Just a passing thought - I know a good number of lacemakers tend to take Mrs Bury Palliser with a pinch of salt on some matters, particularly regarding early lace history which many other authors have copied without researching back to primary evidence, but one thing she would have been fairly reliable on, surely, must be the lace that was being made within her own life time, and her history was written ?around 1865 (not sure if there were any earlier versions, she was born in 1805), well within memory of the Great Exhibition and the effect it had on the fashions of the day. For example, those of us who were teenagers in the 60s will well remember what sort of thing we were wearing then, particularly the trendy new things of the time (think of Mary Quant's designs - the stylised black flowers on shiny white plastic, etc). Santina Levey, although a highly regarded expert, did not have the advantage of living through the era of the newly inspired lace patterns of the 1850s, so on that I would tend to look to the older, contemporary, published histories than the relatively new ones in determining what was what at the time.
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