“There are in the Exhibition some beautiful examples of such lace amongst the productions of other countries as well as of our own. They are made by the united labour of many women. The cost of a piece of lace will consist of:
# The remuneration to the artist who designs the pattern.
# The cost of the raw material.
# The cost of the labour of a large number of women working on it for many months.
Let us compare this with the cost of a piece of statuary, which is undoubtedly of a much higher class of art; it will consist of:
# The remuneration to the artist who makes the model.
# The cost of the raw material.
# The cost of labour, by assistants in cutting the block to the pattern of the model.
# Finishing the statue by the artist himself.
In lace making the skill of the artist is required only for the production of the first example. Every succeeding copy is made by mere labour: each copy may be considered as an individual, and will cost the same amount of time.
In sculpture the three first processes are quite analogous to those in lace-making. But the fourth process requires the taste and judgment of the artist. It is this which causes it to retain its rank amongst the fine arts, whilst lacemaking must still be classed amongst the industrial.”

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 49-50

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There are in the Exhibition some beautiful examples of such lace amongst the productions of other countries as well as …" by Charles Babbage?
Charles Babbage photo
Charles Babbage 40
mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical enginee… 1791–1871

Related quotes

Charles Babbage photo
Charles Erwin Wilson photo

“Costs of manufactured articles importantly depend on the cost of raw materials as well as labor, and the prices of many raw materials do not fluctuate directly with the labor cost of producing them.”

Charles Erwin Wilson (1890–1961) American secretary of Defence

Charles E. Wilson cited in: Ernest Dale (1950), Sources of economic information for collective bargaining. p. 36

“The fundamental idea of transaction costs is that they consist of the cost of arranging a contract ex ante and monitoring and enforcing it ex post, as opposed to production costs, which are the costs of executing a contract.”

R. C. O. Matthews (1927–2010) British economist

Source: "The Economics of Institutions and the Sources of Growth." 1986, p. 904; as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 14)

“In many societies the domestic social costs of adjustment to changing patterns of comparative advantage are believed to outweigh the advantages of further trade liberalization.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter Five, The Politics Of International Trade, p. 228

Elon Musk photo

“Which means we’re cheaper than the Chinese, cheaper than [the] Russians or anywhere else – and we’re doing it in the United States with American labour costs.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

Seneca the Younger photo
William Stanley Jevons photo

“The calculus of utility aims at supplying the ordinary wants of man at the least cost of labour.”

Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter I, Introduction, p. 53.

Cesare Pavese photo

“Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the effort of understanding that they are free.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Frederick Douglass photo

“This war, let it be long or let it be short, let it cost much or let it cost little… shall not cease until every freedman at the South has the right to vote.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)

Related topics