Refashioning the Past:

Technology, Nostalgia, and (Neo-)Victorian Knitting Practices

Abstract

The recent rise in the popularity of knitting may seem to simply be a nostalgic anti-technological move. Of all knitting traditions, Victorian knitting stands out as a unique case of this turn to the past, because it is a temporal rather than geographic category. However, while the current interest in Victorian knitting (and in what I will call ‘neo-Victorian knitting’) signals a desire to return to the past, its connection to technology is more complex, as both the existence of the category of Victorian knitting as well as current access to the patterns that define this category are fundamentally shaped by the technologies of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, respectively. In drawing connections between the emergence of the category of Victorian knitting and the contemporary interest in neo-Victorian knitting, this paper unearths how these knitting traditions are fundamentally shaped both by contemporaneous technologies as well as a nostalgic yearning for times past