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It is only through paintings that we get a good idea of children's play in the 1840s. Daguerreotypists did not even attempt to depict children playing. Artists on the other hand did. And by the 1840s the idea that there were positive aspects to children's play had begun to take hold. In the 18th century while ideas were changing as part of the Enlightenment, but it was still widely thought that that there was not only no value in play, but that it was a wicked waste of time. Among some families, very young children were expected to devote themselves to ehaustive study and were dressed in restictive adult clothing. As part of the Victorian era these and other ideas were changing. Note the clothing. We see fairly standard lng sleeve white shirts, vests, suspenders, and long pants. In urban areas we see more fashionable styles such as tunics, but this was not very common in rural areas and in the 1840s, the vast majority of Americans lived in rural areas. Sports were not yet an important feature of American boyhood. But we note children playing with balls, blocks, dolls, drums, hoops, puppets, and other toys. We see toy animals (some on wheels), vehicles (stage coaches, ships, and trains), and soldiers. Outdoor play including skating, sleading, swimming, and games like crack the whip. Notice that the boys in Homer's iconic 1870s 'Crack the whip' painting in the 1870s are not dressed much differently than the boys here in the 1840s (figure 1). There are notable differences in how urban boys were dressedd, but rural boys seem to have been a different matter. Unfortunately, neither naive artists or Daguerreotypists could quite capture this. One interesting attempt is Moses B. Russel's portrait of the Massachusetts Wonson twins (about 1847). But as we see here some artists were developing the needed skills.
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