ABSTRACT
following technical innovations, improvements in communication through the introduction of the Penny Post and the opening of a railway line to London, the lace trade underwent considerable changes in the third quarter of the century. The commercial crises in 1857 and 1866 brought temporary set-backs and caused widespread unemployment, but though recovery was swift and foreign and domestic demand for lace expanded slowly, Hooton Deverill’s extremely successful application of the jacquard loom to the leavers machine in 1841 had been immediately adopted by the trade. By 1846 more than four hundred machines had been fitted with his mechanism in order to manufacture patterned laces. 1 Progress made in methods of designing and draughting led to the creation of a profusion of patterns with a wide range of appeal. It was estimated that the number of bobbin net machines increased from 3,200 in 1843 to 3,522 much wider machines in 1865, of which almost half were the Deverill-improved leavers machines making fancy lace. 2 Production in large shops had existed during the early years of the century when machinery was hand operated, but the additional economies to be derived from integration, particularly in the production of plain net, had induced more manufacturers to invest in factory production in the forties and fifties. In 1836 there had been twenty-nine or thirty factories in the trade; by 1865 Felkin counted one hundred and thirty ‘larger’ factories and no more than ninety hand machines at work all of which were in private houses. 3
