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Reviewed by:
  • Making, Selling and Wearing Boys' Clothes in Late-Victorian England
  • Annebella Pollen
Clare Rose . Making, Selling and Wearing Boys' Clothes in Late-Victorian England. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010. 294 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-6444-4, $124.95 (cloth).

The study of children's culture, after many years of scholarly neglect, has become the subject of increasing academic interest, not least in the area of children's clothing. Key publications by sociologist Daniel [End Page 432] Cook and anthropologist Alison J. Clarke, as just two examples, have persuasively examined the making, selling, and wearing of children's clothing in the twentieth and twenty-first century as a means of engaging with larger issues about consumer culture, the social construction of childhood, and the complexities of the shifting moral debates therein. Similarly, Clare Rose's text, with its meticulous focus on boys' wear in the nineteenth century, seeks to use this case study as a lens through which to explore changing practices of production, distribution and retailing practices, the social constitution of gendered and classed identity, and the conceptualization and experience of social change more broadly.

Concerned to establish "the habitus of nineteenth-century boys' clothing practice" (p. 246), Rose is frustrated by surviving garments preserved by museums, with their emphasis on special occasion and elite wear rather than everyday clothes. Her quest for alternative sources leads her, instead, to an impressively comprehensive and innovative range of research material including photographs emerging from children's charitable institutions, design registers, advertising archives, trade journals, dress patterns, needlework guides, and autobiographies. Due to the vast scale of some of these data sets, Rose largely applies quantitative analytical approaches, where the material is typologized, tabulated, and then organized in the form of percentages. This approach is defended by Rose as providing "a firm evidential base" (p. 227), and can certainly prove illuminating for establishing patterns of clothing styles across data; as an interpretive tool for assessing nuances of social significance and cultural meaning, however, it can prove rather limited.

For example, in the first chapter, Rose discusses the way that "raggedness" as a metaphor for child poverty in the nineteenth century was positioned against the desired quality of "respectability," particularly in the transformational effects of charity visualized in the "before" and "after" photographs of children entering and exiting Dr. Barnardo's children's homes. In order to account for "the reality of raggedness" (p. 46), Rose counts instances where the clothing worn in these photographs could be understood as ragged (in the form of holes, tears, missing buttons and bare feet) against that which could be seen as respectable (most commonly interpreted in the form of a white collar). This quantification leads Rose to conclude that the difference, in practice, between poverty and improvement is not as marked as one might expect. However, in order for this assertion to carry authority, Rose acknowledges that it is necessary to first refute the charge of such images as "artistic fictions" and to claim their validity as a source that may be counted as "evidence." Given what has been argued both in nineteenth century court cases and in recent [End Page 433] photographic analysis about the staged and rhetorical purposes of these particular prints, this is a tricky ambition.

In a short paragraph in the introduction, as part of a longer, rather list-like literature review, Rose briefly notes that various theorists have critiqued the use of photographs as historical sources. Rose is also aware of the literature that problemati z es the Barnardo's photographs in particular, as this is deferred to in footnotes. It is rather frustrating, then, that these debates are not explored and integrated into the argument, where photographs seem oversimplified as windows on the world. There is also an emerging and sophisticated body of work on visual methodologies that is wholly sidestepped in analysis. I am thinking, in particular, of the work of Gillian Rose and Elizabeth Edwards, whose debates about the material, emotional, and performative role of photographs in social and historical research moves beyond considering them merely as documents that may or may not be trusted evidentially. Some engagement with these debates would have considerably thickened reflections. Additionally...

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