotionally and fiscally independent. Like her teacher and the Quaker community to which she belonged, Downes viewed needlework as useful for financial reasons. Friends sought and expected more from female Quakers than only being housewives — they counted on women to participate in business. 

These clues are just the beginning of what Downes’ workbox and its contents can tell us about elite Quaker girls and women in early modern London. We know more about Hannah then we do about most seventeenth-century English girls – from when and whom she married to what school she attended – but we cannot fully understand why she, an upstanding member of a society that promoted plainness, made such vibrant, decorative pieces of needlework. Her box and its contents tell us more about nonconforming girlhood in the seventeenth century than do most pieces of needlework, yet they cannot remedy the disparity between how we today believe Quakers to have acted during this period and how they actually did.

Isabella Rosner is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at King’s College London.

Selected Bibliography.

Fox, George. A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry of that Ancient, Eminent and Faithful Servant of Jesus Christ, George Fox. ed. Thomas Ellwood (London: Thomas Northcott, 1694).
Fox, George. A Collection of Many Select and Christian Epistles, Letters and Testimonies, Written on Sundry Occasions, By That Ancient, Eminent, Faithful Friend and Minister of Christ Jesus, George Fox (Philadelphia: Marcus T. C. Gould, 1831).
Anon. The Quakers Art of Courtship, or, The Yea-and-Nay Academy of Complements (London: 1689).

14 April 2022.