Figure 1.--This English Ambrotype portrait is undated, but was probably taken in the 1850s. He looks to be about 8-9 years old.It is a ruby glass ambro. Notice the book. That probably suggests he wore the tunic to school. Size: 1/9th plate: approx. 2 x 2.5 inch. Unlike American Ambros, the Anbro was not done in a case. The dealer acquired three other Ambros from the same source, so they may possibly be related. Click on the image to see all four Ambros.

We do not have many English images from the 1850s because photography was not as inexpensive and thus as common as it was in America. We have found a few English images from the 1850s. We note boys wearing tunics before and after begiining school. Younger boys might wear tunics with panatalettes rather than proper tousers. Some of these pantalettes were plain, others had lacy trims and ruffles like their sisters. A good example is a boy aboutb 6-years old painted as apart of an idealized Victorian family by Rebecca Solomon in the early-1850s. While our information is limited, we think thst it was fairly common for school-age boys to wear tunics up to their teens. This would mean mostly boys attending private schools. Free state educatiion was still limited, in this regard England lagged behind America and Germany. While as best we can tell, tunics were fairly commin, we believe thst it was mostly a fashion for boys from middle- and upper-class families. We do not think tunics were commonly worn by working-class boys. We do not have a loy of information on styles, but we notice white collars and stock-tie. The tunics seem to be mostly dark colors, possibly blue. We notice an unidentified boy wearing a blue tunic in the 1850s. That is a colorized image so we are not entirely sure about the actual color. We get a better idea in an actual painting which almost certainly recorded color to a fair degree of accuracy. We see Joseph Younghusband wearing a dark blue tunic suit. They were worn with a tange of trousers (long pants, drawers, and pantalettes), usually not matching the tunic. We note the tunics being worn with belts. While the images we have found all show long pants, our archive is no large enough to shgow all the boys wore long pants, but as far as we can tell that was by far the most common. We believe that these tunics were common schoolwear, but we are unsure about how commonly tunics were worn for other occassions. We nore John Denton who seems be wearing a stylisdh light-colored tunic at a sea-side resort in 1858. We do not know to what extent they were worn for play or formal occassions. They seem to have been the standard daily dress for some boys. The formal photographic portraits provide few clues as to such conventions.

Created: 5:50 AM 11/20/2010
Last updated: 5:17 AM 8/9/2019