The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe

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Chapters on early 19th-century dressmakers, tailors and milliners in Anne Sykes' orbit make it clear that garment workers have always been (and continue to be) highly skilled, overworked, underpaid, and mistreated by both their clients and employers. The circumstances are different but I found myself continually reminded of garment-workers' struggles that would arise in the intervening time, from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to the 21st-century injustices in the sweatshops of Indonesia and Bangladesh. This is a book that you can dip in and out of, and is an ideal travelling companion. I actually started reading it when I was on a short trip away from home, staying in Clitheroe - which turned out to be the birthplace of Mrs Sykes! An astonishing coincidence that made the book all the more interesting to me. Only seventy fragments were associated with male garments, and only seventeen of the names recorded were those of men. It seemed that at a time when so much of literature and the arts was focused on the endeavors of men, this was a book dedicated to the world of women. I decided to try to piece together the lives of some of these women through the clues that were left behind, scant though they often were. Using what felt like a forensic approach in its detail, I focused on fragments of cloth to illuminate the world these women inhabited, enabling a wider context to emerge. What began to appear were the tales of an era, placing these lives into the industrial maelstrom of the nineteenth century, with all its noise, color, and innovation. The Dress Diary: Secrets From a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe by Dr. Kate Strasdin is a wonderful nonfiction and history book that gives us a never before experience into the lives of Victorian women through one woman’s unique journalistic account. Lace is where Anne's story and my own became entwined. Were it not for that desire to learn a traditional technique...I would never have joined the lace group amongst whose members was the custodian of Anne's diary. In the years since, and along the path of discovering Anne's life, I realize that while our experiences of the world inevitably differ, there is that which connects us: female friendship and an appreciation for the threads of textiles women into our lives." p. 73

The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe (Penguin, 2023) by Dr. Kate Strasdin presents the hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life - from family and friends to industry and Empire - told through her unique textile scrapbook. 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. 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.

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For the imaginative reader, on closing the book, ' the silks still glisten from the paper' Mail Plus Strasdin's knowledge is evident in her descriptions of the fabrics displayed in this diary . . . This is too good to miss Literary Review The author received a book that held many samples of fabric, annoted with the names and dates of those who wore those fabrics. Eventually the creator of the sample book was revealed as a "Mrs Ann Sykes" - by a single mention of her name. The author has researched extensively into the life and times of Mrs Sykes, and discovered many interesting facts, which she has woven into a fascinating picture. An evocative and often touching exercise in re-imagining these fragments of fabric into historical life... it is delightful Prospect This is a fascinating read if you - like me - are a lover of textiles, and textile history. As someone whose ancestors worked in the textile industry, I am always drawn to books that can bring their history to life.

The material is from outfits belong to Sykes and to family and friends - and I can only admire Strasdin's long hours of research through census records, newspaper archives etc to tell her story. Strasdin has obviously dedicated a lot of time to researching her subject matter, but from a few scant clues and some canny historical detective work, she has pieced together a colourful collage of Victorian life. The diary doesn't take an entirely chronological approach, and Strasdin cleverly structures her chapters around characters, places and themes to build a cohesive narrative out of the clues she's been given.Kate Strasdin wanted to know more & set out on a quest to find out as much as she could about the woman behind the book, and this is the result of several years of research. 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! 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. Anne Sykes grew up in Lancashire, the daughter of a cloth merchant in a part of England focused at the time on the cloth industry. She married a cloth merchant from a family of fabric printers, so needless to say Anne understood the importance of fabric in daily life- both as fashion, gifts, and probably the basis for family economics. Anne and her husband Adam traveled to Singapore for his work and lived there (and briefly Shanghai) for nearly ten years before returning to England. Strasdin scoured records, newspapers, ship's logs and more for hints of the Sykes and other names that appear in Anne's diary, often with surprising success. While no letters have been found from Anne, Strasdin helps us discover what her life in Singapore might have been like through letters of other women who lived there at the time, and who knew Anne and donated fabric to her album.

Intriguing and engaging... A fascinating and creative unravelling of Anne's life and times Clare Hunter, author of THREADS OF LIFE 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’.

I gather from the introduction that these books were perhaps not as commonly kept as a written diary but were at least enough of a phenomenon that other clothing textile scrapbooks exist in the collections of other museums. It's wild to think that even if these things were frequently assembled by lots and lots of women, they would have probably been something discarded into the trash by heirs after the deaths of their makers, as not worth keeping. And yet it's clear from this book analyzing the contents of just one extant swatch diary, they indicate so much about the lives of people otherwise invisible in the history as recorded by Western colonialism. In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes. I knew very little about the history of fashion or textiles outside of North and South, but I found this approach to the subject really engaging. The detail is cleverly contextualised so that it feels part of the fabric of every day life. From a few snippets of information, the author was able to piece together a patchwork of life in the mid 1800s. The way the author has approached the content makes it very accessible. Each chapter focusses on a different aspect of Anne Sykes’s life and combines the evidence from the scrapbook with genealogical research and associated historical information. Oh, how I enjoyed this book! Not only is it a great read, but it's quite informative and very well-written, too.

The story of a singular woman... Kate Strasdin's forensic detective work has finally let Mrs Sykes - and her book - speak again' JUDITH FLANDERS An extraordinarily rich record of middle-class Victorian life, both at home and abroad... [a] fascinating book GuardianHow serendipitous that a diary dating from 1838 and containing hundreds of snippets of fabric should fall into fashion historian Kate Strasdin's capable hands. Thanks to Strasdin's forensic research...this book opens into a vivid history of expansion and empire. And all wrapped up in 2,184 pieces of cloth BBC History Magazine The Dress Diary of Anne Sykes and Kate Strasdin proves beyond a doubt that fashion history stands as a part of the social history of any time period that must be considered when we truly try to know a time and place. Women were hugely influential in the choices connected to fashion, letting us find some of their stories within the shadows of "important" history as so often focused on by men, but Strasdin reminds us in this book of the huge web of social and global economic influences a phrase like "fashion history" truly means. Not something to be scoffed at, it is a growing field of study that should be both celebrated and encouraged. 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. 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.