(Laura Ingall Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1935)
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| Noah's Ark (Pinterest) |
The single most appealing child character was probably Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett's sturdy flaxen haired American heir to a British earldom, Little Lord Fauntleroy. This sentimental but very readable story has been totally demolished by the scorn of adults such as Compton Mackenzie who were forced by doting mothers to wear their hair long like girls and go to parties in velvet suits:
'That confounded Little Lord Fauntleroy craze which led to my being given as a party dress the Little Lord Fauntleroy costume of black velvet and Vandyke collar was a curse.'
(Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times, Octave 1, 1883-1891, pub. 1963, p.178)
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| Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1888 (Library of Congress) |
(Letters from Sarah, Lady Lyttleton, 1777-1878, pub. 1873, p.243)
Similar sentimentality is found in many children's portraits from the late 19th and early 20th century. Millais Bubbles and John Singer Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose are famous examples. It is the attitude of the Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth. Kate Greenaway's picture books show girls in quaint old-fashioned dresses and mob-caps, playing traditional games like 'Oranges and Lemons'. Parents copied her illustrations and dressed their children in Kate Greenaway costumes.
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| Kate Greenaway, Rhymes for the Young Folk, 1887 (Pinterest) |
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| Nister. Stories from Hans Andersen, c.1890 (Pinterest) |
Charles Perrault's French fairy tales, originally written for adults, were appropriated for children; these include Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty; very unsuitable in the original version, Red Riding Hood, a warning to young maidens about who they might meet in the woods, and Puss in Boots. British writers experimented with the genre, producing collections like Frances Browne's Granny's Wonderful Chair, 1856 (internet edition available, Project Gutenberg)
Some Victorian fantasies have become classics, for example Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, 1865 and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, 1871, George Macdonald's Princess and the Goblin and its sequel, and Rudyard Kipling's Rewards and Fairies, stories which celebrate the English countryside as fairy and folk tale. Charles Kingsley disguised the moral story as a fairy tale in The Water Babies, (1862-3 Project Gutenberg internet edition available) and turned it into a lightly disguised fairy tale, while Thackeray also turned the venerable moral story on its head in his sophisticated, mocking fairy tale, The Rose and the Ring,:
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| John Tenniel illustration, the Cheshire Cat disappears Alice in Wonderland (Pinterest) |
(The Rose and the Ring, 1854, p. 1. Project Gutenberg internet edition available)
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| The Rose and the Ring, MS (Morgan Library) |
(Louisa May Alcott, her life, letters and journals, 1898, p. 29. Project Gutenberg internet edition available) another American author, Henry James, said 'All our books at that age were English'
(Henry James, A small boy and others, 1813, internet edition available)
The terminology of British authors was often strange to American ears; Oliver Wendell Holmes complained of: 'Books..... where naughty schoolboys got through a gap in the hedge to steal Farmer Giles' red-streaks instead of shinning over the fence to hook old Daddy Jones' Baldwins; where Hodge used to go to the ale-house for his mug of beer, while we used to see old Joe steering for the grocery to get his glass of rum; where there were larks and nightingales instead of yellow-birds and bobolinks; where the robin was a little domestic bird that fed at table instead of a great, fidgity, jerky, whooping thrush.'
(Quoted in Alice Morse Earle Child life in colonial days, 1899, p. 303, internet edition available)
In the 19th century American authors began writing books for children which crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction. Probably the most famous, still read today, are Mark Twain's two books about life among white and black folk on the Mississippi river in the American south, at a time when slavery was still legal, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876 and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885.
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| E. W. Kemble illustration to Huckleberry Finn, Jim mistaking Huck for a ghost |
Gosse, having absolutely no experience of 'stories' took the whole work as literal truth and describes the effect on him as 'like giving a glass of brandy neat to someone who has never been weaned from a milk diet.'(Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, 1907. p. 143)
Louisa M. Alcott and Elizabeth Wetherall's books were as popular in Britain as in America. James Fennimore Cooper contributed a classic told from the Native American viewpoint in The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Tales of the pioneers in the American West and Canada, and goldrush adventure stories were also a popular subject for garishly illustrated 'penny dreadfuls'. Frontier settings were used by British writers such as G. A. Henty and R.M. Ballantyne, a Scottish author who based The Young Fur Traders (1856) on his experiences with the trappers in Canada.
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| The Young Fur Traders (Vanished eras.com, 1930s ed) |
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| (Image, The bookdorks.blog) |
Many periodicals for teenagers began life in the late 19th century, the boys had the Boys' Own Paper, there was also Saint Nicholas and Aunt Judy's. Probably some of the least beloved were the ones designed to provide suitable Sunday reading, Sunday at Home, Sunday Reading for the Young.
The Biblical Noah's Ark was one of the few toys considered suitable for Sundays in strict religious households. It would have a sliding roof, and Noah and all his animals, two of each, were crammed inside:
'In the Ark lived Noah and his family, eight people with round heads and large hats, the women with tiny pinched waists, the men with long coats and sticks which moved in their hands...There were about sixty animals, grey elephants, camels and dromedaries, zebras with black stripes, giraffes with spots, bears, antlered stage, buffaloes, tigers, cows with long horns, sturdy pigs, calves, horses of different breeds, and many strange dogs, spotted and striped. There were blackbirds, ravens, crows and doves, all the same size. We liked the birds, for they perched on the Ark's roof and stood firmly on their feet and tails, unlike the animals whose legs were broken as we knocked them about.'
(Alison Uttley, Ambush of Young Days, 1937, p. 123)
F. Anstey had no toys on Sundays except scripture bricks featuring stories from the Bible.
(F. Anstey, A Long Retrospect, 1936)
Jigsaws and board games were still very popular and new games began to appear. They were usually educational, like the New Parlour Spelling Game, a collection of letters with a slatted frame to slot them into, or word games like Word Taking and Word Making, where the players tried to make words from tiles chosen at random, a bit like Scrabble. There were card games teaching spelling, history and geography. Cards just as an amusement were, like dice, out of favour in well-run nurseries because of their association with gambling, which was raging out of control among well-off adults.
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| The Game of Human Life, a moral board game, c.1790 (branchcollective.org) |
'My bricks were made of a non-shiny, stone-like substance and included pediments, arches, columns, bases, trabeations and an endless variety of blocks. It was possible to make quite large and elaborate buildings and learn a great deal about the laws of construction. I took my buildings very seriously, preserving them for weeks on end, and demanded criticism from the unfortunate guests who were press-ganged into visiting my nursery.'
(Kenneth Clarke, Another part of the wood, 1974, p. 13)
There were scientific educational games such as The Young Naturalist, c.1860, based on the popular hobby of collecting cabinets of fossils, rocks, butterflies, shells. After Benjamin Franklin observed that the mixing of the marks on the surface of children's spinning tops provided a lesson in optics special toys which demonstrated the mixing of the colours of the spectrum were made.
The Zoetrope, or Wheel of Life depended on the spinning of a cylinder pierced with slits and lined with paper with figures in slightly different positions printed onto it. When the cylinder was spun the figures blended into one and appeared to be moving. The Phenakiscope, with figures painted onto a flat disc, worked on the same principle, and these ideas were later used in movie cartoons.
(Leslie Gordon, Peepshow into Paradise, A history of children's toys, 1953, chapter 21)
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| The Young Naturalist game (BBC images) |
Alison Uttley was captivated by the magic lantern slides of strange monsters and exotic places which she and her brother saved up to buy:
'We set it up in the kitchen, on the servant-boy's stool, placed on a table. A sheet was hung from the clothes line, across the room to take the pictures...My brother stood on the chair and manipulated the slides; the tiny lantern sent a stream of smoke to the low ceiling, and there was a delicious odour of hot japanned metal. The brightly coloured pictures filled us with joy, and we looked at them over and over again, inventing tales about them, swept into a world of romance...'
(Gordon, op. cit, p.202-3)
Harriet Martineau was terrified by the magic lantern in 1804. She was also terrified by the the Phantasmagoria: 'I did not like the darkness to begin with; and when Minerva (Greek Goddess of Wisdom) appeared, in a red dress, at first extremely small, and then approaching, till her owl seemed coming directly upon me, it was so like my nightmare dreams that I shrieked aloud.
(Gordon, op.cit, p.203)
There were many different mechanical toys, from simple wooden figures who ran up sticks or danced when a string was pulled, which we can still buy, to Jumping Jacks, which seem to have disappeared, and toys like Leotard the Acrobat 'who lived in a glass-fronted box. His loose-jointed limbs were cardboard, cardboard his slender trunk; and his hands eternally grasped the bar of a trapeze. You turned the box round swiftly five or six times; the wonderful unresolved machinery worked, and Leotard swung and leapt, backwards, forward, now astride the bar, now flying free; iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, unceasingly novel in his invention of new, unguessable attitudes; while above, below, and around him, a richly dressed audience, painted in skilful perspective of stalls, boxes, dress-circle, and gallery, watched the thrilling performance with a stolidarity which seemed to mark them out as made in Germany.'
(Kenneth Grahame, Dream Days, 1899, p.257)
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| Jack in a Box (BBC Primary History, Victorian Britain) |
'When the news arrived that France and Germany were going to war, I need not tell you, if you know whence we obtain a large proportion of our finest toys, that I became seriously alarmed...We cannot get on, you know, without French toys...'
(Gordon, op.cit, p.69)
Germany for automata, France for dolls. France led Europe for fashion clothes, and the doll and fashion trades were closely connected. Cremer describes how the gun and sword makers he visited were too busy making the real thing to fill his orders. In Germany too dolls' house furniture and utensils were made by those who made the full size articles. Many dolls were made to display miniature versions of fashion outfits and there is probably a close link between demonstration miniature articles of furniture, so tempting to a child, and pieces for the dolls' houses which had become a regular feature in Victorian nurseries.
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| A Jumeau doll (Pinterest) |
These wonderful dolls had wigs of real hair, eyes which opened and closed, lips delicately parted to show two pearl-like teeth, and possibly a voice and walking mechanism. It was a doll like this which Nellie refused to let Laura Ingalls Wilder and the other pioneer farmers' children play with at her birthday party:
'She was dressed in blue silk. Her petticoats were real petticoats trimmed with ruffles and lace, and her panties were real little panties that would come off. In her feet were real little blue leather slippers.'
Laura had to be content with Susan, a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief until her mother made her beloved rag doll Charlotte.
Being the storekeeper's children Nellie and her brother Willie had far better toys that the other children at Plum Creek. Laura remembered tin soldiers, a jumping-jack and that Noah's Ark. And a bicycle. In the 1870s some were advertised in an American fashion magazine:
'Velocipedes are in special favour this winter...very good ones can be bought for $4.77'
'They can't ride my velocipede!' shouted Willie when Laura and her sister came to that party.
(Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1937, p.109)
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| (Wikipedia image) |
Dolls were generally sold dressed only in a chemise and their owners would learn to sew by sewing their clothes. Louisa Alcott set herself up as dolls' dressmaker to the neighbourhood in Boston, USA, at twelve 'with my sign out and wonderful models in my window. All the children employed me, and my turbans were the rage at one time, to the great dismay of the neighbours' hens, who were hotly hunted down, that I might tweak out their downiest feathers to adorn the dolls' headgear.'
(Lousa May Alcott, her life, letters and journals, 1889, p. 30. Project Gutenberg internet edition available)
In the Southern USA children played with black rag dolls, later called 'Golliwogs', and fictionalised in Florence Upton's popular children's picture books about the adventures of Golliwog and two Dutch peg dolls, (1895-1909) now banished as racist, along with Helen Bannerman's enterprising hero Little Black Sambo. (1899)
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| Florence Upton's Golliwog and Peg Dolls (Wikipedia) |
'Renee had brown eyes and pink cheeks, a blue silk dress and a white bonnet with orange blossoms on it. She had two pairs of shoes and two pairs of stockings, and she had two wigs, a brown and a flaxen one. All her clothes took off and on, and there was a complete change of them.'
Edith Nesbit, Long ago when I was young, 1966, p.66)
She must have been similar to the doll which became poor Sara's confident in Mrs. Frances Hodgson
Burnett's story A Little Princess. (Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sara Crewe, or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's, 1888. Later re-titled A Little Princess.) Kate Greenaway had a doll almost two metres high which she called Guaraca as it was a reward for learning a 'piece' of that name. (Gordon, op. cit, p. 85)
Guaraca wore her brother John's clothes with the tucks let out to make them large enough, and full size baby shoes. Kate Greenaway had many other dolls. The smallest were the Royal family, two halfpenny dolls which she called Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, though both wore skirts, and several farthing dolls representing the princess and princes.
(M.H. Spielman and G.S. Layard, The Life and Work of Kate Greenaway, 1905, p.26)
Alison Uttley had a doll which cried "Mama" and "Papa" when a string was pulled. She was only allowed to play with her, reverently, on Sundays; for everyday she had a battered old wooden one which was eventually given to the poor:
'When my mother suggested that I should give away some of my toys to little children not so well off, I chose out the beloved object as the greatest sacrifice, welcome to God.'
(Alison Uttley, Ambush of Young Days p. 61)
She always regretted it, and the poor probably did not appreciate the gift at all.
Many other Victorian children had their toys bundled up and sent off to orphanages or hospitals when they felt to be too old:
'We were being daily inundated with leaflets headed by a woodcut depicting Little Annie (of Poplar in London) sitting up in her little white cot, surrounded by the toys of the nice, kind, rich children.' remembers Kenneth Grahame
Less well brought up than Alison Uttley, they rescued few favourites from the box and buried them in the garden. Outgrown, battered, but full of happy memories, who could ever love a toy as well as the child whose constant companion it once was.
The children also had one of the rocking horses which became a standard for Victorian nurseries:
'In days of old each of us in turn had been jerked thrillingly round the room on his precarious back, had dug our heels into his unyielding sides, and had scratched our hands on the tin tacks that secured his mane to his stiffly-curving neck...'
(Dream Days, 1895, p.255, 259)
The rocking horses were always dapple grey and their tails were real horse hair.
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| (Legends rocking horse image) |
'They were sold in square wooden boxes with sliding lids which had improbably but thrilling battle pictures on them. Inside these was a little compartment for a cannon, and another for dried peas; the rest of the box contained the rival armies on a disproportionate amount of shavings. 'Rules of Warfare' were pasted inside the lid...The first box I remember contained Federal and Confederate troops with their respective colours.'
He also had a set representing the Allies and Russians in the Crimean War, and there were sets representing most of the armies of Europe.
(F. Anstey (1856-1934) was a comic journalist and author of Vice Versa, a famous father and son role, and body reversal story. A Long Retrospect, 1936, p. 15)
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| German toy soldiers (Proxibid.com) |
(Leslie Gordon, op. cit, p. 181, and Parker Collection of Children's Books and Games, Birmingham Libraries, mechanical monkey)
Toy trains, indespensible for boys in the twentieth century, made their first appearance in the 1840s. Leslie Gordon describes the earliest known example in Peepshow into Paradise. It was a wooden one, based on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company's engines, but covered in daisies.
(Leslie Gordon, op. cit, p. 182)
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| (Image, Modeltraincollectors.wordpress.com) |
'At school there was a game - a circle about a yard in diameter was scratched in the dust, and in that circle the boys spun their tops (if they could!) while other boys hurled down theirs, all spinning, in the hope of striking the revolving peg into somebody else's top.'
He also remembered 'the paint brushes, a penny each, were of camel-hair, and in buying one you had to suck it, to be sure that it would go properly into a point. In use paint brushes could be sucked clean...Only you had to be careful not to suck up too much paint. Crimson lake, indeed, tasted delicious...'
I wonder how many children suffered from lead poisoning?
(George Sturt, A small boy in the sixties, 1927, p. 150. Chapter 16 describes their games)
Finally, a Native American Hopi described his pastimes:
'We shot arrows at targets, played old Hopi checkers, and pushed feather-edged sticks into corncobs and threw them at rolling hoops of corn husks. We wrestled, ran races, played tag, kickball, stick throwing, and shinny. We spun tops with whips and made string figures (cat's cradle?) on our fingers...'
(Robert Bremner, Children and Youth in America, Vol. 2, 1971, p. 48. Quoted from Leo W. Simmons ed. Sun Chief, the Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, 1942, p. 51-53, 60-61, 66-71
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| (Goodreads.com) |
