The Lady's Stratagem: A Repository of 1820s Directions for the Toilet, Mantua-Making, Stay-Making, Millinery & Etiquette [Paperback]

That is exactly what I've found myself doing in the months since this huge volume came to me: I've kept it very close at hand.

If you're interested in the Regency period and want to get beyond secondary retellings of the details of ladies' lives in the era, this is a terrific book to have. The title might have been "The Lady's Compendium", so detailed are the contents. Just about anything touching modes and manners is covered here: from the expected, such as fashion and etiquette, to the esoteric, such as recipes for dying the hair or dying fabric or recovering shoes. In between are rare original resources I've desired for a long time: period millinery, glovemaking, multiple patterns for stays...and for costumers, directions for making up dresses and outerwear. The sections on trims are super. If you've longed to sew the rouleaux, ruches, scallops and vandykes and draperies that decked women's gowns in the 1820s, they're right here.

Many of the manuals the author translated from French (in period-style language) and so will be new to the vast majority of readers: this isn't a rehash of content we've seen before. Plus, Frances Grimble has included long passages from British sources, as well as notes when American versions of the same source omitted or added material. Why is this important? It reveals some of what the original publishers expected would be different practices among French, British, and American readers.

The text frequently talks about what is in fashion, or considered good taste, by making comparisons to fashions and practices of past years. This is valuable too, because it helps readers who are interested in early Regency styles and manners...the bulk of the resources included in the volume date to the late 1820s.

Finally, because you are reading the originals largely in full, not in tidbit quotations, you get the delicious experience of stepping into an era long past...complete with the original authors' side notes and sometimes snarky comments on provincial habits or personal pet peeves. Fun!

If I had one wish, it would be that the vast sewing section in the middle of the book contained more precise diagrams of dress construction methods. Those of us who are visual learners and of middling sewing skills may find it tricky to visualize what the writers are describing. As a test, I attempted to replicate constructing side seams on an unlined Regency dress; it worked out, but I did need to consult another volume. One might wish that the author had followed the lead of her early volume, After a Fashion: How to Reproduce, Restore, and Wear Vintage Styles, which is heavy with detailed illustrations. However, given the mammoth task of translating hundreds and hundreds of pages of text and hunting down comparison sources to include, I can hardly complain if the author ran out of some steam on drawings!

I believe that readers wanting to understand the underpinnings of looking and acting well in Regency times will value this book as I do, and make it a close companion to their volumes of Jane Austen, their histories of life under Napoleon, or their copies of Janet Arnold's costuming manuals. My copy already has dog-eared pages and a coffee stain -- in this household, a sign of love.

This book is positively enormous. I've never seen anything quite like it. The French sources that were translated really are rare, I've never seen any of them and I can't read French anyway. There's a ton of detailed information. There are chapters on making dresses, trimmings, corsets (including preparing whalebone!), lingerie, hats, turbans, mending, alterations, and embroidery. For those who knit, there are a lot of early knitting directions for stockings, petticoats, night jackets, and some purses in what looks to me like early crochet. There are even step by step directions for getting dressed, with all the accessories, even hairdressing. There's info on storing clothing with a description of an early coat hanger, and a little device to hang your watch on. How to do the laundry (including washing corsets) and even how to make soap.

The French translations are all well written, they don't read like translations. There are English sources and some American ones, as well as the French sources. Some of the information is said to date back as much as 15 years from when it was written, in the middle of the 1820s. You can use this book for Regency and 1812 costuming and reenactment, as well as for the 1820s and early 1830s. It's well worth the money!

I received this book for Christmas and it's spectacular. This covers social "norms" for middle class people. It offers advice to the young woman on everything from making one's own corset and clothing in general to "Politeness in a Business or Profession". Period advice on cleaning teeth and dressing hair, to recovering shoes and knitting are included in this amazing work.

Frances Grimble has given us a little `clip' of history with this large volume (755 pages including glossary and index). This is a translation from the original French, of a series of instructional manuals originally published in the 1820's.

The advice and the information offered through this wonderful, wonderful book will assist and guide anyone looking for information of life, manners, attitudes and societal views for the first decades of the 19th century. And because it takes time for these attitudes, manners, and views to develop, this offers insight into the American Federal period, Regency, Napoleonic and Restoration eras.