A fox, a hen, human figures – all depicted on scraps of paper so small that they can comfortably nestle in the palm of your hand, and some no bigger than your fingernail. The story of how these fragile fragments survived across the centuries, and of their rediscovery and recent identification, is so full of moments of serendipity and the right people being in precisely the right place at the perfect time that it seems unbelievable. Yet all of what follows is true – and these tiny pieces have the power to evoke a world that is almost entirely lost to us today: the imaginations of 17th-century schoolgirls.
The setting for these events is Hackney – today indisputably part of London, but 350 years ago the area was still semi-rural, and a desirable place for wealthy merchants and gentry to build their country houses, conveniently close to the capital but still sufficiently removed from urban sprawl to enjoy the open space and fresh air. At this time, the 17th-century social elites were becoming increasingly interested in girls’ education and, building on the precedent of sending daughters to other households for their development, this sparked a flourishing of girls’ boarding schools. Hackney was a particularly important focus for this movement, so much so that the area was popularly known as ‘the Ladies’ University’. At these academies, middle- and upper-class girls were taught all the practical skills that they would one day use to run their own households – such as reading, writing, arithmetic, and needlework – as well as languages, music, dancing, and decorative arts.
Within this last category, a particularly fashionable pursuit involved carefully cutting out images from pre-printed sheets of designs (often grouped by category, such as birds, animals, and biblical scenes) and using them to decorate boxes and other items. Paper-cutting was seen (alongside other activities like embroidery and creating elaborate shapes from folded paper) as a suitably genteel way for young ladies to show off their taste and dexterity, and was a forerunner of the Victorian enthusiasm for découpage. It is described in household manuals of the time, particularly those of Hannah Woolley, who is known to have taught in several Hackney schools. In her A Guide to Ladies, Gentlewomen, and Maids (1668) and The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1673), Woolley writes about the ‘cutting of prints, and adorning rooms or cabinets or stands with them’, and offers advice on how to arrange images to their best effect: ‘let the houses and trees be set sensibly, as also water with ships sailing, as you put them on, observe that they have a relation to one another.’
Protected places and prehistoric pints