During his travels to Asia in the 1320s the English traveller Sir John Mandeville described an unusual-looking tree. In India he saw a ‘wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the end of its branches’.

One caption alone hints at a strategy of collecting, inked above a woven silk picture of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The note reads: ‘Mr McMicking’s contribution to this book given to him by one of the Gentlemen of the French Embassy to China.’ Her note suggests that she was actively sourcing textiles for her book, casting her net far and

a deep-seated perception of dress as superficial and inconsequential – that to be interested in clothing is to lack seriousness. Yet here we all are dressed in clothes, making daily decisions about how we will face the world. We might use dress as our armour, a protective carapace to shield us from censure, or we might use it to express our place

There is only a glimpse of the book’s original cover visible beneath the frayed edge of the bright-pink silk, but it reveals a marbled design in shades of blue with a red-leather spine. Marbling was a technique that arrived in Europe from Japan in the seventeenth century and it had become hugely fashionable.

This pioneering technology was further improved by Richard Arkwright’s water frame, a spinning frame that was powered by a water wheel and produced a stronger and more reliable yarn than the jenny had achieved. The final extension of this work was the ‘spinning mule’, invented by the fourth Lancashire son to have such a huge impact on the landscape

On 24 December 1798 Jane Austen wrote in one of her letters, ‘I cannot determine what to do about my new gown; I wish such things were to be bought ready-made.’

Entries in Queen Victoria’s journal reveal that she gave a great deal of thought to how she, as Queen, ought to appear at her wedding. She consulted Lord Melbourne and records of precedents past before deciding that she would not wear her crimson robes of state, but would simply adopt the role of bride, rather than Queen. Two years earlier

He described his early researches, watching lacemakers at work: ‘I set to work to inform myself in what peculiarity in the texture of pillow lace consisted and for this purpose obtained a sight of the process of making it. A pretty heap of chaotic material I found it! Like peas in a frying pan dancing about.’ He set about unpicking a piece of lace

It was to be the revelation that cracked the code for the entire volume. In the same neat, fine script that populated the whole book were the words ‘Anne Sykes May 1840. The first dress I wore …’ She was revealed. The one and only time that she referred to herself in the first person, Anne Sykes identified herself as the keeper of the book; the