CHILD'S PLAY

Nine photos of Edwardian children

 “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

Graham Greene

 The children in these British photographs, especially those taken in the north of England between 1905 and 1914, belonged to the first generation in over two hundred years who were given a good chance of surviving until adulthood. The mother of this baby, taken by John Brown Smithson of Leyburn in Yorkshire, had grown up in a world where, statistically, one in four children would die at birth and only half live past the age of five. Disease took most of them but the real culprit was industrialization. In factory towns the smog carried cadmium and lead and other dangerous metals that poisoned infants. Studio scenes of adoring Mum with her newborn in this pose are not that common. Generally photographers preferred the mother to be seated although in this case Smithson got to show off his five headed badger rug.

In Citizen Kane reporter Jerry Thompson sets out to discover the meaning behind Kane’s dying word, ‘Rosebud’ and fails to discover it was the brand name of his sled when he was a little boy. For Kane the sled is not only one of his earliest memories, it takes him back to that age of innocence before everything he won and lost destroyed him.  You get the feeling the rabbit in this image has been invested with similar power. In years to come, most of her early childhood will be consigned to fog but she will remember the rabbit. For a while it was her best friend.

 Unknown child, unknown photographer, unknown date but certainly taken at one of England’s seaside resorts about 1905. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the major resorts at Brighton, Blackpool, Southport and Scarborough were for the gentry, who could afford the hotels and who followed fads such as water cures and sulphur baths. By the 1850s and the expansion of railways some progressive factory owners were sending workers off to the seaside for long weekends and in 1871 the Bank Holidays Act granted a generous four days to workers. Even then, resorts were for adults not children. That began to change towards the late nineteenth century and by the time this lad stood at the water’s edge it was not just common, it was expected that parents would bring their children and spend most of the holiday with them. Before long the motor car gave families the freedom to spread out from the resorts and find their own spaces.   

 

 Our subjects are getting older. During the late nineteenth century both girls and boys wore dresses up to the age of five (and up to the 1920s pink signified boys, blue for girls). Both genders also wore sailor suits, in fashion for boys since the 1840s when the future Edward VII put one on but by the 1910s every five year old girl had to have one too. Taxidermist and photographer Theo Upton Barber, AKA “Tubs”, was born in Wisconsin but moved to England around the turn of the century and opened his studio at 84 Preston Road in Faversham, Kent in 1911. 

 

 In an era when it’s not unusual for men to extend their childhoods into their thirties, photos like this are a sharp reminder that a century ago children began their move into adulthood as soon as they handed down their child uniforms to their younger brothers and sisters, around five years old. This boy isn’t even ten yet already he dresses like a pocket version of his father, right down to the watch chain. Even his pose is adult-like. The photographer was Frederick Southwell, who operated studios in Battersea, Hammersmith and Wandsworth and apparently was no relation to his namesake of the better known Southwell Brothers.

 

 “Do you know who is sitting on the other side of Lucy Henson?” Written in a child’s uncertain handwriting, posted from Batley, near Leeds and addressed to a Mrs Rolandson of Grewelthorpse, near Ripon in Yorkshire, we can assume that’s Lucy on the stile and by ‘the other side’ the writer means of the camera. Again we get that notion that will increasingly cease to have relevance as the twentieth century progresses, that the child is just a pocket version of the adult.

 

 The photographer is not identified but from the quality of the print and the evidence of studio lighting we can say he or she was a professional. The performers are strictly amateur, which is not to say they are bad (‘ham’ seems a useful word here). There are hundreds of thousands of photographs of children in fancy dress from the Edwardian period; not so many of them performing for the camera as here. The wall at the back and the parquetrie on the floor are sufficiently indeterminate to make it understand whether this was taken in a private home or a school. I suspect the latter.

 

 More role playing, There was a moment, roughly between 1895 and 1910, when people could believe that the upcoming century would put technology to good and with our extended life spans, better education and concordant freedoms most problems would disappear. By the time this photo was taken that dream was in ruins. These lads are too young to have flown in a proper warplane but just the right age to catch the experience the next time it came around just over twenty years later.

 

This photo was likely taken in 1907, the year twelve year old Frances Bradley Storr baptised babies but also adults into her Primitive Methodist sect before congregations of several thousand. Primitive Methodism sounds much what it was: passionate revival meetings, and hellfire and damnation sermons by the likes of Miss Storr, who had feeling to compensate for her lack of education or straitened background. Like the Peculiar People of Plumstead and the New Forest Shakers from a few years earlier, she espoused a religious empowerment of the working class that was socialistic in everything but its politics. She was hardly the only child preacher working in England at the time: Lonnie Dennis, Florrie Elkins , Gertie Brackenbury and Jack Cooke being others, but stateside there were reputedly dozens, working a kind of sideshow circuit. In the 1920s Frances and her mother moved to Canada where she continued to preach. The photographer is unidentified but Doncaster photographer Luke Bagshaw took a lot of her promotional shots.

FANCY DRESS

Images of fancy dress

“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.” 

Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited

At a recent conference in Nottingham Verity Wilson from Oxford gave an engaging presentation on fancy dress in photography. A historian of fashion and textiles rather than photography, she admitted the topic was broader than she had first anticipated. Well, yes. Once anyone started talking about fancy dress in photography they would quickly have to set out parameters and enforce definitions before they were swamped. Here are just a few of the types, genres if you like, of photographs where people not only dressed up for the camera but assumed roles for it: theatrical, tableaux de vivant, family snapshots, glamour, fashion, folk costumes for the tourist market, tourists in folk costumes, fancy dress balls and costume parties, national identity, the erasure of identity and with all that we haven’t left the 19^th century yet. Someone asked how we could tell the difference between a fancy dress photo and one of an acting troupe. Often we can’t though the distinction matters. We think actors in costume are less interesting than ordinary citizens in fancy dress because they are only doing their job. The photo above was taken in Winnipeg, C1910. I think it is a group of actors because most of them look like actors but I say that not knowing what exactly an actor looks like. And if it is a group of actors, does it matter if they are amateur rather than professional? Fancy dress in photographs is a form of amateur theatre.

For the purposes of the presentation Ms Wilson excluded actors. She was more interested in that basic desire we have to slip into another character and how the camera was the perfect machine to help us achieve that. It gives us a record that verifies the memory but more than that, from the very beginning there was the idea that the camera was a truth machine and the photograph a fact, so what better use was to be made of it than to manufacture evidence? You could assume any identity you wanted; the camera would vouch for it. 

From the Edwardian era into the 1920s, costume parties were incredibly popular at Oxbridge colleges, particularly among the arts students. A whole mythology has been built around the parties Stephen Tennant and his circle of bright young things threw and cameras were essential. The various images we have of their parties don’t suggest the behaviour was particularly wild but then, people tended to stop what they were doing as soon as the camera came out and hold that pose (Cecil Beaton was often the photographer). Evelyn Waugh’s descriptions of them usually amount to scenes of giggling groups in retarded adolescence recklessly driving around dressed as playing cards, or something to that effect. Fancy dress was part of being liberated. Some social historians relate it to the passing of the Victorian era, others to the end of the First World War, though both seem to be missing something. Just as important was a conscious effort among younger generations to engage in adult games like masked balls that had once been reserved for the very wealthy. The people in this photograph look too rough around the edges part of the Bright Young Thing set; notice how the two men are wearing carpets for togas. 

Tableaux vivant were also a popular Victorian then Edwardian pastime, but unlike costume parties the photograph was the whole point. A scene like this could take hours to put together, given that first it had to be imagined, people had to dress for it and then it had to be arranged. I can’t explain the thinking behind this though it may have had its origins in some fairly trashy artwork. It is possible the children were in a school play but we know Charles Dodgson took a lot of these staged scenes with children and there’s no reason to think he wasn’t following a fashion. During the era when tableaux vivant were popular, people didn’t shy from the morbid or grotesque. For a series of tableaux vivant look at Luminous Lint here.   

This image appears to combine elements of the costume party and the tableau vivant. If it is a costume party I doubt it was very decadent since there appear to be young children in this scene – and no sign of alcohol. They are dressed as Japanese. No idea why they are all pretending to be asleep unless the photographer wanted the impression this was a dream. Despite the costumes, something about this photo tells you immediately it was taken in England.

When it came to fancy dress, other cultures were high on the list, and the more exotic the better. The gut reaction to call it colonialist, or worse, needs to be tempered with the huge number of images we have of Chinese dressing as westerners, Turks as Arabs, Arabs as Chinese and so on. If the motive for dressing as another culture is a joke in bad taste it is also universal. This was obvuiously taken in a photo studio. Was dressing up as Arabs one of the services the studio offered? It isn’t so strange when you think how popular studio cowboys were (see here) or even sitting in a papier maché boat. It is possible too that they are soldiers on the North African front in the Second World War. When he was in Constantinople after the Crimean War, Roger Fenton wanted to photograph some of the locals in their native dress but was too shy to ask. When he returned to England he got his friends to dress up instead.

This is by Theodore Servanis, a Greek photographer working in Constantinople from the 1900s to the 1920s, and it is obviously from a school play. If the play is a French classic by Moliére, Hugo or one of their cohorts, the school was most likely Armenian as French was often the language of instruction and these were the schools that taught European classics. French wasn’t just the language of commerce; it distinguished high from low culture. If the intention was to present the façade of sophistication you could argue that was another form of fancy dress. The wristwatch the girl on the far right wears is a nice touch.

Compare the Servanis photo to this one. The man’s costume indicates he is Meskhetian Turkish, from Georgia, which when this was taken was part of the USSR. Technically this is traditional rather than fancy dress but he wouldn’t have worn this costume in his daily life. The date this was taken is important. In 1944 Stalin began a purge of Georgia and the Meskhetians who weren’t killed fled to the Black Sea region of Turkey, Trabzon in particular. If this was taken at that time he is probably a refugee making an obvious political point.

Speaking of national identity, this woman was photographed at an Elizabethan fair in England on July 30, 1924. Some quick research suggests that the Elizabethan theme was popular for fetes and fairs at the time; several examples of advertisements pop up on the internet. Historians who like symmetry might find it revealing that at one end we have the beginning of the British Empire, at the other its end, but it isn’t really clear that in 1924 most English people accepted the Empire was over. More likely; Elizabethan suggested not only elaborate costumes but also Merrie England, that hard to locate halcyon era that apparently existed sometime after the Black Death and before industrialization. These days we associate Elizabethan with ruthless machinations at the court, religious persecution and the prelude to revolution. History can take the fun out of the past.

What is it with the Far East? As often as not, fancy dress has meant the Orient, for women especially. Around 1880 Japanese style started to become fashionable. One reason was that the country had only recently opened its ports to the West and designers discovered the concept of style with minimum appearance. Teapots, bureaus and vases turned Japanese and kimonos and bamboo umbrellas became fashion items. Ancient Egypt had been popular at the same time but interest waned until Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered in the 1920s. Japan however never went away. If its allure remained mysterious it might be because the country was never colonized by Europeans. Its stuff never belonged to the West so it never lost its glamour. And if you think about it, there are a lot of things we Europeans can’t do these days; it is crude to wear black face or dress as Native Americans, Arabs, Sikhs, Turks, Zulu or Inuit but even now, when a group get together for fancy dress you can be guaranteed that at least one male will be a cowboy, one female will come Japanese.

Anyone who collects vernacular photographs will have a sizeable proportion devoted to fancy dress, whether they set out with that in mind or not. Some collectors specialize in it. As subjects go these photos are hard to pass over. They are about people having fun for the camera and more than one scholar has pointed out that’s what we think the Kodak was invented for. But there is more, because if all vernacular photos are inherently mysterious, fancy dress adds another layer to the riddle. Philosophically speaking, it is about identity, the construction of truth and reality and so on, with the implicit understanding we are not going to get a single categorical answer. It’s that paradox that the more a photo tells us the less interesting it becomes.

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FANCY DRESS

LITTLE WOMEN

Turkish studio portraits of children

“Children are all foreigners.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 The photographs in this post have two things in common; children who don’t like being photographed and elaborate backdrops and props. They are not disconnected. Going to the photographer for a portrait was a social event that required dressing up and various other activities intended to make you look your best, and which any self respecting child would naturally resist. Maybe they went to the photographer once a year, or once in their life, but it was a special occasion and a simple, blank background would have been an anticlimax. The parents wanted something more, like a papier-maché rock or a path cutting through a forest; they wanted the portrait of their child to look at least a little like a work of art. To the child it was probably not that different to a visit to the doctor or dentist. They were put in a room where an intimidating stranger started ordering them about; stand up, sit here, look at the camera, smile please! No less an ordeal than having a dentist stick sharp metal objects in your mouth when you think about it.

The first hand accounts of children growing up in the late Ottoman empire are rare and most, actually we could say all, describe an idyllic world of mansions, gardens and a bevy of servants at attendance. This is hardly surprising. You need education, some cultivation and a sense of loss to be aware of what made your upbringing worthy of record. You also need a market that would consider reading your reminiscences. Most people in the collapsing empire had none of the above. Few would have considered the life of a poor Turkish child as having much to say beyond making an ideological point and hardly any of those children would have had the background or training to put words to paper. Loss, especially of status, is the big theme in all the memoirs. One of the best known is Irfan Orga’s Portrait of a Turkish Family, written in the 1950s when the full grasp of what had vanished could be given eloquence. By then the family home had been sold long ago, the servants had disappeared and most of the central personalities in the account had died. The sons and daughters of poor tradesmen had a lot less so a lot less to lose and, they could argue, the collapse of the empire wouldn’t change their lives that much. If they were shining shoes on the street in  the Ottoman era they probably still were in the republican years.

You might think there would be a few books written by Greeks and Armenians forced to leave the city in the 1920s and 30s and had something to say about the experience but if there are, not many have made it into English. Over the last few years, accounts by descendants have been published but these are not first hand and lack the vividness of lived experience. What we are left with is a few facts, some glimpses that, like these photographs, tell us something though not necessarily what we want to know. 

Like, for example, what happened to these two kids? He wears a uniform from one of the good colleges and what we know about primary education in the Ottoman empire is vouched for in his whole pose and expression; it was strict, dry and traditional, it concentrated on image rather than expression and it left a lot of students unprepared for a modern world of technology and science. If he is Armenian or Greek there is a high probability that his family left Constantinople soon after the photo was taken and he entered a world where most of what he had learned was suddenly redundant. If he was Turkish then the best future outside of law, medicine and the military was in the civil service. Whichever path he took involved years of rigorous exams leading to a valued position that ultimately depended upon very little of what he had learned. At least his sister could say that by the time she graduated from high school she would be given advantages her mother never had, like the opportunity to go to university, to vote and to have a full time job.

The writer Halide Edib described an elaborate ceremony at the start of the school year where a new student was selected to wear a silk gown and ride in a carriage while the others formed a procession behind singing hymns and collecting other students on the way. The full ritual, which involved several recitations from the Koran and ended up with the students eating ceremonial cakes, lasted most of the day. Halide Edib was not permitted to learn to read until she was seven and was married to a friend of her father’s when she was about fifteen. Things could have been worse. In the villages girls weren’t expected to have any education. Well, they were already betrothed when they were barely out of infancy so what was the point of learning? Things were already sorted.

The painted studio backdrop is such a 19^th century idea we can forget that in some countries it persisted into a time when most studio photographers had never used one. Some of these portraits were taken in the 1930s and if we can’t identify the studio we can say that it was one that had been around long enough to have certain hallmarks, even notions, it couldn’t dispose of. In other words, it was probably an Armenian or Greek studio. The first studios run by Turkish Muslim photographers started appearing in the 1920s and the operators came out of either art schools or the army. The army of course did not like frivolities like fake trees and the art schools were more aware of what was happening in Europe. Consequently their photographs had a more contemporary look. 

Which isn’t to say they were better. When the studios started abandoning backdrops and props something was lost; a sense that the photograph was more than a portrait, it was a construction, what cultural theorists like to call imagined space but which the rest of us is a kind of bonus. Would this image of the two students be better without the obviously artificial stage? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have that strangeness that makes it special.

Or what about this one, with the boy on the right who looks like he stepped out of a Goya painting? My guess is that having to stand in front of a backdrop of a woodland made the experience more obviously absurd, which to the children’s minds was translated as something unpleasant. Had their father raised his Kodak Brownie and told them to say cheese they probably would have but here they were being told to do something they couldn’t quite figure out.

One of the best things about backdrops is that they disrupt our idea of the portrait. Whatever we want a portrait to tell us about someone, the backdrop distracts us. It’s a reminder that however we might try we are not going to get beneath the skin of the subject. Everything is on the surface. Everything is a disguise.

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LITTLE WOMEN

NEVER NEVER LAND

Early 20th century photographic postcards of children

“One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever.”
Frances Hodgson Burnett; The Secret Garden

In 1900 the infant mortality rate in England began to plummet, from around 160 to 180 deaths per 1000 children in the late 19th century (distributed across the country; in industrial areas the rates were much higher) to about 110 in 1910 and falling steadily. At Christmas in 1904 the original stage play of Peter Pan opened in London. Six years later Frances Hodgson Burnett published The Secret Garden, the story of an orphaned girl restoring life to a family living in self-imposed isolation. In Peter Pan children stay eternally young in Never Never Land. In The Secret Garden an orphaned girl breathes life into a family living in morbid isolation. There is nothing coincidental about these pieces of information. People were beginning to think of childhood as a magical time and children (in literature anyway) were being given a germ of influence over the adult world. Photography played a part this change of attitude. In early cartes de visite and cabinet cards children were often photographed against a drab studio background, no different to the way their parents were, and the attitude they presented to the camera was one of sombre discomfort.  It was as though childhood was just a phase adults had to go through. Gradually more elaborate and imaginative props were introduced and children were encouraged to perform. By the turn of the century and the introduction of the postcard, they had started to inhabit fantastically theatrical stages closer to Never Never Land than mundane reality.

The best known authors of late Victorian and Edwardian children’s fiction had childhoods that were famously wretched or punctured by tragedy. Whatever Peter Pan offers Freudian analysis pales in comparison to the relationship that Barrie had with his mother. When Burnett’s father died the family went from moderate comfort to poverty more or less overnight and Kipling and Andersen claimed they were abused as children. Their books weren’t so much offerings of hope to the young as ways for themselves to escape the past. One way to do that was to reinvent it and give it qualities it had never possessed. Around the turn of the century – a little before to be precise – childhood became sentimentalized. Children appear in studio portraits holding their favourite toys and wearing Fauntleroy suits - inspired by Burnett’s novel Little Lord Fauntleroy about a boy who teaches by example the virtues of charity to a family of cold hearted English nobles. Childhood was regaining its innocence. It was also becoming cute.

This festishizing of children is apparent in all of these photographs, most obviously in the one above of the girl on the pedestal. At first glance it is a chaste enough image, and certainly more cute than erotic, but everything in it from the girl’s costume to her expression mirrors contemporaneous postcards of women where the intentions were more obvious. In a lot of postcards from this era girls especially have been encouraged to be coquettish. This could mark the beginnings of the sexualisation of childhood in popular culture, or it could be something less contrived. Cuteness in children necessarily involves a certain precocity on their part and the photographers, and parents, couldn’t obtain that without referring to the most obvious differences between an adult and a child.

Just like the novels of Barrie and Burnett, this was a genre supposedly celebrating childhood but it was also about loss, the things denied to the older generation and a desire on the part of parents that childhood could last forever.

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NEVER NEVER LAND

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Photographs of children from the Victorian age

“He walks shockingly and is dreadfully awkward, holds himself as badly as ever and his manners are despairing, as well as his speech, which is quite dreadful. It is so provoking as he learns so well and reads quite fluently; but his French is more like Chinese than anything else; poor child, he is really very unfortunate."

Queen Victoria describing her son, Leopold, in 1859

I had a kind of Dickensian childhood.

Shaun Cassidy

Pity Lewis Carroll. It is his tragedy that no one can discuss him without raising the spectre of paedophilia. A tragedy because the evidence is unresolved so it continues to haunt his reputation; tragic too because people are inclined to read a sinister eroticism into some of his portraits merely because the subject is a young girl. And it gets worse. What is often deemed dangerous, at least unsettling, in Carroll’s portraits could be nothing more harmless than girls playing dress-ups. Meanwhile some of his contemporaries, Oscar Rejlander for one, have escaped scrutiny for works of much more deliberate salacity. 

Alice is the most well adjusted child in Victorian literature, encountering the various characters she meets in Wonderland with unruffled maturity and commonsense. Then again she hasn’t suffered the litany of horrors usually dumped on her contemporaries, Pip in Great Expectations, Tom the chimney-sweep in The Water Babies and all those other children adrift in the world without parents, raised in the workhouse or cut down by disease. For a lot of us, our first impressions of the Victorian era were formed when some well meaning relative gave us a copy of A Christmas Carol or Oliver Twist and plunged us into a world of unrelieved miseries. Even now, with a few years of accumulated knowledge behind us, it’s hard to imagine London in the 1860s washed in sunlight and alive with the sounds of chuckling infants. It was grim, the air was filthy and children battled through unloved and abused. No wonder they seldom smiled for the camera.  

Newspapers provide convincing evidence that life was actually as bad as that. In 1862 a Dr Greenhow discovered that three quarters of children born to Nottingham factory workers died in infancy, that at a time when one in four children in England died in their first year. Overlooking the frequent reports of murders and neglect that happen as much today, we have the stories of child labourers. A story from the New York Times in November 1875 describes a group of spectators so disgusted by the treatment handed out to one of ‘Count Leo’s’ circus acrobats they had him arrested. Subsequently it was found that all his child workers were severely malnourished. In an orphanage in Buffalo misbehaving children must place their hands under a window sash. It is brought down hard upon their fingers, somehow guaranteeing they won’t play up again.

It’s not all horrid. Just as Dickens’ child heroes find some kind of redemption, there are stories of sharp-eyed adults rescuing children from the brink and of politicians and newspapermen roused to action by their own compassion. Carroll regarded his own childhood as idyllic. Still, the idea remains that the Victorian childhood was a nasty place to be. Our great, great grandparents wander through contemporary films and novels hollow eyed and pale, resigned to a premature death or a life of unrelenting, thankless toil. 

The children in this gallery come from England, Europe, the US and Australia. They are aged between four and about fourteen. They play, they work, look miserable, bored, sulk and smile. One thing that unites them is that they all appear strangely adult in their deportment, as though whatever their background they had to grow up faster back then. The images are cabinet cards and CDVs from the 1860s to the 1890s.

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS