ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which clothing expressed a boy’s social position in terms of age, family membership and employment status, using documented portraits, school photographs and Barnardo’s entry images. In choosing clothing, families also had to balance pragmatic considerations of cost and availability against social conventions. This balancing led at times to anomalous combinations such as the white collars on ragged jackets seen in the Barnardo’s entry images. The chapter outlines the legal and biological definition of childhood in the late nineteenth century. It examines mass-production processes relied on a standardisation of the sizes in which particular styles were made. The chapter also examines the actual practices of age-related clothing, starting with school photographs, which will indicate how the three life stages intersected with the age divisions between Infants and Junior Schools.
