A compelling history of the dark side of material culture.

'Their Darkest Materials' is about the seamy, dark, sometimes creepy underside of material culture and textile history. A sort of 'Horrible History' for grown-ups.

In 'Their Darkest Materials', we creep through nineteenth century asylums, debtors' prisons, charity schools, pubs and marketplaces; the 'stews' (brothels) of the city, school-rooms, collapsing London houses, workhouse toilets, small-town waxwork exhibitions in back rooms and see ladies knitting in grand Georgian drawing rooms; following the unravelling thread of history's textiles.

We'll find out which Victorian novelist's mauve ribbon was trapped in her coffin lid and discover clothing-as-evidence in an infamous London burking case ("Burking" as in "Burke and Hare").

And we'll watch a Yorkshire farmer's wife knit a blue stocking on the morning of her murder and a caddish, handsome soldier murdering his stocking-knitting new wife. And we'll spend time in the county asylum with a world famous dyer's incendiarist wife and an embroiderer who used her art to say the unsayable.

Chapters:

1. Grim and Less Grim Deaths: The Approach of the Destroyer, the Partly-Murdered Knitter & Other Tales
2. The Bewitched Spinning Wheel & Other Tales
3. Murder, Mayhem and Knitting as Evidence
4. The Small Woman: The Nineteenth Century Needlewoman
5. "Virtute et Industria". The Stick, the Carrot and the Virtuous Child & Also the Trope of the Extremely Old Knitter
6. The Lost: Runaways - Slaves, Servants, Apprentices and The Captive
7. "Twelve Bobbins Spinning". Charity Schools & Poor Houses
8. Prisons and Idle Loiterers
9. The Dyer Who Watched Storms and also Concerning A Properly Shaped Female
10. Nathaniel Smith, the Knitting Schoolmaster



232 pages. Perfect-bound paperback. Printed in UK. Published by Pretty Baa Lambs Press.

ISBN: 978-1-9163391-0-1
e-ISBN: 978-1-9163391-1-8


PDF version (non interactive) in separate listing.

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UK delivery - free, second class Royal Mail.
Everywhere else - £14 Royal Mail second class. (Sorry, this is what it costs us, just for the postage alone, most countries, we stand the cost of packaging!)



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