A post-mortem photograph of Samuel Charles Stowe, son of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1849.

Little “Charley,” the young son of American abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband Calvin, died in 1849 during a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati, Ohio. Following the custom of many Victorian families, the Stowes had a daguerreotype portrait taken of their deceased son before his burial. The small framed portrait would have been an important part of the family’s mourning, and it fits with the Victorian conception of childhood as a period of both innocence and vulnerability.