"Mary Isabella Grant Knitting a Shawl" (ca.1850)

"Mary Isabella Grant Knitting a Shawl" (ca.1850) by Francis Grant.

This lovely painting of the artist's daughter is also one that clearly shows that the artist knows what a piece of knitting looks like.  Mary Isabella is holding fabulously long needles (not "parlour style"), with the ball of wool in a little basket on her arm.  The knitting looks like a brioche stitch, very popular in the 1840s and 50s!

"The Artist's Mother Knitting in a Flat in Paris"

"The Artist's Mother Knitting in a Flat in Paris" by Albert Ranney Chewett (1877-1965).

Maria Susan Chewett (1836-1918), née Ranney, knits in the English or "drawing-room style," with the right needle extending over the hand, much like holding a pen; this style was the "posh" way of knitting from some time during the Victorian period to the 1940s at least.  Mrs. Chewett was born in England, spent much of her married life in Canada (where her six children were born), and returned to England to live out her widowhood with her artist son and a number of his siblings.

Note that this is not what is now generally called English-style knitting, in which the wool is held in the right hand and "thrown" or wrapped around the working needle (as opposed to continental-style knitting, in which the wool is held in the left hand and "picked" or scooped up by the working needle) -- here it has more to do with the way that the needle itself is held.

This style of holding the needles was almost certainly much earlier than this Edwardian-ish painting, but for the time being this post will have the "earliest known usage" label -- more on the "drawing-room style" to come ...

British sailors knitting

Note that the original file-name is "sailors knitting out of boredom" (emphasis added)!  Sailors were usually very handy with needle and thread, so there is no reason not to believe that many of them also knitted, possibly on a regular basis. Note also their "drawing-room" style ("parlor style" in America) of holding the right-hand needle. Source, alas, unknown.

Elvina Mary Corbould

Elvina Mary Corbould was born in 1849 in Islington, then a comfortable middle- and upper-middle-class district on the northern edge of London proper.  She was the eldest of the four children of Henry Heath Corbould and his wife Ann; Henry was a member of the Corbould family of Sussex and London which produced an impressive number of artists, including two of Henry's brothers, over at least three generations.  Elvina was sent to St. Mary's school in Bury St. Edmund's, but in the same year that she was recorded there on the 1861 census, her father, a doctor, died at the age of forty, leaving Ann with four children, the youngest less than a year old.  Perhaps as a result, by the time of the next census in 1871, Elvina was recorded as a governess, presumably to at least the youngest of the family's five sons, in the household of Aster R.C. Corbould, a first cousin of her father's and already a noted artist.  Three years later, Elvina published her first books at the age of about twenty-three, The Ladies' Knitting Book and The Ladies' Crochet Book, demurely credited on the title pages to "E.M.C."  These were the first of many instruction books on a variety of needlework subjects, most of which, gratifyingly, ran to multiple printings and editions.

In 1893, in her early forties, she married Mark Anthony Robinson of Brighton, a surgeon. Robinson died in December 1911, but a few months earlier, Elvina had been enumerated on the 1911 census, though noted as "married", living with her mother and unmarried youngest brother (an artist), at no.6 Ruvigny Mansions in Putney (which was apparently Ann's family home), on the banks of the Thames. (It seems likely that Elvina and her husband were living apart because of his illness.) By the 1930s at least, Elvina was living at 24, Queen's Square, Bath, where she died 6 October 1936.

In addition to needlework manuals, Corbould published other didactic works including Side-Lights on Shakspere with Louise Rossi in 1897, Pitman's Studies in Elocution in 1909 ("A guide to the theory and practice of the art of public speaking, reciting, and reading") and Sweet Little Rogues (1876), her only exercise in fiction.

The frontispiece to Sweet Little Rogues. Note the "comforters" worn by all three of the children! (The illustrations are uncredited; it is entirely possible, given the artistic bent of many of the Corboulds, that they were drawn by Elvina herself.)

Works on knitting and needlework

1874

• The ladies' knitting-book (1st series)
  
• The ladies' crochet-book

1876

• The ladies' work-book (possibly this one?)
  
• The ladies' netting-book 

1877

• The teacher's assistant in needle work
• The ladies' crochet book (1st series)
  
• The ladies' crochet book (3rd series)
  

1878

• The ladies' knitting book (2nd series)

1879

• The ladies' crochet book *
• The ladies' knitting book
  
• The ladies' crewel embroidery book
  

1882

• Mother's knitter: containing some patterns of things for little children
  

1884

• Directions for knitting drawers **
  

1887

• The useful knitter 

1890

• The knitter's note book
  

*Possibly a pirated or thoroughly-adapted American edition. 

**Known only from the knitting-books list at Booksandwriters.co.uk.

Sources

"Elvina Mary Corbould" in FamilySearch Family Tree (accessed 12 May 2021).

"Elvina Mary Corbould" at Gutenberg.org (accessed 12 May 2021).

"Elvina Mary Corbould" at the Online Books Page (accessed 12 May 2021).

"Elvina Mary Corbould" at WorldCat (accessed 12 May 2021).

Poulter, George F.C.  The Corbould genealogy. Orig. Ipswich : Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, 1935, available in PDF form via Corbould.com.