(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.
Contact us for information about using this image.

label levels:

Frances and Mary Allen photographed this boy playing with a hoop for an illustration for a book by Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911). The boy wears a skeleton suit, a fashion for young boys popular at the turn of the nineteenth century. Buttons connect the top and bottom of the suit. Rolling a hoop with a stick was a popular children's game well into the nineteenth century. Earle's descriptions of everyday life in the eighteenth century in books such as Home Life in Colonial Days" was popular to Americans interested in rediscovering and taking a new look at the nation's colonial era. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Colonial Revival was a time when people viewed the past in a quaint, fanciful way.

top of page

Boy in a Skeleton Suit

Send an e-Postcard of this object