The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe

Kate Strasdin

Aug 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Karen Cass

About this audiobook

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments-some her own, others donated by family and friends-she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of their lives. Her name was Mrs. Anne Sykes. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Using her expertise, Strasdin spent the next six years unraveling the secrets contained within the album's pages, and the lives of the people within. Her findings are remarkable. Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. 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. This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: not the grandees of traditional written histories, but the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. 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.

About the author

Kate Strasdin is a fashion historian, museum curator, and lecturer at Falmouth University, where she teaches the history of fashion design, marketing, and photography.

Karen Cass began her acting career with the Footlights as an undergraduate at Cambridge. After graduating she completed three years of acting training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where she was awarded the Evelyn Laye Prize for Best Actress in a musical.