Delicately intertwined Neo-Gothic ornaments adorn this blanket in natural white against a warm brown background. The design reflects the era’s fascination with architectural forms and richly crafted details. Crafted from a high-quality cotton-blend fabric, this throw feels wonderfully soft against your skin. It’s machine-washable and dryer-friendly, and its high-pile velour stays soft and plush wash after wash. Once you feel it, it’s sure to become your new favorite.
Certified by OEKO-TEX® Standard 100 which ensures that the blanket contains no chemicals harmful to humans or animals.
While architects and artists looked back in the Neo-Gothic style, idealizing the Middle Ages with tracery, pointed arches, and floral ornamentation, a new era was dawning in factory halls and intellectual workshops alike: the age of industry and science. It was a decade full of contrasts—shaped by a romantic longing for yesterday and by groundbreaking ideas for tomorrow.
Looking Backward, Yet Moving Forward
Neo-Gothic, one of the earliest movements of Historicism, was more than a passing fashion. It expressed a deep yearning for stability in a world undergoing profound change. Neo-Gothic windows adorned churches, town halls were given façades with battlements and turrets, and medieval-inspired patterns also found their way into domestic interiors. Yet even as Historicism turned its gaze to the past, progress gathered unstoppable momentum.
Bocholt in Transition
Around 1850, roughly 4,700 people lived in Bocholt—a small but growing community. The railway connection established in 1856 suddenly brought the region within reach of the major cities. Goods, ideas, and people circulated faster than ever before. Just one year later, the Bocholt entrepreneur Driessen made a bold statement: his large mechanical spinning mill set a new industrial standard. Small craft workshops could hardly keep pace with such competition.
The Step into Industry
In daily business as well as on his travels, Josef Philipp Beckmann was no longer alone. His two eldest sons, Heinrich and Albert, accompanied him, learning the trade firsthand and growing into responsibility at an early age. Together, they recognized the potential of steam power, now ready for industrial use. The textile sector—especially weaving mills—stood on the brink of a major technological leap.
Yet in the Prussian fortress town of Wesel, where Beckmann had so far conducted his textile trade, the lack of space made the construction of modern factories nearly impossible. The family drew the inevitable conclusion: they returned to Bocholt and, in 1859, put their plans into action. On Kreuzstraße, they founded a mechanical, steam-powered weaving mill equipped with 120 looms.
For the Beckmann family, this was far more than an expansion of the business—it was a bold commitment to entrepreneurship, new technology, and the future. The thread that had begun in 1826 with a small textile trading company was now being spun forward: stronger, faster, woven by machines.
A World in Upheaval
While the looms clattered in Bocholt, the wider world was debating a new and provocative thesis. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The theory of evolution challenged the traditional worldview and sparked a fundamental conflict between science and religion. This, too, was part of the era: old knowledge was questioned, and new truths began to claim the world stage.
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