Hi my girlfriend is currently intrested in historical sewing and wants to make a convict costume. She has a few sources which tell her what they wore and fabric that was used.
However she's really struggled into fiding a pattern or visual source to be able to refer off to sew, from a sketch or painting.
However, because the colonies saw themselves and based their culture and fashion as English, she thought she could base her costume off working class englishwomen, if there isn't any primary convict sources. So she tried finding paintings and sketches of working class englishwomen around the 1840s and 50s to no avail. She's been using this website as her primary convict source. https://www.femaleconvicts.org.au/convict-institutions/convict-clothing
The pictures in this link are the main references from that website she is using https://imgur.com/a/G3wsSRc
In short if anyone can help us find some visual material of convict women in Australia or lower class women of England between or near the 1840-50s. Thanks
The problem here is that you're/she's focusing on images of specifically working-class women - to get an idea of working-class dress in any historical period, you have to start by learning about that period's fashion. Images of the clothing of the wealthy and even middling are generally not in short supply, and when it comes to the seventeenth century forward, there are even enough extant garments hanging around that we can study them in depth and really come to understand how they were put together and, most importantly, what "rules" there were for garment construction that were broadly applied and therefore likely to show up in working-class dress as well. Then you can study primary and secondary textual sources relating to the dress of the poor to triangulate.
For fashion of the period, I would suggest Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion I, Norah Waugh's The Cut of Women's Clothes, and Nancy Bradfield's Costume in Detail, plus perhaps the V&A's Nineteenth Century Fashion in Detail.
For working-class dress, there are some great articles in the journal Textile History: "Developing a Method for the Study of the Clothing of the 'Poor': Some Themes in the Visual Representation of Rural Working-Class Dress, 1850–1900" by Rachel Worth, "Reclothing the English Poor, 1750-1840" by Steven King, "The manufacture and provision of rural garments, 1800-1850: A case study of Herefordshire and Worcestershire" by A. Toplis, ""The burial-place of the fashions": the representation of the dress of the poor in illustrated serial prose by Dickens and Hardy." by C. M. Jackson-Houlston. There are also some good books: Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England by Vivienne Richmond (2013) and, most aptly, Dress Behind Bars: Prison Clothing as Criminality by Juliet Ash (2010). This last one specifically discusses Australian convict women's clothing.