When this you see, remember me

In 1598 an Englishwoman stitched a name, a birthday and a year into linen. The cloth is still at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Jane Bostocke made it. The inscription says she finished the sampler in 1598, and that her cousin Alice Lee was born on the afternoon of 23 November 1596, a Tuesday. The linen is worked in silk, metal thread, seed pearls and beads, with motifs taken from the family crests. Earlier samplers were mostly reference sheets, a set of stitches kept in case an embroiderer wanted them again. The Victoria and Albert Museum calls this the earliest dated British sampler to survive. It names Alice, and the afternoon she was born.

By the early eighteenth century the English sampler was something to hang on a wall. It had grown squarer, with an alphabet, a border and a verse. By the middle of the century a house and a garden were a favourite subject. A girl stitched her name, her age and her town into it, and the finished cloth was framed and left up in the house. It was schoolwork, and it was also a signature.

One line was stitched often enough to last a century and to cross the Atlantic. “When this you see remember me.” An English sampler at the Cooper Hewitt in New York, from the early eighteenth century, carries that line and the name Mary Soveli. On 7 November 1835 Susan Nash, an English girl of nine, set it down with her name and the date: “When this you see remember me when I am dead and gone.” Martha Earl of Hackensack, New Jersey, worked hers around 1787, when she was about six. The cloth gives her name and her town, “Martha Earl is my name, Hackensack is my station,” then “When I am dead and in my grave and all my bones are rotten,” and then the day she was born, 1 August 1781. The plea is spelled as a child spells: “For this you sea remember me that I are not forgottin.”

She still had the sampler in 1842. She was a widow by then, and her mother was applying for a United States pension on the service of Martha’s father, a private in the Revolutionary War. The family had to show that Martha was their child. She sent the sampler because it carried her date of birth, and she called it one she had “worked when a small girl and went to school.” Her uncle, Cornelius Terhune, said he had been present when she was baptised. The Pension Office granted her mother $51.33 a year.

A sampler has room for a name, a place, an age and one sentence. A child of six has about that much to say. The sentence is not addressed to one person who might answer. It is addressed to anyone who stops in front of the cloth, including people who were not born when she stitched it. The girls who stitched it were asking to be remembered by strangers.

Jane Bostocke’s linen has been looked at for more than four hundred years. Martha Earl’s name is still fixed to the day she was born. The request was small. The cloth has kept it.