The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

I picked up a book in a museum shop on my recent travels which I have found unusual and interesting. It is The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe by dress historian Kate Strasdin, published in 2023.

In 1838 a young woman in the north of England was given a diary on her wedding day. She used it to collect small swatches of fabric from dresses and attire worn by herself, her husband and their friends. After Anne’s death in 1890 her diary passed through various unknown hands before ending up on a junk stall. The person who bought it then passed it to Kate Strasdin, who went through it carefully deciphering the tiny captions, researching the people mentioned and finding the stories behind the clothes. The book delves into the Lancashire cotton industry, the rise of popularity of mourning clothes, clothing for servants, the emergence of the colour purple for the masses, the making of lace and how machine lace developed, and all sorts of intriguing information about ribbons, bonnets, poisonous dyes, waistcoats and ballgowns. Anne Sykes accompanied her husband Adam, a textile trader, to Singapore, and there is more interesting information about clothing in the tropics and what was available there in the way of fabric. How did one clean one’s clothes before the era of the washing machine? How often were lengths of fabric, or ribbons, given as gifts, and what happened when clothes became rather threadbare?

Through her research and this book (written during Covid) Kate Strasdin tells the reader so much about the life of a middle-class Victorian woman, and although she lacks personal information about Anne, and had no idea what Anne looked like, she brings her subject alive through the most intimate of mediums, the clothes she chose to wear.

There are illustrations of some of the fabric swatches (though I’d have preferred bigger and clearer captions, which have to be looked for at the end of the book instead) and there are some illustrations of the places where Anne and Adam lived. Such diaries, including fabric rather than pages of words, are extremely rare, making this a most unusual book. The Times praised it as “irresistible”. I certainly enjoyed it.