Ernest Hemingway Family: Children's Photographs

 

This website, created by students of Middlebury College, provides rare and precious photographs of Ernest Miller Hemingway, the famous writer, and his siblings as children. The photographs were taken in Oak Park, Illinois, where Hemingway was born, and in Michigan, where the family vacationed, during the early 20th century when the children grew up. The photographs, mostly originals, depict how gender, leisure, and family relationships were manifested in children during this time period. The toys they use, such as boats and guns, the activities they engage in, such as swimming and dressing up, and the clothing they wear, either androgynous or resolutely gender specific, help to define the culture of children at this time, which is always classified by society itself. The photography of this time was focused on displaying family size and positive family relationships.

Ernest Hemingway had five siblings: one older sister, Marcelline, three younger ones, Ursula, Madeleine, and Carol, and one younger brother, Leicester, the youngest. They were the children of Grace Hall Hemingway and Dr. Clarence Hemingway, who married in 1896. The children were born beginning in 1898 and ending in 1915, while the last to die, Carol, passed in 2002. These images are the property of Middlebury College, located in Middlebury, Vermont. [1]

Ernest

Ursula

Madeleine

family photographs

Carol

Leicester

 

As Karin Calvert states in her article “Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood”, from The Children’s Culture Reader: “…childhood is a social invention, reinvented by every society and age”. The childhoods of Ernest Hemingway and his siblings, as depicted by these photographs, are reflections of the 19th and 20th century societies. [2]