* sausage or ringlet curls country differences -- United States chronology 1840s









Figure 1.--This colorized Daguerreotype is undated. The clothes and mount suggest to us that it was taken in the 1840s, but the early 50s is possible. The unidentified boy wears a hat with a medium brim. Such headwear was not verty common for bpys who had their hair done as ringlets. Note the shortened sleeves of the light cut-away jacket and voluminous sleeves of his blouse. Also notice the scallopoed hem long pants. Shortened-length pants were largely unknown in the 1840s.

U.S. Boys' Ringlet Curl Chronology (1840s)

Photography appeared as a new industry in the 1840s. We thus have more images than ever before, although the high cost means that the numbers were more limited than the rest of the decade, but still far loswer than a painted portrait. We have found a few portraits of boys with ringlet curls, but the number of available images that we have archived is still too small to make any valid assessments. We have collected a few examples and are steadily expanding pur collection. Ringlets for boys do not seem as common as they were later in the century. We suspect this was in large part an economic matter. For the most part, ringlets especially for boys was a styled mostly seen in realitely well-to-do families--or famuky with such prtensions. America was still a very rural country and the wealth that would be generated by industry had not yet had a major impact. We note an unidentified American child, probably in the late-1840s with ringlet curls. We are not sure, however if the child is a boy or girl. We note another Dag of an unidentified American boy with ringlets. Notably in families with both boys and girls, one gender was often chosen for the ringlets. We are not entirely sure how the choice was made. A good example is the Noyas children, we think in the 1840s. A problem we have here is that we can not yet defrentiate between 1840s and 50s Dags. Ambros on the other hand only appeared in the mid-1850s. So the styles we see in ambros can help differetiate the 1840s and 50s Dags. Our ininial assssment is that ringlets were less common for boys in the 1840s than subseuetly in the century. We believe thar ringlets are a rough indicator od economic expansion. Ans as indusrtrailization was just beginning in the 1840s there were not yet a lot of families that could engage in such rivilous activity, at least for boys.







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Created: 7:37 AM 2/21/2017
Last edited: 7:37 AM 2/21/2017