Recently the following amusing item was going around on Twitter:
I have some bad news and some good news. First the good news: there
is an Edith-Anne. Her name is actually Patty Polk, and she lived in
Maryland around 1800.
Now the bad news: the image above is almost certainly fake. It may be
a purely digital fabrication (from whole cloth, ha ha), or more
likely, I think, it is a real physical object, but of recent
manufacture.
I wouldn't waste blog space just to crap on this harmless bit of fake
history. I want to give credit where it is due, to Patty Polk
who really did do this, probably with much greater proficiency.
Why I think it's fake
I have not looked into this closely, because I don't think the
question merits a lot of effort. But I have two reasons for thinking
so.
The main one is that the complaint “Edith-Anne … hated every Stitch”
would have taken at least as much time and effort as the rest of the
sampler, probably more. I find it unlikely that Edith-Anne would have
put so much work—so many more hated stitches—into her rejection.
Also, the work is implausibly poor. These samplers were stitched by
girls typically between the ages of 7 and 14, and their artisanship
was much, much better than either section of this example. Here is a
sampler made by Lydia Stocker in 1798 at the age of 12:
Here's one by Louisa Gauffreau, age 8:
Compare these
with Edith-Anne's purported cross-stitching. One tries to imagine how
old she is, but there seems to be no good answer. The crooked
stitching is the work of a very young girl, perhaps five or six. But
the determination behind the sentiment, and the perseverance that
would have been needed to see it through, belong to a much older girl.
Of course one wouldn't expect Edith-Anne to do good work on her hated
sampler. But look at the sampler at right, wrought by a young Emily
Dickinson, who is believed to have disliked the work and to have
intentionally done it poorly. Even compared with this, Edith-Anne's
claimed sampler doesn't look like a real sampler.
Patty Polk
Web search for “hated every stitch” turns up several other versions of
Edith-Anne, often named Polly Cook1 or
Mary Pitt2 (“This was done by Mary
Pitt / Who hated every stitch of it”) but without any reliable source.
However, Patty Polk is reliably sourced. Bolton and
Coe's American Samplers3
describes Miss Polk's sampler:
POLK, PATTY. [Cir. 1800. Kent County, Md.] 10 yrs. 16"×16".
Stem-stitch. Large garland of pinks, roses, passion flowers,
nasturtiums, and green leaves; in center, a white tomb with “G W” on
it, surrounded by forget-me-nots. “Patty Polk did this and she hated
every stitch she did in it. She loves to read much more.”
The description was provided by Mrs. Frederic Tyson, who
presumably owned or had at least seen the sampler. Unfortunately,
there is no picture. The “G W” is believed to refer to George
Washington, who died in 1799.
There is a lively market in designs for pseudo-vintage
samplers that you can embroider yourself and “age”. One that features Patty
Polk is produced by Falling
Star Primitives; I will include an image if I can get permission.
References
1. Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the
Making of the Feminine. Routledge, 1989. p. 132.
2. Wilson, Erica. Needleplay.
Scribner, 1975. p. 67.
3. Bolton, Ethel Stanwood and Eva Johnston
Coe. American Samplers. Massachusetts Society of the
Colonial Dames of America, 1921. p. 210.
[ Thanks to several Twitter users for suggesting gender-neutral vocabulary. ]
[ Addendum: Twitter user Kathryn
Allen observes that Edith-Anne hated
cross-stitch so much that she made another
sampler.
Case closed. ]