The family dyer and scourer: being a complete treatise on the arts of dying and cleaning every article of dress, bed and window furniture, silks, bonnets, feathers, &c., whether made of flax, silk, cotton, wool, or hair : also, carpets, counterpanes, and hearth-rugs, ensuring a saving of eighty per cent

Abstract

“The object of the Author [is] to make the art of cleaning and dying their apparel easy to every person, so that they may make their clothes appear as new... persons of slender income, and others residing at considerable distances from great towns, where proficient dyers are to be found, must inevitably be benefited by this work.” [Preface]. Only the wealthy could afford the specially made dresses shown in the fashion plates featured in Ackermann’s Repository or La Belle Assemblee, but the rising popularity of fashion magazines meant that the details of dress quickly spread through the provinces. Most people remade clothes from an existing wardrobe, adding new linings to cloaks and pelisses, covering existing bonnets with a new piece of crape, and dyeing old dresses. Jane Austen wrote about her mother in 1808: “My Mother is preparing mourning for Mrs E. K. – she has picked her old silk pelisse to pieces, & means to have it dyed black for a gown – a very interesting scheme.”