Needlework samplers reflect a time when young girls were prepared for lives of domestic duty and religious piety. Needlework instruction for girls was widespread during the nineteenth century, and relatively basic samplers like this one worked by nine-year-old Harriet Matilda Honeyfield in 1833 were used as the first stepping stones to teach girls practical embroidery skills. Part of the moral verse on this sampler pledges Harriet will ‘strive to mend and to Obey forever’. Honeyfield emigrated from England to Taranaki on the Berkshire in 1850. She married farmer John Litchfield Newman and they lived at Ōmata, raising five children. A brief obituary noting her death on 27 March 1886 seems to be her only appearance on the public record, a common occurrence for women during this period.