No needlework, either of ancient or modern times, (says Mr. Lambert,) has ever surpassed the productions of Miss Linwood. So early as 1785, these pictures had acquired such celebrity as to attract the attention of the Royal Family, to whom they were shewn at Windsor Castle. - Book of Days
Mary Linwood by Hoppner, 1800. Image @Victoria & Albert Museum
Mary Linwood, Partridges after the painting by Moses Haughton, 1798
Mary Linwood was an artist who used needlework as her material. Born in Birmingham in 1755, Mary made her first embroidered picture when she was thirteen years old. She was mistress of a private boarding school, which her mother started, but her lasting claim to fame lay in her needlework art. For nearly seventy-five years Mary imitated popular paintings in worsted embroidery. An enterprising woman, she opened an exhibition in the Hanover Square Rooms in 1798, which afterward traveled to Leicester Square, Edinburgh and Dublin. Four years before her death in 1845, her works were still exhibited in London. She embroidered her last piece when seventy-eight, although she lived to be 90 and worked as a school mistress until a year before her death. In 1844, during her annual visit to her Exhibition in London, she caught the flu and died.
Mary worked with stitches of different lengths on a fabric made especially for her in Leicester. She had coarse linen tammy cloth prepared for her as well. Her long and short stitches looked like brush strokes, with silk for highlights, and many amateurs copiesd her on a smaller scale. A good example of her work is the almost 2 ft square portrait of Napoleon in the South Kensington Museum.
Needlework image of Napoleon
Portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte embroidered with coloured worsteds in small short and long stitches By Miss Mary Linwood In gilt frame glazed English Late 18th or early 19 th centy H 2 ft 7 in W 2 ft 2 in Bequeathed by the late Miss Ellen Markland 1438 1874 This is a remarkable specimen of embroidery involving great labour to imitate a painting - A Descriptive Catalogue of the collections of tapestry and embroidery in the South Kensington Museum, Alan Cole, 1888, p.369
Miss Linwood’s worked pictures, exhibited in Leicester square, were for many years reckoned among the sights of London, and although their pretensions to artistic merit are regarded contemptuously by the present generation, they were in one sense undoubtedly wonderful productions. The exhibition contained copies after such masters as Carlo Dolci, Guido, Ruysdael, Opie, Morland, Gainsborough, Reynolds; a list that proves how great was the scope Miss Linwood’s ambition, and how catholic her taste. The whole collection was dispersed at Christie’s room after Miss Linwood’s death in 1845, when the pieces knocked down for sums far below those at which they had been valued a few years previously…Miss Linwood’s pictures, worked with untwisted soft crewel specially dyed in graduated shades on a ground of twilled linen, are really meritorious, nevertheless one cannot regret that their day, equally with that of the Berlin wool Landseers, is overpast and that we have at last learnt the limitations as well as the possibilities of the embroiderer’s delightful craft. – The Collector
Exhibition, Image @Book of Days
Although Mary Linwood’s needlework exhibits were popular during her lifetime, not everyone was enamored with her work. In 1919, Emily Leigh Lowes wrote these rather hateful statements about Mary in her book, Chats on Old Needlework (Embroidery),
The originator and moving spirit of this bad period was Miss Linwood, who conceived the idea of copying oil paintings in woolwork. She died in 1845. Would that she had never been born! When we think of the many years which English women have spent over those wickedly hideous Berlin-wool pictures, working their bad drawing and vilely crude colours into those awful canvases, and imagining that they were earning undying fame as notable women for all the succeeding ages, death was too good for Miss Linwood. The usual boiling oil would have been a fitter end! Miss Linwood made a great furore at the time of her invention, and held an exhibition in the rooms now occupied by Messrs. Puttick & Simpson, Leicester Square. Can we not imagine the shade of the great Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose home and studio these rooms had been, revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and while wandering up and down that famous old staircase forsaking his home for ever after one horrified glance at Miss Linwood’s invention?
Not only Miss Linwood, but Mrs. Delany and Miss Knowles made themselves famous for Berlin-wool pictures. The kindest thing to say is that the specimens which are supposed to have been worked by their own hands are considerably better than those of the half-dozen generations of their followers. During the middle and succeeding twenty years of the nineteenth century the notable housewife of every class amused herself, at the expense of her mind, by working cross-stitch pictures with crudely coloured wools (royal blue and rose-pink, magenta, emerald-green, and deep crimson were supposed to represent the actual colours of Nature), on very coarse canvas.
More on the topic:
The days when I can read a book cover to cover in one or two sittings are gone, but if I’d been able to free up such a large block of time, I would have finished Syrie James’s new book, The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë, a month ago. As it was, the book became a constant companion in my briefcase. I would fish it out at opportune moments to steal a few minutes reading about Charlotte, her sisters Emily and Anne, her brother Branwell, and Arthur Nicholls, the young curate who’s been hired to help out Charlotte’s father, Reverend Patrick Brontë, and who eventually marries her.
Gentle readers, Afficionados of Agatha Christie mysteries will have one more chance to see an original Miss Marple mystery on Masterpiece Mystery! this Sunday. My good friend Hillary Major has reviewed the last episode. What did she think? She thought it was well worth her while, as did I. See this episode on Sunday, July 26th, at your local PBS television station. The series airs 9 pm local time.
Good dental hygiene is not a modern concept. Toothpicks have been found alongside their owners in ancient Egyptian tombs, and the Chinese freshened their breath as early as 1600 B. C. by chewing on aromatic tree twigs. The world’s first known recipe for toothpaste, a mixture of rock salt, mint, dried iris flower, and pepper, came from Egypt. The development of toothpastes in more modern times started in the 18th century. A bicarbonate of soda or baking soda, the main raising agent in baking powder, was traditionally used for cleaning teeth and included in tooth-powder . A 19th century London Times advertisement promised an assortment of wonderful results for those who used tooth powder:
My enjoyment of the series does not blind me to the dated quality of these Agatha Christie plots. Also, Miss Marple is a woman of her time, and seeing how she boosts the egos of the males around her and makes polite “suggestions” that lead the inspectors in the right direction makes me cringe. This is how smart women once lived and how many women still get their point across – through manipulation. The murders are often solved through coincidences that are sometimes too convenient, and the mysteries themselves are contrived, too convoluted, and in many instances, weak. Despite all the red herrings thrown my way, in two out of three instances I had solved the murder halfway through the show, but I am being picky. I still prefer a good Agatha Christie mystery over almost anything aired on the cultural wasteland that t.v. has become. For production value I give this murder series. 5 stars. For entertainment, 4 stars. For quality of mystery, 3 stars.
Missed the first three episodes? You can watch two episodes online on PBS’s website 
Jane Austen wrote six novels. You can almost count them on one hand. Those books, and a smattering of Juvenilia, a few uncompleted manuscripts, and a number of letters – some fragmented, most missing blocks of years – are all that we have of Jane Austen’s legacy in writing. Yet these little bits of ivory contain such a vastness of riches that one can spend a lifetime exploring them.
You haven’t truly arrived until you’ve been imitated. Like Shakepeare, Jane’s works invite hordes of copyists, with new books, movies, games, and comics based on her work and life cropping up monthly. Satirists are having as much fun with our Jane as with Shakespeare. Action figures and finger puppets abound, and famous lines are quoted with a modern twist every day. With Shakespeare it might be, “To eat, or not to eat, that is the question,” while Jane’s famous opening line morphs into, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a writer in need of a plot must steal from Jane Austen.” We quoth our Jane evermore, but, lacking her biting wit and brilliant insights, we fall short every time.
And now it seems that the Jane Austen industry has descended into monster sequel and adaptation madness, regurgitating these popular culture books at an unholy rate. The new crop of Jane Austen adaptations include Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Mr. Darcy, Vampyre Slayer, Pride and Predator, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. What’s next? Emma and the Loch Ness Monster? King Kong Conquers Northanger Abbey? Mr. Bingley, Werewolf?
Kaye Dacus is an author and editor who has been writing fiction for more than twenty years. A former Vice President of American Christian Fiction Writers, Kaye enjoys being an active ACFW member and the fellowship and community of hundreds of other writers from across the country and around the world that she finds there. She currently serves as President of Middle Tennessee Christian Writers, which she co-founded in 2003 with three other writers. Each month, she teaches a two-hour workshop on an aspect of the craft of writing at the MTCW monthly meeting. But her greatest joy comes from mentoring new writers through jer blog and seeing them experience those “aha” moments when a tricky concept becomes clear. In June 2006, she received her Master of Arts in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. Her thesis novel, Happy Endings Inc., beca,e her first published novel, re-titled Stand-In Groom.Romance novels were amongst the first books Kaye Dacus read, so it was natural when she started writing as a young teen, that would be what she penned. Kaye, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, is a Jane Austen fanatic and loves watching and discussing British costume-drama movies with friends.
5. I see in your publicity that you were inspired by Jane Austen and Horatio Hornblower. If a movie were to be made of your book, who would play the major characters?
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