"A Charm in those Fingers": Patterns, Taste, and the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine

"There are a thousand things that everybody sees, and nobody thinks of," marvels the author of "Railway Magic," an 1855 article in the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine.¹ The writer is particularly interested in drawing attention to the sensory experience of train travel. It is not just that new parts of the country open up to the railway, or that the speed allows one to cover new territory; the actual sights of the everyday are given new meaning when seen from the window of a train. The modernity of train travel enables the traveler to see the English countryside with new eyes: the eyes of a housewife. Looking out the train window, the anonymous author asks, "And did you remark – not a spike wrenched from its good hold, not a tie un-tied, not a timber splintered? There must be a charm in those fingers indeed." The construction of the railway is the work of an especially tidy and conscientious laborer, depicted here as the domestic woman.²

As the train rushes the viewer from far to near perspective, the features of the landscape are crafted from quotidian housewifely objects: "Strips of narrow yellow ribbon widen into broad acres of golden grain; scattered skeins of silk floss are webbed into running rivers." Rural idyll and modern power merge into one image, united through a visual perspective that draws its references from needlework rather than farming or factory work. Fingers, ribbon, and silk floss feature prominently in the parts of the periodical devoted to sewing and fancy-work patterns. "Railway Magic" concludes that the railway marks out and almost creates the surrounding fields, lakes, and towns. The railway's relationship to the landscape becomes much like a pattern for an embroidered scene: "the railway itself, in the magic of distance seems the double scoring of the beautiful fields and lakes and towns along which those lines are drawn."³ The railway marks out the lines within which to fill the fields, lakes, and town.

The unlikely pairing of sewing goods and industrial technology is characteristic of the magazine's subtly industrialized depiction of women's domestic experience. I hope to demonstrate that this pairing reveals an emerging concern with the shaping of the senses in the modern world. In its first eight years, from its inception in 1852 to its upgrade and expansion in 1860, the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine combined the class aspirations of its readership with cultural interest in the related virtues of domesticity and routine. The emphasis on perception in the passage is also typical: descriptions of sewing and fancy-work patterns in the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine are consistently presented as not just keeping feminine hands busy, but as molding sensory experiences through repetition or routine. The conception of patterns and their place in women's daily lives extends beyond sewing or dressmaking to an overt patterning of everyday sensing, like that of the train passenger. For this reason, the magazine's presentation of patterns reveals much about the ways that post-industrial routine shaped the interaction of taste, class, and sensation in this period.

From its outset, the magazine identifies taste as a defining feature of the middle-class woman and the home. The way women touch, taste, see, hear, and smell their surroundings – and appear not to do so - is collapsed into an idea typically given the name of just one sense: taste, a physical and aesthetic response rife with class significance. The language used to describe the patterns takes them beyond the realm of the practical; they are a way of developing taste, inculcating a particular sensory response in the reader that she may interpret and present as feminine, middle-class aesthetic sensibility. The patterns are presented as both essential to forming a reader's sense of taste and as products of that tastefulness. Initially the magazine includes just one or two patterns but increases the number of patterns and the amount of commentary until they become a distinguishing feature of the magazine. The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine attempts to define and codify taste both...