The historian Edward Baines noted in 1835 that the ‘wonderful cheapness of cotton goods’ was now benefiting the ‘bulk of the people’: ‘a country-wake in the nineteenth century may display as much finery as a drawing room in the eighteenth.’ The capitalist achievement, reflected Joseph Schumpeter a century later, ‘does not typically consist of providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.’
