Figure 1.--Here we see an unidentified London boy wearing a white cuit-away jacket with bloomer knickers and strap shoes. A colorized companion image shows blue trim. He has striped long stockings with narrow bands. The colorizer has not colored in the narrow stripes because it would be laborious, but we would guess they were blue. The colored bans show up better in the black and white image. We think the colorizer may have underexposed the print to be colorized. Notice the peaked cadet cap on the balustrade. We are not sure about th boy's age, but ould guess about 7-8 years old. The CDV is undated, but the sharp corners sugget the 1860s. The studio was Smallcombe in London. Click on the image to see the colorized version.

We do begin to see much large numbers of portraits with the appearance of the CDV (1860s). The number of English Dags and Ambros we hae found is fairly limited. Thus for the first time provides a sufficienttly large sampling to give a valid assessment of popular styles, although our English archive is still limited. American CDVs appear about 1860-61. We think that English CDVs appeared a little earlier, but for the most part the number before 1860 are very limited. We do see some boys wearing striped stockings, but they do not seem very prevalent. We see far more American boys wearing white long stockings in America than striped stockings during the 1860s. We are not yet entirely sure about English trends. We do see striped long stocking in England during the 1860s, something we rarely see in America. The Watson boys in 1863 are a good example. Long pants were still common even for yonger boys, but we see considerable numbers of boys wearing the shortened-length pants. We believe that social-class was an issue. Working-class families were more likely to wear long pants for which long stockings were not worn. White stockings seem the most common hosiery for the younger boys wearing shortened length pants (knee pants or bloomer knickers). Our 19th century English archive is still very limited so we can not yet make any determintion about the relative prevalence of white and striped stockings. A lot of the images we have found show uniform width, generlly narrow bands. The pattern seems very standard, equal width white and colored bands. The actual width varied somewhat, but we see mostly equal widths. The actual width of the bands varied, but they mostly seem to be the about the same width. We have not yet found examples of mixed-width bands which were common in America. We have no color information. We are guessing mothers coordinated the stripe colors with the suits. Most of the boys wearing striped stockings wore them with suits. Cut-away jackets were popular in the 60s. We do not, however, see large numbers of children wearing striped long stockings in the 60s, but this is still a preliminary assessmebt based on the smll number of imags that we have achived. Thus this may reflect our still limited 19th century English archive. So this is a topic we are still developing. So far the great majority of the portraits we have found with striped stockings from the 1870s and not the 60s. This appears to be the beginning of the fashion trend. We think this was primarily a fashion for affluent families, in part because working-class boys were more likely to wear long pant . But they were also more likely to hve a studio portrait taken which means we have even fewer working-class images to compare with. Both boys and girls wore these stockings, but with so few images we can not make a gender assessment. We are not sure about age trend. As far as e can tell there were no discernable age conventions. They were the same as the age conventions for shortened-length pants in general.

Created: 8:42 PM 12/16/2012
Last updated: 1:57 AM 7/21/2016