"The need which the writer has felt in common with many others, of a work on Knitting, adapted to American usage,
combined with several years experience in and close attention to that beautiful and useful art, has emboldened her
to place before the public, the following little book, with a sincere wish that it may be found to meet the wants
of her fair country-women" -- from the preface.
Beth Chamberlain, knitter and librarian/historian, has tracked down what may be the first American knitting book -- not the first knitting book published in America (which was a reprint of Mrs. Lambert's The Hand-book of Needlework in 1842), but the first knitting book written in America for American knitters.
This is Lonely Hours : A Text Book of Knitting, by An American Lady, published by E. Gaskill of Philadelphia in 1849 -- you can read Beth's post about her research and discovery here. What is distinctive about Lonely Hours is that the patterns seem for the most part to be completely original to the author, not re-workings of existing ones.
There are not many libraries in the U.S. that own a copy of this book (see which ones do here), but happily, the Boston Public Library has digitized their copy, which can be viewed online at The Internet Archive.
Being an inveterate librarian myself, I followed one trail among the clues uncovered by Beth, and surmise that "E. Gaskill" was Edward Gaskill of Philadelphia (1811?-1866). Sharp eyes will have noticed that unlike the copy that Beth located, the Boston Public Library's copy was published by M. Bywater, also of Philadelphia -- Maurice (or Morris) Bywater (1817-1870) was in fact Edward Gaskill's brother-in-law, who had married Mary Matilda Bywater (d.1879) in 1843. It is unclear why the book would have two different publishers in the same year. (The meaning of the title is also a bit of a mystery.)
It is certainly possible that the "American Lady" was Matilda Gaskill -- although sources indicate that she and her brother were born in Wales -- though of course it is also possible that the "Lady" was someone unrelated to either Edward Gaskill or Maurice Bywater.
Authorship aside, there are curiosities even at a first glance throughout the book -- see for example page 52, in which an "opera cap" is defined, either simply or dismissively depending on how you read it, as "merely a long and wide scarf, one hundred stitches wide, and two yards and a half long" in what would now be called a light fingering weight wool. Also on page 52 is instructions for "zephyr balls" in what is still a common way of making what are now known as pompoms (
the earliest-known use of the latter word is 1873!)
Note that the author has included a page of her knitting terms at the back of the book -- it will be interesting to compare, in a future post, these terms with those of other writers of the same period!
