This talk is about the research process that helped expand the limited biography of the successful Victorian knitting book author Miss Frances Lambert. The author’s biography was expanded using information found in physical and digital archives. The talk will discuss how corpus analysis techniques were applied to the prefaces of the books to find new research paths to investigate. Digital humanities techniques were used to manage the volume of source data that is now available from digitised book archives around the world. However, it was the traditional technique of systematically working through uncatalogued archives that unearthed margin notes that were key to unlocking the previously lost history of this accomplished and respected author.

Richard Rutt had little information to work from when writing a biography of Miss Lambert for A history of hand knitting in 1987, resulting in barely half a page. Rutt was writing before the expansion of digital library and archive catalogues over the last 30 years. Projects such as the University of Southampton’s digitisation of their knitting reference library, and the general book digitisation projects of the British Library, Google, the Hathi Trust, and Project Gutenberg have increased the volume of source data that is now available from digitised archives around the world. It was unearthed margin notes that were key to unlocking the previously lost history of this accomplished and respected author.

The findings of the research are significant because they expand the existing knowledge of the author. The margin notes that were discovered shed new light on the author’s life and work and provide valuable insight into the social and cultural context of the time. The talk will be useful to anyone who is interested in the history of knitting, Victorian literature, and the research process. It will provide a fascinating insight into the challenges and rewards of uncovering lost history.