Cream cotton handkerchief printed in dark pink from engraved plate. The illustration is of a beggar at doorstep of a farm surrounded by verses of 'The Beggar's Petition' or 'The Beggar', a poem written by the Rev. Thomas Moss. The Black Country curate was anonymously published the verse in a small volume entitled Poems on Several Occasions in 1769. It became a perennial favourite for children to learn and recite. Jane Austen describes the difficulty heroine Catherine Morland has in learning the poem in her novel Northanger Abbey (1817). Charles Dickens refers to a handkerchief of this type in Nicholas Nickleby (1839), when a boy rubs his tears 'very hard with the Beggar's Petition in printed calico'.
The illustration is surrounded by a narrow tooled border, and the hem stitching is by hand. There is a small hole in the upper right quarter.
