Cobbler's stall, about 1760.
The Straw-plat is a domestic manufacture, chiefly carried on in the midland and eastern counties. It employs thirty-two thousand persons, of whom twenty-eight thousand are females. The straw hat and bonnet makers amount to twenty-two thousand, of whom more than twenty thousand are females. The art of straw-platting has been greatly improved amongst us of late years; but the Italian straw, being of a finer nature, is in greater demand for the higher priced bonnets.
The beautiful production of Artificial Flowers has, in very recent years, been much increased in England. France, with its superior taste, long supplied us with these ornaments, which had the brilliancy of natural flowers without their perishableness. But three thousand females, and five hundred males, are now engaged with us in this branch.
The Fan-makers of England are only thirty in number. In France this is a large branch of manufacture. In the Jury Report on the Exhibition of Industry in 1851 there is a notice of the fan-trade of Paris, which is curious as showing the joint influences upon cheapness, of machinery, and of the multiplication of works of art by engraving. The fan-makers of Paris in 1847 employed five hundred and seventy-five work-people—the number of the sexes being pretty equally divided. "The men were for the most part copper-plate engravers and printers, lithographic draughtsmen and printers, painters, and colourers; the women were mounters, illuminators, painters, colourers, and overlookers. In twenty years it appears that the produce in fans had increased in value nearly threefold, whilst the number of work-people had diminished one-half. This change is attributed to the employment of machinery, especially of the fly press, in stamping out and embossing the ribs, and the extensive employment of chromo-lithography, an art not practised at the former period. By these means the French have been enabled greatly to increase their exports by the production of cheap fans, to compete with those made by the Chinese."
Dekker, in his 'Gull's Hornbook,' printed in 1609, advises the gallant of his day to exhibit a "wrought handkerchief." A "handkerchief, spotted with strawberries," was Othello's first gift to Desdemona. It was an embroidered handkerchief, such as is produced in the present day at Cairo by the Egyptian ladies in their private apartments. The embroidered shirts of the time of Elizabeth are thus noticed by Stubbes:—
"These shirts (sometimes it happeneth) are wrought throughout with needle-work of silk, and such like, and curiously stitched with open seam, and many other knacks besides, more than I can describe; in so much as I have heard of shirts that have cost some ten shillings, some twenty, some forty, some five pound, some twenty nobles, and (which is horrible to hear) some ten pound apiece."
Men'seg, or Egyptian embroidery-frame.
The embroidery-frame was in time superseded by the lace-pillow, which is stated to have been first used in Saxony in the sixteenth century. The production of Lace extended to Belgium and France; and we are still familiar with the names of Brussels, Mechlin, Lisle, Valenciennes, and Alençon lace. Until the present century no lace was heard of but pillow-lace,—a domestic manufacture, of which Honiton was the most famous seat. A stocking-weaver of Nottingham adapted his stocking-frame to the making of lace about 1770; and the bobbin-frame was invented in 1809. It was never extensively used till the expiration of the patent; and the produce of this machine was kept at so high a price by the patentees that it interfered little with the labour of the lace-makers in the cottages of the midland counties.