Figure 1.-- These unidentified English brothers look to be about 5-13 years of age. The younger boy wears a sailor-styled tunic suit with knee socks. We never see that with american tunic uits. There oldr brothers wear Eton collars with knicker suits, standard schoolwear. The cabinet card portrait is undated, but we would guess was taken at the turn-of-the 20th century. The studio was S.C. Mote in New Cross, a South London neighborhood. The mount has F.R.P.S, after the studio name. we are not sure what that means.

We note boy wearing both long stockings and socks with tunics. This is somewhat different than America. We see socks much less commonly, especially in the 19th century. The socks were commonly white in the early and mid-19th century. We can not yet confirm this for the early-19th century, but have actual photographs conforming white socks for the mid-19th century. We begin to see dark socks in the late-19th century. Here our hosiery information is limited by our limited photographic archive. The fact that mny boys wore long pants with tunic suits is another problem. We begin to see boys wearing knee socks with tunics at the turn of the 20th century. This may have begun earlier, but we do not have photographs confirming it. This is something we do not see in America. Boys wore long stockings in the 19th century. We begin to see three-quater socks at the turn if the century, but never knee socks. Tunics suits were not as popular in England after the turn of the cntury as in America. Thus we have fewer imafe to assess hosiery trends. This and the numbr of English boys wearing lon pants with tunics makes our ssessment here only preliminary because of rhe small numbr of available images.

Created: 9:11 AM 3/8/2015
Last updated: 9:11 AM 3/8/2015