Andrew Simpson: Young Helen Taylor….. an embroidered sampler …. and heaps of twists and turns

Monday 24 April 2023

Young Helen Taylor….. an embroidered sampler …. and heaps of twists and turns

I am looking at the embroidered sampler made by Helen Taylor in 1834.

The sampler 1834

It is a beautiful piece of work, and she was sufficiently proud of her accomplishment to add her name and age.

As befitted a work which also carries an image of the village church in Dore it is heavy with religious messages.

It belongs to Ron Marsden whose direct ancestor was Helen, and it has been handed down through the female side of his family.

It is a treasured possession taking him back 189 years to that young girl and the small village of Dore which was in Derbyshire but is now a suburb of Sheffield.

And what particularly stands out for Ron is the verse, “This world is a city full of crooked streets

Death is the marketplace were all men meets

If life was a merchandise that sold would buy

The rich would live and the poor must die”.

Like the other verses there is that emphasis on the purity of the world to come but perhaps also a challenge to the existing social order.

And that got me looking for it’s origins. It appears on at least one other sampler from the North of England just four years earlier,* and appears on an 17th century gravestone.**

But the first two lines are from The Two Noble Kinsmen written in 1634 by William Shakespeare in collaboration with John Fletcher. It is described as a tragicomedy but reading the plot summary along with the first scene I think we are into heavy nastiness, but we shall see.**

Baptism, 1822

So far, I know very little about Helen. She was born in 1822 and baptised in the church for which she made the sampler.

Her parents were Isaac and Sarah and she had four siblings. Mr. Taylor described himself as a “saw grinder” on the 1841 census and the absence of Sara on the same census suggest she may have died. And given that the youngest of the children had been born in 1830 it may well be that if Sarah had died it will have been after that date.

As for Helen apart from the record of her baptism and her appearance on the 1841 census there is as yet no more official records of her existence.

The family in 1841

But Ron thinks she may have been married and may have died in child birth, and there isa reference to a Helen/Ellen Taylor dying in Ecclesall Bierlow in 1854.

As yet I can't find exactly where the Taylor's lived in Dore, but I know that the siblings continue to turn up in the historic records.

So the twist and turns continue.