Stitches from the soul: Elizabeth Parker's confession

Elizabeth Parker's sampler contains no pretty pictures but it is part of the Victoria and Albert Museum sampler collection. What makes it special are Elizabeth's embroidered words that tell her sad tale. She was born in 1813 to a poor family and forced to leave home for employment as a nurserymaid at the age of 13. She was treated cruelly and was once thrown down the stairs when she spurned her employer's sexual advances. She was abused to the extent that she considered suicide. She embroidered her desperate feelings on canvas where they remain as a testament to the sorry lot of the poor servant girl.

The poignancy of Elizabeth’s words is heightened by their painstaking depic ion in letters formed of tiny cross stitches, in stark red on a plain linen ground, and by her breaking off mid sentence – what will become of my soul – followed by blank space.

Now an American historian, Maureen Daly Goggin, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Arizona State University, has uncovered new information which reveals that Elizabeth's fate was not to die young and alone.Like her mother, she became a schoolteacher at the Ashburnham charity school, in her home village, and at some point in the 1850s was allowed to move into the Ashburnham almshouses. She lived there until she died, on 10 April 1889, aged 76. Although Elizabeth never married, she raised her sister's daughter, who remained living with her aunt into her twenties. It seems that after such troubled years of young womanhood Elizabeth went on to live a moderately comfortable life, surrounded by family.

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