Children's toys: Dolls and Dolls Houses

'Trade and Plum-Cake forever. Huzza!'

(John Newbery, Nurse Truelove's New-Year's Gift, c. 1770)

Louise Juliana of Orange-Nassau
 by Daniel van den Queborn, 1582
(Pinterest)

Not only were adults clearly getting much enjoyment from their children but the gradual appearance of a larger leisured class with the money and inclination to indulge their children encouraged the development of a new market in products to please and satisfy their demands.  Leslie Gordon,  in Peepshow into paradise, a history of children's toys says the first toy shop to open in London was the Parrot and Star, set up in the 1720s by Robert Waite in Bow Lane, Cheapside, London.

Cheap toys were being hawked and sold by pedlars long before this, and were probably also sold in other shops, while many children had home-made toys.  Sir William Petty in his Epistle to...Master Samuel Hartlib, 1647, described children playing games of make-believe with guns made from elder sticks and ships of nut shells.  Both British and American family portraits from the mid 16th century often show little girls clasping a doll and occasionally show other toys.  There is one much-travelled Puritan doll in Kirkstall Abbey Museum, Leeds, who appeared in a portrait of 1688 wit her owner, then went with the family to America, returning with a descendant of the same family after the American War of Independence.  Simple carved wooden dolls were among the presents Sir Walter Raleigh took for the Native Americans on his ill-fated attempt to colonise Virginia in 1607, and there, as well as in Britain there were already home made dolls made from a variety of materials.  The Native Americans were said to be 'greatlye delighted with puppets and babes which are brought oute of England (Mary Hillier, Pageant of toys, 1965)

Florence Upton's Dutch dolls, 1895

Florence Upton grew up in Britain and America.  Her 1895 children's book about the adventures of two Dutch dolls included  Golliwogg, based on an American black rag doll.  Her success led to a whole series which were very popular till the 1960s when the racist implications were finally realised and led to Gollowog's sudden disappearance from the toy-cupboard and children's book shelves.

Hitty, The life and adventures of a wooden doll, 1932 by the American children's author Rachel Field describes the adventures of a doll carved from mountain ash which must have been typical of the playthings of 17th century British and American children.  She stood six and a half inches high and had a painted face like what were later called Dutch dolls.  Her first clothes were of stout calico and were sewn by her little owner, for little girls were encouraged to dress their dolls as a way of getting them to practise their needlework, much more interesting than sewing shirts for the poor or hemming handkerchiefs.

Ann Proctor by Charles Willson Peale, 1789
(RubyLaneblog)

Charlotte Yonge, the Victorian novelist, was given a wooden Dutch doll, Miss Eliza as a reward for completing a piece of needlework as a child in the 1820s:
'My biggest doll would be scorned nowadays.  She was made of apple-wood, with a painted face, black eyes inserted, a wig nailed on, and a pair of leathern arms, much out of proportion.'
 (Georgiana Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge.  1943, quoted from an autobiographical fragment by Charlette Yonge)

Charlotte Yonge had an ungratified yearning for one of the really splendid and expensive dolls with china heads.  However, Charlotte 'was told how many poor children could be fed on the price, and knew it must be given up.'  She had about sixteen others, 'some about a foot long with waxen heads, some of the old-fashioned Dutch dolls, but the most beloved was Anna, who was well made of white leather with a very pretty papier mache face, a novelty sixty years since...'

German doll with a china head,
(Pinterest)

Dolls, which at this date were called 'babies' are quite often mentioned in everyday letters from about 1700 on:
'Mrs. Richardson would lend her a wax baby in swadels which she was very fond of but att last down came ye baby and broke to peces; your daughter did fall astorming and squeaking that ye baby was broke...there was to have ben a great cristning of it and Pen was to have been ye Godmother but ye life was very short.' Elizabeth Hamilton, The Mordaunts, 1965.  Quote from 1701)
'My children buried one of their Babbies with a great deal of Formallity.  They had  a Garland of flowers carried before it, and at least twenty of their playfellows and others that they invited were at the Buriall. (1712.  Margaret Blundell ed., Blundell's diary and letter book, 1702-1728. 1952)

Dolls with delicately mounded wax faces  would unfortunately melt if left too near the fire, or in the sun:

'One summer's day, 'was in the month of June,
The sun blaz'd down in all the heat of noon:
My waxen doll, she cry'd, my dear! my charm!
You feel quite cold, but you shall soon be warm.
She plac'd it in the sun, - misfortune dire!
The wax ran down, as if before the fire!
Each beauteous feature quickly disappeared
And melting left a blank all soil'd and smear'd...'
  (Ann and Jane Taylor, Original poems for infant minds, 1804)

Wax headed doll, c.1890
(e.bay)

Many accidentally shared the fate of Jane Carlyle's doll, which, inspired by the story of Dido of Carthage, she formally sacrificed when she began to study the Aeneid.  Changing her mind, Jane rushed to save her doll from the flames, too late!
(in Mrs. F. Neville Jackson, Toys of other days, 1908)

Dolls with china heads were fairly common by the mid 19th century and in 1825 speaking mechanisms and eyes that opened and shut were available.  In spite of being called 'babies', dolls at this time were generally modelled as adult women, often with generously curved figures.

In 1902 the Teddy Bear was created when Morris Michtom, in the USA, made a toy teddy bear and named it after President 'Teddy' Roosevelt.  He founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company to produce them.
The German firm of Steiff hit on the idea at almost the same time in 1903.

A Golliwog, a French doll with a china head, and a c.1908 Steiff Teddy Bear

The dolls house, as we know it, seems to have begun life as an extremely elaborate work of art.  The earliest recorded example was commissioned by Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria for his daughter in 1558 but ended up in his art collection.  It has four floors, seventeen doors, and sixty-three windows all fitted up in the first style of elegance with embroidered and gold tapestries, gold and silver fitments in the state rooms, even a well fitted bathroom and a lion house for the 'Bavarian armorial animal'.
(Flora Gill Jacobs, A history of dolls' houses, 1954)  Quoted from Karl Grober, Children's toys of bygone days, trans. Philip Hereford, 1928)

Although there may have been unrecorded dolls houses made for children in the 16th and 17th centuries adults do seem to have kept the best for themselves.  In 16th century Germany, Augsburg, Nuremburg and Ulm were particularly celebrated for their production and fitments in the 16th and 17th centuries, but dolls houses were not common in Britain till the 18th century.  The earliest British example is probably Mrs. Humphrey's dolls house, a copy of the 1567 Sparrowe's House in Ipswich, complete with elaborate pargetering, which may have been made for the owners at any time during the first 200 years after the house was built.
In 2016 a very important early British dolls house turned up on the BBC Antiques Roadshow.  It was made in 1705 on the Isle of Dogs for a Miss E. Westbrook, has panelled, well-furnished rooms, and dolls in their original Georgian clothing.

BBC Antiques Roadshow dolls house

It became fashionable to commission architects to design elaborate dolls houses, replicas of actual town or country houses.  A specially fine one at Uppart was described in Country Life: 'The house itself has an accurately designed Palladian facade, of three storeys, seven bays wide, resting on a stand modelled on the arcade of Covent Garden paizza...'  Inside are some delightful dolls:  'Taking an  unpardonable liberty, we discovered that the ladies are wearing three petticoats...The party, their heads flung back, saeem to be enjoying a joke.  These Georgians have a hearty sense of humour.  Can it have anything to do with the lady upstairs?  Poor thing, she is confined to bed, and we can see why: at the foot of the gorgeously canopied bed is a wicker cradle, within is an nobviously very young doll...'
(Christopher Hussey, Country Life 6 March 1942, quoted in Flora Gill Jacobs A history of dolls houses 1954)

The Uppark dolls house, (National Trust Archives)

A proper children's dolls house is mentioned in the Mordaunt letters, 1726 when Peg or Dolly was given a piece of furniture for it:  'Miss desires her Duty to her aunt and a great many thanks for her fine hearth which is put in the Drawing room in her baby house.' (op.cit)

Queen Anne gave her god-daughter Ann Sharp, born in 1691, a nine room dolls house, described in detail in Flora Jacobs History of dolls houses.  In the kitchen there was a plum pudding in a copper pot bubbling on the fire, and a sucking pig roasting on a spit.  The dolls who lived in it were My lord Rockett, his lady, his son and daughter, Sarah Gill, 'ye child's maid', Fanny Long, the chambermaid, Roger, 'ye butler, Mrs. Hannah, ye housekeepers', cook, footman, Lady Jemima Johnson, Mrs. Lemon, Sir William Johnson and a lady.  (op cit)

The dolls house Queen Victoria had as a little girl was described in Girl's Realm for 1899.  It was well played with and a little tatty by then but had all the right dolls' furniture.  In the kitechn 'An ample dresser shows rows of shining pewter plates, and there are frying pans, saucepans and other culinary utensils placed neatly upon the walls or shelves.  There is a capacious knife-box, filled with iron spoons and forks and wooden-handled knives.  There are flat-irons, an iron-stand, a warming-pan, a coffee mill, and a clock.  The grate is one of the old-fashioned kind, and an iron kettle is on the hob.  On each side of the fireplace stand doll servants.  I grieve to state that they are neither clean or trim...'
(Jacobs op.cit, quoted from Girl's Realm 1899)

 Princess Victoria was also very fond of full size dolls and had a hundred and thirty-two, of which she dressed thirty-two herself.

Princess Victoria's dolls house
(BBC archives)