Figure 1.--This CDV portrai shows four children, three girls and their brother. The look to be about 5-12 years old. The portrait is undated. The boy wears a sailor suit with traitional styling. This leads us to believe that the potrait was taken in the late-1870s, perhaps the early-1880s. The studio was J. Jackson in Rochdale, a part of Greater Manchester.

We see some English boys wearing sailor suits in the 1860s, bur not all that many yet. We not only continue to see boys wearing sailor suits (1870s), but we see the sailor suit becoming a major style during the decade. We have found only a few boys wearing sailor suits in the 60s, but by the 70s sailor suit had become fairly common. We think that prevalence in the photographic record is a good indicator of actual prevalence. And we also see girls wearing sailor dresses, as best we can tell for the first time. A factor here may have been the Royals again. The Prince and Princess of Wales began dressing their children in sailor suits, both the princes and princesses. We do not know who took the lead, but it was usually the mother for younger boys and all the girls. The Prince of Wales was a clothes horse. We are not sure to what extent he became involved in how the boys dressed and what he thought of the sailor suit. How important this was we can not tell, but the the photographic record clearly establishes that the sailor suit had clearly become a popular style with not only the well-to-do, but the middle-class as well. We are less sure about the working class. The problem with using the photographic record is that because people had to pay for a portrait, the upper- and middle-class are over represented and the working-class is under represented. That said, the photographic record is a rare window into the decade.

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Created: 11:44 PM 6/18/2025
Last updated: 11:44 PM 6/18/2025