This results in a book that gathers so much information about the textile industry & clothing in one place – the history of cotton, wool and silk, the changes and developments in dyeing and printing techniques as well as glimpses into the trade of the time. For instance we have a whole chapter devoted to lace, which explains how the traditional handmade bobbin lace of Honiton & the surrounding Devon villages became virtually obsolete due to the invention of machine made net that was so much cheaper to produce, but then saved by Queen Victoria who used handmade Honiton lace on her wedding dress. Honiton lace is now a luxury product, still made in the traditional way by hand. There's a chapter on Victorian mourning customs (as there are several swatches in the diary captioned for the mourning attire of various people Anne Sykes knew), with fascinating information about how the sartorial expectations of "proper" mourning were codified, marketed, and observed by people at varying levels depending on gender, class, geographic location, etc. Strasdin is a wonderful writer and the book delves into not only Anne's life but the world of the Victorians and the material they used to clothe themselves. We get insights into mourning clothes, poisonous dyes, Lancashire's cotton industry and the Empire that lay beyond etc.

Dr. Kate Strasdin is a fashion historian, museum curator and lecturer at Falmouth University, where she teaches the history of fashion design, marketing, and photography. I loved this book!! I have already planned to buy a copy for a dressmaking friend for her birthday later this year, I can’t wait to see all the fashion plates in colour something my reading device wouldn’t let me do. I think this would be a very welcome addition to any centres that teach Arts and Crafts, and for Social historians. There is just so much information gathered together in one place. The history of cotton, calico, silk, the development of dyeing techniques, as well as descriptions of trading and the politics of the time. I have spent a lot of time myself looking up the beginnings of retail as we know it today. The development of off the peg clothes as opposed to having everything made. How shops such as Kendals in Manchester first began. I didn't know where the term 'mad as a hatter' came from, but I do now. Basically, the author was given an old scrapbook of textile swatches, kept and collected by a random ordinary merchant-class British woman throughout her life, that was ultimately found in a stall in Camden Market. I suppose it's actually a book about material culture and what this artifact of a 19th century life can illuminate and obfuscate. It was just beyond fabulous to learn about such a unique journal and book, and to have the privilege to have the talented author draw us this picture through her writings. I greatly enjoyed and appreciate this experience.Despite all the knowledge we have gained as a result of Anne’s diary finding itself in Strasdin’s hands, there is also so much we can never know. Throughout the book, alongside the concrete findings, are queries about the intricacies of their thoughts, emotions, and activities. How close the relationships between Anne and those mentioned in her diary, whether they genuinely liked or politely accepted the fabrics and garments gifted to them, all these personal thoughts and more that are just beyond our reach, not recorded in marriage records or newspaper cuttings. In many ways, thisadds to the intrigue maintained throughout the book. We know Anne so well, having been able to trace her life (and wardrobe) from these fragments of cloth, and yet we also come out knowing so little about her personality. Ultimately though, this remains a value, not a disappointment – these questions that are raised providing a constant reminder of the individual people, with all their thoughts and feelings, mundanehabits and routines, excitements and tragedies, attached to every historical artefact. This appears to me as a fascination, more than a frustration, at least as I read it. ‘The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes’ may start with snippets of fabric collected by just one Lancashire woman, but it certainly does not end there. This is a journey Kate Strasdin takes us on with her; the precision, openness, and curiousity, with which she does so filling me with positive affirmation of my fascination with history (and love of prints!). The author captures it best herself: ‘Anne’s story is both remarkable and ordinary’. A revealing and unique portrait of Victorian life as told through the discovery of one woman's textile scrapbook.

The structure of the album, the names, and the cloths themselves all suggested that this was not a volume compiled in the rarefied spaces of the aristocracy but something more quotidian: the creator being a woman of some means, but inhabiting the world of the well-to-do middle classes. This woman and others—women whose lives would otherwise go unrecorded, hidden in the shadows of history—found themselves unwittingly front and center in this story. This is a wonderful book! The life of a woman, a time and an industry, woven, like cloth, into something unique and beguiling. A treat for the curious reader Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words

Featured Reviews

The hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life - from family and friends to industry and Empire - told through her unique textile scrapbook. In fact, in the whole of the UK, I failed to find another album like either Barbara Johnson’s or the one that had fallen into my own hands. That is not to say they do not exist, or were not created in greater numbers in decades past. My mystery diarist could not have been the only one in the nineteenth century to choose to record an aspect of her life in this way, and the very tactility of cloth lends itself to this form of remembrance. There may well be volumes of fabric scraps languishing in trunks in attics, or wrapped in the bottom drawer of an elderly chest. There may even be examples that were once catalogued and then forgotten in an archive or a museum, their value yet to be identified. How serendipitous that a diary dating from 1838 and containing hundreds of snippets of fabric should fall into fashion historian Kate Strasdin's capable hands.

One of the other reasons why it has taken me so long to read the book is because apart from Sykes's time in Singapore and then China, her home and her birthplace were in Lancashire, which is where I live. The first part of the book covers the birth of the cotton industry which brought about the start of the Industrial revolution. I live in Oldham where at the height of the cotton industry there were around 400 cotton mills built here. Both my maternal grandparents worked in cotton mills which made this book all the more interesting. In January 2016 I was given an extraordinary gift. Underneath brown paper that had softened with age and molded to the shape of the object within, I discovered a treasure almost two centuries old that revealed the life of one woman and her broader network of family and friends. It was a book, a ledger of sorts, covered in a bright magenta silk that was frayed along the edge so that a glimpse of its marbled cover was just visible. The shape of the book had distorted—it was narrow at the spine but expanded at the right edge to accommodate the contents, reminding me of my mum’s old recipe book, which had swelled over the years as newspaper cuttings and handwritten notes were added. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in fashion, genealogy, the textile industry, the Victorian era or social history. It’s a very unusual book, focusing on an ordinary (though admittedly fairly wealthy) woman rather than an aristocrat, and one that really brings the past to life through the personal touch. Wedding dresses sit alongside cloaks, day dresses and mourning attire – the various items of clothing taking the wearer through every aspect of their daily life. There was no immediate indication of who might have created this amazing dress diary, as I called it—of who had spent so much time carefully arranging the pieces of wool, silk, cotton, and lace into a document of lives in cloth. While there was much I was uncertain of, however, one thing I knew for sure from the careful handwriting that arched over each piece of cloth: this was the work of one woman. I just didn’t know who she was.I saw a social media post by the author of this book, and really wanted to read this. It took a while until my turn came up at the library, but it was worth the wait! The author rightly categorizes the album as a form of life writing. She states,"Anne's story is both remarkable and ordinary. She gave voice to the women in her world. She caught a tiny piece of them and protected their colourful variety in her most unusual of diaries. Not through her written word do we find these women, and Anne Sykes herself, but through these precious pieces of cloth." (p 268) The book contains a bibliography and colour photos of the fabric swatches discussed - I had an electronic copy of the book & would be interested to see these photographs in the print version! British fashion historian Kate Strasdin took a lace-making class, partly from professional interest in women's home-work and handwork (before industrialization lace was made by hand, of course), but also because she enjoyed the other participants. In 2016 an older woman in the class gave her an extraordinary gift: Anne Sykes' scrapbook. Anne's husband Adam gave it to her on their wedding day in 1838 and for more than 40 years Anne pasted scraps of fabric from women's dresses--hers and her friends and acquaintances, documenting each in a fine copperplate hand. Strasdin spend the next six years finding out more about Anne and Adam, both of whom came from textile-manufacturing families in Lancashire. They spent seven years in the British colony in Singapore and several in Shanghai before returning to England. My thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK/ Vintage publishers for my advance digital copy given in exchange for my honest review. It has been an absolute delight and pleasure to read this novel.