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

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This was a book I was excited to read since I first heard about it through social media. Author and fashion historian Kate Strasdin was given an album, a 'dress diary' in 2016. The album consisted of swatches of fabrics from the 1830s through about the 1870s and, with the exception of brief captions identifying the fabric in a way only the album's creator would have recognized, there was no writing. Strasdin spent years researching the people named in the captions and the stories she could connect to them and their fabrics. The result is the fascinating book The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe (called The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe in the US). 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. 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.

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 Anne’s identity radiated out in myriad hues and materials, connecting her to her world and allowing us to join her. Discovering that Anne Sykes was the hitherto unknown creator of the book that I had been meticulously transcribing was at once both exciting and perplexing. I felt certain that she had to be a dressmaker, a woman whose role in life was to clothe her clients, taking a keen interest in shape and style, keeping the secrets of bodies. In that moment I could never have anticipated just how much I would be able to uncover. For the imaginative reader, on closing the book, ' the silks still glisten from the paper' Mail Plus

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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. The hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life - from family and friends to industry and Empire - told through her unique textile scrapbook. 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. In the C18th and C19th, clothes were made for the wearer; there were almost no “off-the-peg” dresses, suits, etc.. One would buy a length of material and make it (or have it made by someone else) into clothing, upholstery or curtains. Anne Sykes obtained small fragments of the leftover material from friends and relations for her book. A typical inscription might state “Adam’s vest new on his birthday July 12th 1843.”

I found it absolutely fascinating, both the information on so many aspects of Victorian social history, in particular clothing and fashion, but also the author's patience and investigative enthusiasm. The diary is basically made up of swatches of fabric that Anne Sykes put together over quite a number of years. There is practically no text in the diary apart from very short captions and the mention of names, sometimes in relation to whom the fabric belonged to and what item of clothing it was taken from. And yet despite this scant information and absolutely no knowledge of who Anne Sykes was when she first set out, the author has managed to glean enough information from public records to be able to trace the movements of Anne Sykes and her husband over most of her adult lifetime. An extraordinarily rich record of middle-class Victorian life, both at home and abroad... [a] fascinating book Guardian 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. 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.

Table of Contents

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. Strasdin's painstaking detective work has uncovered many of the fascinating insights behind the fabric swatches contained in this unusual collection Sunday Times 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. 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! 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 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.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. 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. 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.

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’.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) With very little to go on Strasdin researches the woman who collected these snippets - a lady called Anne Sykes from the north of England. 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.