Whereas in the Middle Ages embroidery was the domain of Queen and her Ladies, by the 18th century the craft had slipped down the social scale so that it was often little more than a way of teaching young girls the alphabet and simple moral lessons.
But in the 19th century it was also used as therapeutic tool for the sick or the destitute, and also as a means for campaigners to highlight their cause. Dorothy Phelan, the curator of the Point of the Needle exhibition at the Dorset County Museum shows Jennifer Chevalier a striking piece embroidered by Esther Stuart in 1836. Dorothy Bromiley Phelan, The Point of the Needle: Five Centuries of Samplers and Embroideries, The Dovecote Press, ISBN: 1 874336 97 0, £6.95 Picture reproduced with the kind permission of the author
