Family history books with Helen Tovey, Paul Chiddicks & Jackie Tench
The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe
by Dr Kate Strasdin
We all love an old book, or a junk-shop treasure. And when the groaning covers of a Victorian scrapbook were placed in dress historian Kate Strasdin’s hands, she knew she had come upon something special.
The scrapbook contained more than 2,000 snippets of fabric, that had been carefully collected and stored from 1838, for several decades into the 1870s. Protected from the light, the snippets show the kaleidoscope of colours that our more comfortably off Victorian ancestors would have worn.
Yet the story goes beyond this. Weaving together the detective story, Kate Strasdin scours the scrapbook for clues to identify who it
