DRESS DIARY OF MRS ANNE SYKES (PB)

In 1838, a young woman named Mrs Anne Sykes was given a diary on her wedding day and, collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments, she carefully annotated each one. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Through her research, these fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: from pirates in Borneo, to riots over working conditions, to the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.