The most famous example of knitting being used to record information is Madame Defarge in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. She sits by the guillotine as the enemies of the French Revolution are beheaded, calmly recording their names in wool as their heads fall into the basket. But there’s no contemporary evidence tricoteuses – knitting women – existed. One of the first actions of the Revolution was a demonstration against food shortages by working-class women. At first venerated as the “mothers of the revolution”, these “bonnes citoyennes” fell from favour during the Terror (1793-94). It seems likely that “knitting women” was a mocking word for female militants, but writers (like Dickens and Carlyle), looking for a bit of colour, interpreted it literally.