No wonder little Rosamond was unequal to such labour, and her half-guinea was squandered in extravagant purchases. Miss Edgeworth, trained in her father’s theory that children should be always occupied, was a good deal distressed by the fruits of their industry. The “chatting girls cutting up silk and gold paper,” whom Miss Austen watched with unconcern, would have fretted Miss Edgeworth’s soul, unless she knew that sensible needle-cases, pin-cushions, and work-bags were in process of construction. Yet the celebrated “rational toy-shop,” with its hand-looms instead of dolls, and its machines for drawing in perspective instead of tin soldiers and Noah’s arks, stood responsible for the inutilities she scorned. And what of the charitable lady in “Lazy Lawrence,” who is “making a grotto,” and buying shells and fossils for its decoration? Even a filigree basket, which had at least the grace of impermanence, seems desirable by comparison with a grotto. It will be remembered also that Madame de Rosier, the “Good French Governess,” traces her lost son, that “promising young man of fourteen,” by means of a box he has made out of refuse bits of shell thrown aside in a London restaurant; while the son in turn discovers a faithful family servant through the medium of a painted pasteboard dog, which the equally ingenious domestic has exposed for sale in a shop. It was a good thing in Miss Edgeworth’s day to cultivate the “ornamental arts,” were it only for the reunion of families.
Pasteboard, a most ungrateful and unyielding material, was the basis of so many household decorations that a little volume, published in the beginning of the last century, is devoted exclusively to its possibilities. This book, which went through repeated editions, is called “The Art of Working in Pasteboard upon Scientific Principles”; and it gives minute directions for making boxes, baskets, tea-trays, caddies,—even candlesticks, and “an inkstand in the shape of a castle with a tower,”—a baffling architectural design. What patience and ingenuity must have been expended upon this pasteboard castle, which had a wing for the ink well, a wing for the sand box, five circular steps leading up to the principal entrance, a terrace which was a drawer, a balcony surrounded by a “crenelled screen,” a tower to hold the quills, a vaulted cupola which lifted like a lid, and a lantern with a “quadrilateral pyramid” for its roof, surmounted by a real pea or a glass bead as the final bit of decoration. There is a drawing of this edifice, which is as imposing as its dimensions will permit; and there are four pages of mysterious instructions which make the reader feel as though he were studying architecture by correspondence.
Far more difficult of accomplishment, and far more useless when accomplished,—for they could not even hold pens and ink,—were the Grecian temples and Gothic towers, made of pasteboard covered with marbled paper, and designed as “elegant ornaments for the mantelpiece.” A small Ionic temple requires ten pages of directions. It is built of “the best Bristol-board, except the shafts of the pillars and some of the decorations, which are made of royal drawing-paper”; and its manufacturers are implored not to spare time, trouble, or material, if they would attain to anything so classic. “The art of working in pasteboard,” says the preface of this engaging little book, “may be carried to a high degree of usefulness and perfection, and may eventually be productive of substantial benefits to young persons of both sexes, who wisely devote their leisure hours to pleasing, quiet, and useful recreations, preferably to frivolous, noisy, and expensive amusements.”
A pleasing, quiet, and useful recreation which wasted nothing but eyesight,—and that nobody valued,—was pricking pictures with pins. The broad lines and heavy shadows were pricked with stout pins, the fine lines and high lights with little ones, while a toothed wheel, sharply pointed, was used for large spaces and simple decorative designs. This was an ambitious field of art, much of the work being of a microscopic delicacy. The folds of a lady’s dress could be pricked in such film-like waves that only close scrutiny revealed the thousand tiny holes of which its billowy softness was composed. The cleanness and dryness of pins commend them to our taste after a long contemplation of varnish and glue pots; of “poonah work,” which was a sticky sort of stencilling; of “Japan work,” in which embossed figures were made of “gum-water, thickened to a proper consistence with equal parts of bole ammoniac and whiting”; of “Chinese enamel,” which was a base imitation of ebony inlaid with ivory; and of “potichomanie,” which converted a piece of English glass into something that “not one in a hundred could tell from French china.” We sympathize with the refined editor of the “Monthly Museum,” who recommends knotting to his female readers, not only because it had the sanction of a queen,
Who, when she rode in coach abroad,
Was always knotting threads;
but because of its “pure nature” and “innocent simplicity.” “I cannot but think,” says this true friend of my sex, “that shirts and smocks are unfit for any lady of delicacy to handle; but the shuttle is an easy flowing object, to which the eye may remove with propriety and grace.”
Grace was never overlooked in our great-grandmother’s day, but took rank as an important factor in education. A London schoolmistress, offering in 1815 some advice as to the music “best fitted for ladies,” confesses that it is hard to decide between the “wide range” of the pianoforte and the harp-player’s “elegance of position,” which gives to her instrument “no small powers of rivalry.” Sentiment was interwoven with every accomplishment. Tender mottoes, like those which Miss Euphemia Dundas entreats Thaddeus of Warsaw to design for her, were painted upon boxes and hand-screens. Who can forget the white leather “souvenir,” adorned with the words “Toujours cher,” which Miss Euphemia presses upon Thaddeus, and which that attractive but virtuous exile is modestly reluctant to accept. A velvet bracelet embroidered with forget-me-nots symbolized friendship. A handkerchief, designed as a gift from a young girl to her betrothed, had a celestial sphere worked in one corner, to indicate the purity of their flame; a bouquet of buds and blossoms in another, to mark the pleasures and the brevity of life; and, in a third, Cupid playing with a spaniel, “as an emblem of the most passionate fidelity.” Even samplers, which represented the first step in the pursuit of accomplishments, had their emblematic designs no less than their moral axioms. The village schoolmistress, whom Miss Mitford knew and loved, complained that all her pupils wanted to work samplers instead of learning to sew; and that all their mothers valued these works of art more than they did the neatest of caps and aprons. The sampler stood for gentility as well as industry. It reflected credit on the family as well as on the child. At the bottom of a faded canvas, worked more than a hundred years ago, and now hanging in a great museum of art, is this inspiring verse:—
I have done this that you may see
What care my parents took of me.