Blond lace originated in France, and rather than being woven from cotton, it was a pale-cream silk thread that lent the resulting cloth an elegant sheen that was perfectly captured in candlelight, icing their evening gowns.

He described his early researches, watching lacemakers at work: ‘I set to work to inform myself in what peculiarity in the texture of pillow lace consisted and for this purpose obtained a sight of the process of making it. A pretty heap of chaotic material I found it! Like peas in a frying pan dancing about.’ He set about unpicking a piece of lace

In order to preserve its uniqueness, Miss Bidney destroyed the designs for the wedding lace after it was made, so that it could never be copied. The lace was to remain one of Queen Victoria’s most treasured possessions. Throughout her life, and long after the death of Prince Albert, she wore the flounce from her dress and her veil to a variety of

Not all factories were built on the same model of exploitation that came to characterise the world depicted in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, where so many of the masters of the mill in her fictional town of Milton were tyrants. Milton stood in for Manchester, the Cottonopolis itself, where Gaskell had lived for a time and witnessed

During his travels to Asia in the 1320s the English traveller Sir John Mandeville described an unusual-looking tree. In India he saw a ‘wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the end of its branches’.

Entries in Queen Victoria’s journal reveal that she gave a great deal of thought to how she, as Queen, ought to appear at her wedding. She consulted Lord Melbourne and records of precedents past before deciding that she would not wear her crimson robes of state, but would simply adopt the role of bride, rather than Queen. Two years earlier

There is only a glimpse of the book’s original cover visible beneath the frayed edge of the bright-pink silk, but it reveals a marbled design in shades of blue with a red-leather spine. Marbling was a technique that arrived in Europe from Japan in the seventeenth century and it had become hugely fashionable.

On 24 December 1798 Jane Austen wrote in one of her letters, ‘I cannot determine what to do about my new gown; I wish such things were to be bought ready-made.’

This pioneering technology was further improved by Richard Arkwright’s water frame, a spinning frame that was powered by a water wheel and produced a stronger and more reliable yarn than the jenny had achieved. The final extension of this work was the ‘spinning mule’, invented by the fourth Lancashire son to have such a huge impact on the landscape