“An Index of Gentility”: Representations of Needlework in Dombey and Son

Abstract

Enlightened by scholarships in recent decades about the cultural significance of women’s embroidery, this article attends to the scenes and activities featuring needlework in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Through his representations of the nineteenth-century needlework language in this novel, Dickens provides for readers a window into Victorian women’s everyday performance of embroidery. By focusing on his representations of needlework in the novel, this article reveals how the seemingly trivial performance of embroidery were embedded in Victorian schemas of gender and class configuration, and more importantly, how Dickens has artistically represented—while wishfully reproduced—the Victorian ideal of the gender divide through his rendering of needlework language.

Keywords:

• Dombey and Son
• needlework
• fancy work
• Victorian era
• domesticity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their detailed reading and inspirational comments. My thanks also go to Dr. Jia Xu for her helpful suggestions for my revision of this essay.

Notes

1 In Victorian Needlework, Kathryn Ledbetter defines fancy works as various items of needlework handmade by leisured-class women to decorate their household and display their social and financial status: “The type of needlework practiced for this purpose during the first half of the Victorian period was called fancy work, usually indicating decorative embroidery, Berlin wool work, crochet, knitting, or tatting” (2012, 2). The examples of fancy works she lists include: foot warmers, embroidered needle books, footstools, postage stamp cases, lace borders for under-linens, sofa cushions, antimacassars, crochet garters, music folio stands, embroidered hanging cushions, footstools with hot-water bottles, embroidered fans, jewel cases, lamp shades, umbrella cases, work bags, etc. (2012, 3).

2 Notably, when Florence is to marry, all the chores of plain sewing for her wedding dress are accomplished by Susan Nipper, who “work[s] away at her side, all day, with the concentrated zeal of fifty sempstresses” (818).

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Huazhong University of Science and Technology under Grant [No. 2022WKZDJC006].

Notes on contributors

Houliang Chen

Houliang Chen is at School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.