The Wardle Family and its Circle: Textile Production in the Arts and Crafts Era by Brenda M. King (review)

In The Wardle Family and its Circle: Textile Production in the Arts and Crafts Era, Brenda M. King weaves a tightly woven and meticulously researched story of the Wardle family, its textile production, and its circle of influential friends from the mid-nineteenth century to the early part of the twentieth. As such, the book fills a void in the history of Victorian textiles and makes plain why this was a rich time for design, printing, and embroidering of fabric. The book makes clear, too, that the Wardle family were superb experts in all of these areas. Organized into four chapters with an introduction and a conclusion, the book includes twenty-eight beautifully colored plates of Leek embroidery, as well as a useful appendix on materials connected to the Wardle family.

In the introduction, King carefully stitches the history of Leek, a market town in the county of Staffordshire, England, and of the Wardle family during the Victorian era. The most notable members are Thomas, a dyer and printer of fabrics; his wife Elizabeth (née Young Wardle), a talented embroiderer and leader extraordinaire; and Elizabeth’s brother George Young Wardle, a designer who first worked with William Morris and then with Thomas. (As far as this reviewer could tell, although Elizabeth and her brother had the last name “Wardle,” there was no relation to the Wardle family that Elizabeth married into.) Later Thomas and Elizabeth’s children would join them in the family businesses. The Wardle family cultivated important links to the Anglo-Indian silk trade, becoming one of the largest importers of silk fabric and thread. As the introduction makes clear, King has great reverence for the entire Wardle family, a stance that marks all the chapters.

Elizabeth Wardle is often given short shrift in textile histories of this period, even in the very description of this book by the publishers: “Elizabeth Wardle, embroiderer, worked with many major architects such as R. N. Shaw, G. G. Scott Jnr and J. D. Sedding,” they write (“The Wardle Family and its Circle: Textile Production in the Arts and Crafts Era,” Boydell & Brewer [Boydell & Brewer], par. 2). This characterization paints her as a helper and a crafts worker—true, but diminishing of what Elizabeth actually achieved during this time. Indeed, three of the chapters focus almost entirely on Elizabeth Wardle’s contributions to color, design, administration, mentoring, embroidery, and entrepreneurship. The book is to be credited with introducing Elizabeth Wardle’s many skills and accomplishments.

The first chapter, “The Wardle Family and its Circle,” traces the personal and professional webs of notable architects, designers, needleworkers, and others in the textile industry that Thomas and Elizabeth cultivated. Morris, for example, was a close friend sharing interests and connections in fabric, thread, and design. Like Morris, John Ruskin, and others, the Wardles adhered to the Arts and Crafts movement that called attention to the past for design and color in fabrics and thread. As Ruskin made clear, the fine medieval, hand-wrought craftsmanship was to be valued and engaged; beauty, not perfection, was the goal. This chapter introduces Thomas Wardle’s dye and print shop for fabric and the Leek Embroidery Society that Elizabeth ran, among her other responsibilities. King notes how their textile influences ran throughout England, Europe, and India as they participated in many exhibitions and travel in these regions.

The second chapter, “The Business of Stitch,” introduces Elizabeth as a leader in and of stitchery; her own stitch work was exquisite and her leadership outstanding. As the head of the Leek Embroidery Society, Elizabeth brought the national organization to great repute in both ecclesiastical and domestic stitchery as magazine articles, books on needlework, and exhibitions of the day made clear. It was the first society to work with India’s tussah silk thread and Wardle’s dyed and printed tussah cloth, often...