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

In 2016 an acquaintance of Kate Strasdin gave her a book which turned out to be a scrapbook of textile swatches dating from the Victorian era. She could only trace its provenance back to the 1960s when it had been bought on a stall in Camden market, and the annotations it contained were quite minimal: brief notes relating to the fabrics; dates, starting from 1838; and the names of over one hundred people, some appearing fleetingly and some very frequently. There were more than 2,000 fragments of fabric in all, but no immediate indication of who had so painstakingly collected and documented them.

And so started Kate’s pursuit of the story of the creator of the book, the world she lived in, and the people, mostly women, that inhabited that world. Even finding the author’s name required some detective work, as she referred to herself in the third person, indistinguishable from all the other names. But just once the mask slipped — “Anne Sykes May 1840. The first dress I wore...” across a square of floral printed cotton — and the key that cracked the code for the whole volume was revealed. Now that Kate had a name, the pieces of a jigsaw slowly fell into place. Kate was able to research public records: births, marriages and deaths, censuses, and electoral registers and she could trace the history of a woman born in the north-west of England to a mill-owner, and married to a well-to-do merchant whose business interests took them to the Far East for a decade before they returned to Lancashire to live out their days.

Kate’s book, which documents what she has so far been able to glean from Anne Sykes’ dress diary, took six years of careful transcription, research and interpretation. She has intertwined her deep knowledge of the fashion of the period with her ability to tell fascinating stories of the characters and incidents alluded to in this precious volume.