The hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life told through her unique scrapbook.
In 1838, Anne Sykes was given a diary on her wedding day. Using it to collect snippets of fabric, she created a record of her life and times. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of fashion historian Kate Strasdin who spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within its pages.
Piece by piece, she charts Anne's life and times. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.
‘Flawless’ Amber Butchart
‘Fascinating’ Clare Hunter
‘Irresistible’ The Times
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781529920819
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 280 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 20 mm
Strasdin's painstaking detective work has uncovered many of the fascinating insights behind the fabric swatches contained in this unusual collection - Sunday Times
Snippets of fabric, snippets of biographical detail, snippets of historical evidence - this is a book entirely made up of snippets and I found it irresistible - Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Times
'[A] questing and poignant social history' - Hephzibah Anderson, The Observer
An extraordinarily rich record of middle-class Victorian life, both at home and abroad... [a] fascinating book - Guardian
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
It’s taken me a while to read this book for various reasons. It’s non-fiction, so I’ve read fiction books whilst I’ve been reading this book. I don’t think it’s one you can read from beginning to end at one go, but... More
Anne Sykes was born in Manchester to a family of cloth workers. She married a cloth merchant and travelled with him to Singapore and Shanghai before settling back in the North-West. However her story has only been... More
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.... More
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