A previous feature dealt with children cast in the roles of adults. Today’s is about children growing up as nature ordained – vulnerable, craving attention and affection, playful, dependent, asexualised.

The invention of photography in the beginning of the Victorian age helped project and install this image in popular culture. Photo portraiture set current stereotypes in stone: that of adults sought to bring out status or gravitas; that of children, their innocence and charm.

A toddler in a 1910s Pierrot costume. Photo: Salvatore Lorenzo Cassar

Boy with a toy horse, c. 1910. Photo: Salvatore Lorenzo Cassar

A young boy dressed as a magician. Photo: Fenech studio in Valletta, c. 1910.

These essential differences ended up being exploited by photographers in Malta and elsewhere. Some advertised ‘portraits of children a speciality’. Others stocked studio props, like tricycles or toy horses, to dress the photo up with easily recognisable symbols of childhood.

Children in an open carriage at San Anton Gardens, 1890s.

Photographs of pre-pubescents smoking prove disturbing today but I would place the portrait of a seven-year-old with a cigarette in his mouth in the ‘contrived adulthood’ class but that of a child lighting a cigar for another child as horseplay by kids.

Two children posing as adults lighting a cigar in the 1910s. Photo: Grand Studio

As in all known old civilisations, toys for children have turned up in archaeological digs in Malta too. Children play with everything – sticks, pebbles, bells, hoops, seashells, balls, kites, pets, beads, rag dolls, checkers, whistles. Perhaps the mysterious small temple models and the Gozo shaman’s figurines were only toys and dolls after all.

Servicemen used to toss pennies at groups of urchins to watch them fighting over the loot, 1920s.

A characteristic runs through much of early children’s portraiture – their dressing up. That parents would want them dolled in their Sunday bests is understandable but why, outside the carnival freedoms, kids had to look extravagant or exotic remains puzzling.

A boy sprawling over a bread cart in the 1920s.

Boy on a tricycle, and other toys, 1930s.

My selection includes children enjoying themselves collectively, in carnival companies, in communal gymnastics or wrestling over pennies thrown at them by their colonial owners. No, these are not pathetic students starting their academic careers fighting by the hundreds over five euro notes on the university campus.

A group of young children in bathing costumes by the sea in the 1900s.