Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700–Present 9781501332029, 9781501332968, 9781501332043

Citation preview

Childhood by Design

Material Culture of Art and Design Material Culture of Art and Design is devoted to scholarship that brings art history into dialogue with interdisciplinary material culture studies. The material components of an object—its medium and physicality—are key to understanding its cultural significance. Material culture has stretched the boundaries of art history and emphasized new points of contact with other disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, consumer and mass culture studies, the literary movement called “Thing Theory,” and materialist philosophy. Material Culture of Art and Design seeks to publish studies that explore the relationship between art and material culture in all of its complexity. The series is a venue for scholars to explore specific object histories (or object biographies, as the term has developed), studies of medium and the procedures for making works of art, and investigations of art’s relationship to the broader material world that comprises society. It seeks to be the premiere venue for publishing scholarship about works of art as exemplifications of material culture. The series encompasses material culture in its broadest dimensions, including the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles), everyday objects of all kinds (toys, machines, musical instruments), and studies of the familiar high arts of painting and sculpture. The series welcomes proposals for monographs, thematic studies, and edited collections. Series Editor: Michael Yonan, University of Missouri, USA Advisory Board: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware, USA Claire Jones, University of Birmingham, UK Stephen McDowall, University of Edinburgh, UK Amanda Phillips, University of Virginia, USA John Potvin, Concordia University, Canada Olaya Sanfuentes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile Stacey Sloboda, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Robert Wellington, Australian National University, Australia

Volumes in the Series Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700–Present Edited by Megan Brandow-Faller British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775–1930 (forthcoming) Edited by Rosie Dias and Kate Smith Jewellery in the Age of Modernism 1918–1940: Adornment and Beyond (forthcoming) Simon Bliss Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, Seventeenth Century to Contemporary (forthcoming) Edited by Imogen Hart and Claire Jones Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design 1850–1920 (forthcoming) Edited by Claire Moran

Childhood by Design Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700–Present Edited by Megan Brandow-Faller

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 This paperback edition published 2020 © Megan Brandow-Faller and Contributors, 2018 Megan Brandow-Faller and Contributors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Tripp Trapp chair © Stokke AS All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brandow-Faller, Megan, editor. Title: Childhood by design : toys and the material culture of childhood, 1700-present / edited by Megan Brandow-Faller. Description: London ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: Material culture of art and design | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017043753 (print) | LCCN 2017050877 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501332036 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501332043 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501332029 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Toys–History. | Children‘s paraphernalia–History. | Material culture–History. | Play–History. | Children–History. Classification: LCC GV1218.5 (ebook) | LCC GV1218.5 .C45 2018 (print) | DDC 649/.55–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043753 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3202-9 PB: 978-1-5013-5889-0 ePub: 978-1-5013-3203-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3204-3 Series: Material Culture of Art and Design Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Lotte and Otto

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Materializing the History of Childhood and Children Megan Brandow-Faller

xi xvi xix

1

Part 1 Inventing the Material Child: Childhood, Consumption, and Commodity Culture 1 Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys, and Learning to Shop in Eighteenth-Century Britain Serena Dyer 2 Transitional Pandoras: Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century Ariane Fennetaux 3 The (Play)things of Childhood: Mass Consumption and Its Critics in Belle Epoque France Sarah A. Curtis 4 Building Kids: LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity Colin Fanning

31 47 67 89

Part 2 Child’s Play? Avant-Garde and Reform Toy Design 5 Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking: Walter Crane, Flora’s Feast, and the Possibilities of Children’s Literature Andrea Korda 6 The Unexpected Victory of Character-Puppen: Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender in Imperial Germany Bryan Ganaway 7 Work Becomes Play: Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning in the Bauhaus Legacy Michelle Millar Fisher 8 Simply Child’s Play? Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde in Socialist Czechoslovakia before 1968 Cathleen M. Giustino 9 Reconstructing Domestic Play: The Kaleidoscope House Karen Stock and Katherine Wheeler

113 133 153 173 193

x

Contents

Part 3 Toys, Play, and Design Culture as Instruments of Political and Ideological Indoctrination 10 Material Culture in Miniature: Nuremberg Kitchens as Inspirational Toys in the Long Nineteenth Century James E. Bryan 11 Making Paper Models in 1860s New Zealand: An Exploration of Colonial Culture through Child-Made Objects Lynette Townsend 12 Toys for Empire? Material Cultures of Children in Germany and German Southwest Africa, 1890–1918 Jakob Zollmann 13 Public Nostalgia and the Infantilization of the Russian Peasant: Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys Marie Gasper-Hulvat 14 The “Appropriate” Plaything: Searching for the New Chinese Toy, 1910s–1960s Valentina Boretti Index

215 235 255 273 293 316

List of Figures 1.1 The History of Little Fanny, 1810, S. & J. Fuller, London, Briggs Collection of Educational Literature, University of Nottingham Special Collections, PZ6.H4 2.1 Trade Token for J. Kirk, Toy-man, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, inv: B.77-1996. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2.2 Doll, wax and cloth, dressed in white figured silk sack-back wedding gown and petticoat, 1761, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, inv: T.183:7-1919, © Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2.3 Ellen Mahon’s Sampler Book, 1852–1854, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, inv: V&A T.123-1958, © Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2.4 Doll with wax head, painted features and glass bead eyes c. 1800, Museum of London, inv: MOL.A.25315, © Museum of London 3.1 Catalog cover, Samaritaine department store, December 1901. Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Éphémères 3.2 Palais du Père Noël, Louvre department store catalog, December 1913. Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Éphémères 3.3 Child’s room designed by André Hellé, 1911. As exhibited in the decorative arts section of the Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1911 and “Art for Childhood” at the Musée Galliera, Paris, 1913. Courtesy Association des amis d’André Hellé 3.4 Advertisement, Au Printemps department store catalog, December 1913. Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Éphémères 4.1 LEGO/Shwayder Bros. advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1962. Image courtesy of Jim Hughes. LEGO is a trademark of the LEGO Group of Companies. © 2018 The LEGO Group. Image used by permission 4.2 “Castle” set, 1978. Photo used with permission. © 2018 The LEGO Group. All information is collected and interpreted by the author and does not represent the opinion of the LEGO Group

39 51

52

56 60 71

72

79 80

93

95

xii

List of Figures

4.3 “Mania Madness” feature, January/February 1999 LEGO Mania Magazine. LEGO is a trademark of the LEGO Group of Companies. © 2018 The LEGO Group. Image used by permission 4.4 “Architecture Studio” set, 2013. LEGO is a trademark of the LEGO Group of Companies. © 2018 The LEGO Group. Image used by permission 5.1 Walter Crane, “Here stately lilies …,” in Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1889). Courtesy Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta 5.2 Walter Crane, “Here Lords and Ladies …,” in Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1889). Courtesy Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta 5.3 Walter Crane, “Types of Artistic Dress,” in Ideals in Art: Papers Theoretical Practical Critical (London: George Bell & Sons, 1905). © The British Library Board W2/7373 5.4 Walter Crane, “Dance of the Five Senses,” in Beauty’s Awakening, a Masque of Winter and of Spring (London: The Studio, 1899). Courtesy University of Alberta Libraries 5.5 Beatrice Crane, “Legend of the Blush Roses,” in Woman’s World (February 1888): 177. Courtesy Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta 6.1 Marion Kaulitz Character Dolls, c. 1910–1911. In Westermanns Monatshefte, Volume 111/II (Dec 1911), 616 6.2 Käthe Kruse Character Doll, c. 1924. In Der Universal-SpielwarenKatalog, Vol. I (Hamburg: Hess, 1924) 7.1 Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, Bauspiel “Schiff ” (“Ship” building toy), 1923. 21 pieces, painted wood, length of largest piece: 10 1⅜16 in. (25.5 cm). Die Neue Sammlung—The International Design Museum, Munich 7.2 Bauhaus Kite Festival, September 25, 1921, Ilse Fehling (left) and Nicol Wassilieff (right), 1921. Image courtesy Bauhaus Archiv Berlin 7.3 Eberhard Schrammen, Gerd Schrammen with Play Horse “Hansi” made of colored painted wood, c. 1947, silver gelatin paper. Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

98

102

116

116

117

119

126 140 142

156

159

165

List of Figures

7.4 Page from Katalog der Muster (Catalog of designs), sales catalog of Bauhaus objects, layout by Herbert Bayer, showing child’s suite of cabinets including puppet theater designed by Alma SiedhoffBuscher in 1923 for the Haus am Horn. Dessau: Bauhaus, 1925. Letterpress. 11 ¾ × 8 ¼ in. (30 × 21cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jan Tschichold Collection, gift of Philip Johnson 8.1 Front cover of Tvar’s 1952 Special Issue Devoted to Toys. Tvar Vol. 4 (1952). Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague 8.2 Children Playing with “Collective Toys.” Tvar Vol. 4 (1952): 295. Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague 8.3 “The Tree of Toys” in the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Tvar Vol. 10 (1959): 299. Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague 8.4 “Tomcat” designed by Libuše Niklová. Tvar Vol. 16 (1965): 275. Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague 9.1 Kaleidoscope House, Laurie Simmons and Peter Wheelwright for Bozart Toys, Co., 2001. Image courtesy of Peter Wheelwright. Photo by Laurie Simmons 9.2 Laurie Simmons, Sink/Ivy Wallpaper, black and white photograph, 13.5 × 21 cm, 1976. Edition of 10. Image courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York 9.3 Plans of Kaleidoscope House, (L) Ground Floor with living, dining, kitchen, and office (R) Upper Level with mezzanine and bedrooms. Courtesy of Peter Wheelwright. Redrawn by Lacey Stansell, 2017 9.4 Laurie Simmons, Untitled (Woman’s Head), black and white photograph, 13.5 × 21 cm, 1976. Edition of 10. Image courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York 10.1 Typical Toy Kitchen, German, Late Eighteenth to Mid-Nineteenth Century, 17 × 29 × 13 7⅜8 in. (43.2 × 73.7 × 35.2 cm), New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Sylmaris Collection, gift of George Coe Graves, 1930, Accession # 30.120.123 10.2 Smarje Family Toy Kitchen, German, c. 1750, approximately 31 ½ × 20 1⅜16 × 30 in. (80 × 51 × 76 cm), Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg, Altonaer Museum

xiii

167

179 181

185 187

194

197

203

206

216

224

xiv

List of Figures

10.3 Toy Kitchen, German, Schleswig-Holstein, c. 1830–1840, approximately 35 ⅝ × 20 ⅞ × 23 ⅜ in. (90.5 × 53 × 72 cm), Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg, Altonaer Museum 10.4 Toy Kitchen, German, Altona, c. 1830, approximately 20 ½ × 18 × 23 ¼ in. (52 × 46 × 59 cm), Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg, Altonaer Museum 11.1 Model village made by the Saxton children in New Zealand, c. 1864, paper, ink, paint, wool, wood, glass, templates published by H. G. Clarke & Co., 250 × 550 × 230 mm. CC BY-NC-ND licence. Te Papa (GH004320) 11.2 Alice Clapham, Wanganui River Embroidery, 1880, Wellington, silk, feathers, glass beads, burr totara frame, glass, 730 × 600 × 25 mm. Gift of the Clapham Family, 1951. Te Papa (PC000798) 11.3 John Waring Saxton, Nelson, 1842, lithograph, paper, 240 × 432 mm. Te Papa (1992-0035-1732) 12.1 Colonial German and African tin soldiers, manufacturer unknown, c. 1900, Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 79/12 12.2 Negerpuppe (gollywog) with bisque head. Manufaktur HeubachKöppelsdorf, c. 1920. Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 75/31 13.1 Alisa Poret, page 1 of Ch’i Eto Igrushki? (Whose Toys Are These?), detail, 1930. Courtesy Russian State Children’s Library 13.2 Aleksei Den’shin, plate 6 of Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka: Viatskaia Lepnaia Glinianaia Igrushka (Russian Folk Toys: Sculpted Clay Toys from Viatka), 1929. Courtesy Amherst Center for Russian Culture 13.3 Aleksei Den’shin, plate 7 of Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka: Viatskaia Lepnaia Glinianaia Igrushka (Russian Folk Toys: Sculpted Clay Toys from Viatka), 1929. Courtesy Amherst Center for Russian Culture 13.4 Konstantin Kuznetsov, page 8 of My Lepim (We Sculpt), 1931. Courtesy Russian State Children’s Library 14.1 Isaac Taylor Headland, The Chinese Boy and Girl (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1901), 108. Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library 14.2 “Xiao baobao xihuan wan de wujian—Zhongxing sailuluochang chupin” (Objects the Baby Likes to Play With—Zhongxing

224

224

236

243 245 259 262 277

278

280 285

296

List of Figures

Celluloid Factory Products), Meishu shenghuo no. 6 (1934), n.p. Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library 14.3 Unidentified Artist Chinese, Active Late Thirteenth to Fifteenth Century, Yingxi tu zhou, Children Playing in the Palace Garden, Late Yuan (1271–1368) to Early Ming (1368–1644) Dynasty, China, Hanging Scroll; Ink and Color on Silk, Image: 54⅞ × 30 in. (139.4 × 76.2 cm) Overall with Mounting: 113½ × 36½ in. (288.3 × 92.7 cm) Overall with Knobs: 113½ × 39 in. (288.3 × 99.1 cm). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1987, Accession Number 1987.150, CC0 1.0 Universal, Public Domain Dedication 14.4 Women of China (ed.), Chinese Children’s Toys (n.a.: n.a., 1960), n.p. Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library

xv

298

300

307

Notes on Contributors Valentina Boretti is Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, Department of History, where she previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Specializing in modern Chinese history, her research and publication interests include gender, material culture, and childhood. Her current work on the cultural history of toys in twentieth-century China explores citizen-building and mobilization. Megan Brandow-Faller (Ph.D., Georgetown University), Associate Professor of History at the City University of New York Kingsborough, works on art and design in Secessionist and interwar Vienna. Recent publications deal with Secessionist artistic toys, Viennese expressionist ceramics, and women’s art institutions and education. She is the author of The Female Secession: Reclaiming Women’s Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy, 1897–1938 (forthcoming). James E. Bryan (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where he teaches art and design history. His research interests include dollhouses, miniatures, vocational education and the arts and crafts movement, the furniture and design traditions of American ethnic and religious minorities, and fantasy and humor in popular interior design. Sarah A. Curtis is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in NineteenthCentury France; Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire, and numerous articles. She is currently working on a monograph on the culture of childhood in nineteenth-century France. Serena Dyer is Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture at the University of Middlesex, UK, and Associate Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral dissertation (University of Warwick, 2016) examined dress and the female consumer in eighteenth-century Britain. She is currently working on a new project on eighteenth-century material literacy.

Notes on Contributors

xvii

Colin Fanning is a doctoral student in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center in New York and Project Assistant Curator for European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His research interests broadly concern architecture, design, and craft since the mid-nineteenth century, with focused forays into the history of building toys and construction play. Ariane Fennetaux is Assistant Professor at the University of Paris Diderot, France, where she teaches eighteenth-century social and cultural history. Her research focuses on material culture with a particular emphasis on textiles and dress. In 2015 she edited The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long 18th Century. Her forthcoming book, co-written with Barbara Burman, is entitled The Artful Pocket: A Social and Cultural History of an Everyday Object. Michelle Millar Fisher is a doctoral candidate in architectural history at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, and works on the social history of architecture and design. She was formerly a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organized exhibitions including Items: Is Fashion Modern? and Design and Violence. She teaches widely in universities and museums, and is the founding Co-Dean of the Kress Foundation Award-winning website ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org. Bryan Ganaway completed his Ph.D. in Modern European History at the University of Illinois in 2003. He is Director of the International Scholars Program and Faculty Fellow in the Honors College at the College of Charleston. He is the author of Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918. Marie Gasper-Hulvat is Assistant Professor of Art History at Kent State University at Stark. Her research examines art and visual culture of the early Stalinist era as well as active learning practices in teaching and learning art history. She is currently working on a monograph that examines the late-career work of the avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. Cathleen M. Giustino (Ph.D., Modern Central European History, University of Chicago) is Mills Carter Professor of History at Auburn University. She is author of Tearing Down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-Class Ethnic Politics around 1900 and co-editor of Socialist Escapes:

xviii

Notes on Contributors

Breaks from Ideology and the Everyday in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, and numerous articles. Currently, she is writing a book-length study on dispossession and heritage in twentieth-century Bohemia. Andrea Korda is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Augustana Faculty of the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on Victorian new media, with publications addressing illustrated newspapers, pictorial advertising, and children’s picture books. She is the author of Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (2015). Karen Stock is Professor of Art History at Winthrop University. She received her Masters and Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her publications include essays on Edgar Degas and Emile Zola, Florine Stettheimer, Félix Vallotton and the modern French interior, as well as Richard Dadd and Victorian psychiatry. Lynette Townsend is Historian at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in New Zealand and was formerly History Curator at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Her research focuses on childhood and children’s material culture in New Zealand. She initiated a museum co-collecting project that materializes children’s contemporary experience through objects. Katherine Wheeler is Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Miami School of Architecture where she teaches courses on architectural history and theory, with a focus on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture and technology. She received her Ph.D. from MIT and her Master of Architectural History at UVA after her BArch at University of Tennessee. Her experience as a practicing architect informs her current research on the development of the architectural working drawing as well as her first book, Victorian Perceptions of Renaissance Architecture (2014). Jakob Zollmann completed his doctoral studies at Free University Berlin in the Department of History. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Constitutionalism of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He is the author of Naulila 1914: World War I in Angola and International Law—A Study in (Post-)Colonial Border Regimes and Interstate Arbitration. He has published on German colonial law, colonial policing and is currently working on a history of interstate arbitration.

Acknowledgments Childhood by Design is indebted to the support, guidance, and interest of a number of colleagues and institutions. In growing out of my own publications on Modernist toys and art for children, I wish to extend special thanks to Amy Ogata and Susan Weber for their warm support of my research on Secessionist artistic toys, particularly their invitation to participate in the September 2015 Symposium at the Bard Graduate Center “Toys and Childhood: Playing with Design,” where I met several of the contributors included here. At Bloomsbury, I would like to acknowledge the tireless efforts of Margaret Michniewicz, the project’s enthusiastic champion from an early stage, as well as series editor Michael Yonan, with whom I share a mutual affinity for understudied and often trivialized categories of material objects. Both individuals played a critical role in guiding the project forward on an intellectual and practical level. Katherine De Chant is to be commended for her meticulous attention to the details of the editorial and production process. I am likewise grateful to the two external reviewers who offered very helpful comments on the direction of the volume. I also wish to thank the City University of New York Kingsborough for its generous support of my research over the years, funded through a PSC-CUNY research award. Special thanks are owed to Michael Barnhart, my department chair, as well as the staff of the Kingsborough library, who always met my—at times seemingly unending—requests for interlibrary loan materials. The book likewise benefitted from discussions with colleagues and friends including Matthew Morrison, Laura Morowitz, Elana Shapira, and Rebecca Houze. I also wish to extend my hearty and sincere thanks to all of the authors represented in this volume, who responded to my editorial guidance with the utmost enthusiasm and intellectual care. Above all, I am grateful for the untiring support of my husband Adam Brandow, father of the real children to whom this book is dedicated.

Introduction: Materializing the History of Childhood and Children Megan Brandow-Faller

Notions of sentimentality, nostalgia and timelessness cling to toys and the material world of childhood. In his landmark 1928 cultural history of toys, German art historian Karl Gröber framed playthings as material remnants of an illusionary landscape of child’s play that could never be regained by adults. The fantasy of a grown-up, be it ever so winged, can never recover the wealth of visions which course past the heart of every child when it is absorbed in its playthings, undisturbed, oblivious of its surroundings. The tiniest object swells into a world, and a hint, however slender, weaves itself into a fairy tale. Once in a way there gleams, phantomlike and elusive, a flash of memory in the soul of the grown-up, when he takes in his hand some poor scrap of a toy which had been his when he was little. Through a chink in the dense curtain which shrouds the past, he catches a glimpse of the long-vanished magic land of his childhood; for a moment only, and all this splendor is again swallowed up in a grey mist, and a feeling half sweet, half melancholy, enwraps his heart. The paradise of the days gone by is shut to him, and it [the toy] is only the dumb witness to a happier time that his hand grasps …1

Containing material objects of remembrance for the immaterial, lived experience of childhood, the adult’s childhood toybox materialized the apparently unchanging youth represented by memories of his/her own childhood playthings.2 To Gröber and other scholars taking an early interest in the material world of play, children throughout the ages shared universal preferences not for elaborate “over-refined” playthings but simple, handmade toys intended for vigorous use, even those of what Gröber called “a ‘vulgar’ simplicity.”3 It was only adults’ inability to understand children’s supposed proclivity for simplicity that resulted in what Walter Benjamin likened to a monstrous proliferation

2

Childhood by Design

of elaborate, factory-produced technological miniatures entirely unsuited to creative play.4 Despite the ways in which childhood has been viewed through such universalizing lenses, notions of children, childhood and the material world surrounding them are not static but historically and culturally specific. Indeed, in spite of Gröber’s nostalgic longing for a time when children’s playthings were untainted by mass consumption, toys have long been the focus of an extensive consumer culture evolving and rupturing in response to new methods of production, market demands, and changing socio-cultural attitudes towards children and childhood. Groundbreaking socio-historical scholarship on the invention of childhood as a distinct stage of human development looked to the visual and material artifacts of childhood and infancy as evidence for widely-held, if rarely verbalized, attitudes towards children. Studies including Philippe Ariès’s landmark L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (1960), translated in English as Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Childhood (1962), measured shifting attitudes towards childhood through recourse to new constellations of material goods including clothing, furniture, and domestic space reflecting European society’s growing awareness of childhood.5 Preceding mid-twentieth-century social historians’ interest in the historical recognition of childhood, a separate genre of connoisseurial literature took shape making understudied objects like miniatures, dollhouses, and tin soldiers the explicit focus of study.6 But, in privileging matters of style and manufacture, such early toy histories tended to be unconcerned with the toys’ intended users or ideas of childhood clinging to them. The explanatory power of toys and design culture for children—as a means of potentially unlocking socio-historical constructions of childhood and children’s lived experiences—was rarely central to such studies. Only more recently have toys and the material culture of childhood emerged as important categories for serious scholarly inquiry. In a flood of monographs and museum exhibitions since the 1990s, children, childhood and the material culture surrounding them are becoming increasingly visible in the fields of history, art history, and design studies.7 Much of this growing body of interdisciplinary literature has overlapped with the disciplinary aims and preoccupations of childhood studies, a field dedicated to problematizing children’s historical invisibility—an inability to generate sources to tell their own history from a state of legal, economic, and physical dependency—in a historiography supposedly centered on their experiences and perspectives.8 Likewise informed by developments in the fields of sociology, archaeology, and

Introduction

3

material culture theory, recent scholarship on the material culture of childhood has scrutinized how toys and design culture materialized broader cultural norms of childhood and play. Accommodating more than children’s immediate physical needs, distinct forms of furniture, clothing, and playthings evolved in response to adult perceptions of children’s changing needs. Childhood by Design seeks to fuse socio-historical studies of childhood (examining the tension between adult representations of childhood and the lived experiences of “real” historical children) with art-historical and designbased studies of the material culture of childhood (typically prioritizing issues of authorship, technique, and style), drawing from the disciplinary methods and preoccupations of both fields. In a simultaneous departure and continuance of recent scholarly trends, the volume differs from previous works in investing toys and design culture with a certain historical agency in not only reflecting, but actively performing and constituting shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children in the modern era. Indeed, much of the literature on the material culture of childhood has focused on the ways in which toys mirror a society’s attitudes towards children and childhood, giving the impression that toys—as well as their child users—were passive carriers or recipients of such ideas or prescriptions, equipped with little independent agency in and of themselves. However, rather than consider toys as unproblematic, passive reflections of broader socio-cultural ideas, the present volume interrogates how a new range of material objects—what is meant by the book’s title of a Childhood by Design—actively intervened in crystallizing the modern invention of childhood. The book examines the dynamic, mutually constitutive relationship between the material culture of childhood and the discursive field informing its design, particularly interrogating how conditions of usage and/or children’s appropriation of toys complicated the ideological expectations of producers and marketers. Moreover, just as toys are treated not just as uncomplicated reflections of larger ideas but as multivalent, layered texts producing ideologies of childhood in and of themselves, the present volume scrutinizes the manner in which toys’ child users defied, subverted, or resisted the adult meanings inscribed on toys, extending an important and provocative theme in recent literature on toys and children’s consumer culture. When possible, the essays in Childhood by Design strive to integrate children’s perspectives and lived experiences into their respective interpretative frameworks. Yet the means to do so are notoriously elusive, as adult-made toys can prove less than ideal for accessing the mental universes of their intended

4

Childhood by Design

users. Indeed, scholars and museum curators have raised serious concerns about the explanatory power of toys as authentic artifacts of childhood, for, apart from makeshift toys fashioned by children themselves, toys often reveal much more about adult expectations of childhood than children’s actual experiences.9 Further compounding the problem is that children’s self-fashioned toys, arguably more authentic objects of childhood than adult-made toys, have rarely found their way into museum collections: a situation not only resulting from toys’ inherent ephemerality, but institutional collecting practices privileging exquisite miniatures, children’s clothing, and commercially manufactured toys over toys of children’s own creation (a problem addressed in Jakob Zollmann’s and Lynette Townsend’s essays on colonialism and imperialism). As such, given the problematic nature of disentangling an authentic child’s world and adult perceptions and prescriptions thereof, Sharon Brookshaw has proposed a methodological distinction between “the material culture of childhood” to refer to objects made for children’s use by adults and reflecting “adult attitudes towards children and not the child’s world in itself ” whereas “the material culture of children” is to be reserved for “those items that children make themselves or adapt into their own culture from the adult world.”10 Adapting Brookshaw’s terminology, the present volume explores the notion of a childhood by design—the new array of material objects not only mirroring but constituting the modern invention of childhood—through both “the material culture of childhood,” as duly reflected in the volume’s title, introduction, and selected essays and also, to a more limited extent, the “material culture of children.” While we make no claims to comprehensively cover the latter category given the present volume’s focus on adult-designed consumer culture, Childhood by Design encompasses both methodological and theoretical positions: positions that are not mutually exclusive but pose different sorts of questions and rely on different source bases. Chronologically, the volume spans the eighteenth century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children’s use; through the nineteenthcentury expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early twentieth-century child-centered pedagogy and Modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing

Introduction

5

directly to children through television, film, and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.

Inventing the modern toy: Childhood by design In contrast to earlier conceptual fluidity between playthings, luxury miniatures, and automata, the idea that play was the child’s work and the child needed specially manufactured objects for this purpose represented a distinctly modern phenomenon that paralleled the socio-historical invention of childhood. Prior to the eighteenth century, in what historian John Brewer refers to as early modern Europe’s “no toy” culture, the toy—in its modern usage an object intended exclusively for children’s play and edification—did not exist.11 Children had enjoyed playthings like hobbyhorses, dolls, and miniature figures since ancient times, but these were almost exclusively improvised from available natural or domestic materials by parents or children themselves. Aside from self-fashioned playthings, the distinguishing characteristic of pre-eighteenth-century toys and other forms of material culture manufactured especially for children’s use was their rarity: the jousting metal knight figures, ball and cup games, or hobbyhorses illustrated in early toy histories were only accessible to a privileged royal and noble elite.12 Moreover, many objects commonly associated with childhood— such as the doll, now regarded as a universal symbol of girlhood—once served very different religious or cultic functions or originated as adult amusements. Indeed, it was not until the onset of the Enlightenment that the word “toy” came to refer to a separate category of objects for a childhood by design. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “toy” indexed material objects of an inconsequential nature—trinkets, baubles, or miniatures, whether cheap or pricey—intended to amuse children and adults alike. The entry for “toy” in Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary made no special reference to childhood or children as most traditional forms of play and leisure were communal, centered on a seasonal calendar of agricultural festivals, market fairs, and religious feast days.13 Cultural attitudes towards leisure, both for children and adults, were overwhelmingly negative in pre-modern Europe; play was condemned as a sinful, idle pursuit and potential obstruction to learning. But pre-modern Europe’s “no toy” culture was revolutionized with the onset of Enlightenment conceptions of human perfectibility through knowledge and

6

Childhood by Design

reason, wherein playthings acquired educative and moralistic functions with the capacity to impart critical lessons for the adult world. Central to these reformist attitudes towards play was John Locke’s popular pedagogical manual Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), which laid out the ideal upbringing for a gentlemen’s son. In the widely influential work, Locke countered conventional notions that children were inherently sinful, semi-animalistic savages to be broken through harsh discipline in favor of his famous tabula rasa theory of the child’s mind, in which children were blank slates shaped by environment and education. Critically, in contrast to traditionally negative attitudes towards play as a sinful dissipation, Locke invested play and children’s playthings with vital pedagogical importance to mold the child’s progression into adulthood and ability to reason. Locke, in fact, disseminated the idea of the modern “educational toy” by promoting use of so-called “Locke Blocks,” objects that were part and parcel of a broader commercial explosion of children’s books, puzzles, games, and toyshops particularly vigorous in the consumer culture of late eighteenthcentury Georgian Britain: a vibrant material culture that historian J. H. Plumb famously referred to as “a new world of children.”14 Not only toys but the broader artifact constellations surrounding the material culture of childhood—or ways in which evolving cultural assumptions surrounding childhood challenged the utility of furniture forms and other material artifacts—radically shifted to accommodate new ideals of child development. The few pre-eighteenth-century furniture and clothing forms designed expressly for children’s use, such as cradles, swaddling clothes, and the standing-stool (or go- or going cart), marked a fundamental preoccupation with uprightness, both in the moral and physical sense, due to the belief that “very young children tottered precariously between upright humanity and the beasts of the field.”15 It is not surprising, then, that pre-Enlightenment children’s furniture forms like the standing stool, an infant stool consisting of a circular wooden waist ring from which turned wooden supports radiated to terminate in a hexagonal or square base (but without the seat characteristic of twentiethcentury infant walkers) forced early standing or walking while specifically inhibiting crawling, likened to an animalistic form of locomotion beneath the dignity of civilized human beings.16 But, with the abandonment of traditional beliefs that children needed to be thrust into the adult world as soon as possible, such traditional furniture forms, as well as the practice of tight swaddling (thought to be essential to molding the child’s physical and moral formation in a very literal sense), were discarded in favor of new elevated cribs, high chairs,

Introduction

7

and play pens that protected the child from the adult world while allowing it to develop according to a supposedly more natural trajectory.17 Two interconnected thematic threads run throughout the three sections of the present volume: first, playthings whose usage has fluctuated between the conceptual realms of childhood and adulthood and, second, anxieties surrounding consumption for and by children, particularly the ways in which adult cultural references have permeated the material culture of childhood. It is critical to stress that many objects such as dolls, toy soldiers, and miniature figurines that are unproblematically associated with today’s childhood toybox originated as adult amusements or served very different religious or spiritual functions. As material stand-ins for the human or divine form via idols, votives, and funereal offerings, German historian Max von Boehn argued in his groundbreaking 1929 study that while dolls could be traced back to ancient and prehistoric cultures they were hardly children’s playthings.18 Rather, as indexed by the etymology of Puppe (German), poupée (French) and puppet in English, all derived from the Latin puppa for votive image, early dolls were primarily used for cultic and funereal rituals and were only passed on to children after being cast off many generations later. On the cultic origins of dolls, American popular culture scholar Gary Cross frames the point when societies transform religious icons and adult entertainments into child’s play as a fundamental mark of modernity. “In modern times,” Cross maintains, “the doll that once embodied the power and personality of the god or departed relative has become a child’s imaginary baby or playmate. The mask that represented a demon in religious rites and imbued its wearer with special powers has turned into the Halloween costume.”19 Yet such playthings’ cultic origins have been forgotten by contemporary society, just as recent criticism of postwar plastic fashion dolls, widely criticized for imbricating girlhood with adult sexuality, materialism, and glamorous fashionability, obscures the ways in which fashion dolls have always had a problematic relationship with childhood and were never originally intended for children. In medieval and early modern Europe, miniature fashion mannequins were exchanged and collected by aristocratic women to circulate information about contemporary clothing styles and accessories. The first recorded fashion doll was commissioned in 1396 from the French court tailor to Charles VI, Robert de Varennes, for Queen Isabella of England. Subsequently, similar models were presented as diplomatic gifts to Queen Isabella of Spain and Marie de Medici. Only when the mannequins had outlived their fashionable utility were they discarded and passed on to children. Thus, despite the ways in

8

Childhood by Design

which postwar fashion dolls like Barbie have come under fire for introducing adult standards of sexuality, materialism, and consumerism to children—for, as Barbie scholars rightly maintain, what seems to appeal most to both children and adult collectors is the material richness of Barbie’s consumerist dream world, saddled between fantasy and reality—such anxieties about the permeable boundaries between womanhood and adulthood preceded the invention of Barbie.20 During the late nineteenth-century “golden age” of the French fashion doll produced by entrepreneurs like Pierre Jumeau and Adelaide Huret, critical commentators compared French fashion dolls, outfitted in miniature versions of couture fashions that reflected the Second Empire’s preoccupation with visible luxury consumption, to high-class prostitutes and posited a “direct moral alignment between the excess of the French doll and the superficiality and corruption of the Second Empire.”21 But just as Barbie continues to embody what Dan Fleming refers to as a “plastic paradox”—referencing how the doll reifies the objectification of women through her unrealistic physical ideal even as she, in refusing to get married, have children, or put others above herself, deviates from codes of mainstream femininity and claims a potentially emancipatory sort of male privilege—a new school of feminist doll studies challenges widespread assumptions that girls slavishly adhered to forms of doll play that necessarily supported patriarchal gender ideals. Rather, postmodernist doll studies stress the ways in which female doll manufacturers and players created scripts that challenged conventional gender ideals.22 The ways in which contemporary doll studies scholars like Miriam Forman-Brunell, Erica Rand, Ann duCille, Elizabeth Chin, and Sherrie Inness have framed dolls as “texts that represented layered versions of reality, mediated by the often contradictory ideologies and values, or worldview of doll creators, producers, consumers and players” have decisively informed the doll-themed essays included here.23 Much like dolls, dollhouses have an equally problematic history of fluctuating between the worlds of children and grown-ups.24 The early modern “doll cabinet” (Dockenhaus) served two contradictory functions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: first, providing didactic lessons on material culture and household management to elite children and, second, serving as miniature displays of the material affluence, familial status, and collecting practices of princely or patrician households. Indeed, early German and Dutch dollhouses were highly exclusive artworks intended for display in the Kunstkammer of adult collectors and reflected a long-standing fascination with miniaturization and the contemporary fashionability of science, naturalism, and the optical effects of

Introduction

9

magnification.25 Indeed, as Brigitte Lindencrona has recently argued with regard to the first well-documented dollhouse commissioned in 1558 for the curiosity cabinet of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, any connection to childhood was marginal, at best.26 Following the precedent of Albrecht’s opulent Dockenhaus, destroyed by fire in the late seventeenth century but meticulously inventoried and described by travelers, male and female collectors spent sizeable fortunes on the creation and decoration of doll cabinets featuring sumptuously appointed interiors (including miniature picture galleries, porcelain cabinets, and fully stocked linen closets), finely-crafted miniature furniture, as well as elaborate kitchenware in materials like pewter, porcelain, and tin. Most typically a replica of the commissioner’s own residence en miniature, the overall purpose of such early sixteenth- and seventeenth-century doll cabinets was to document the family’s material wealth and collecting practices, serving to make the collector’s domestic residence an object worthy of inclusion in the collector’s cabinet, as Sharon Broomhall has rightly maintained.27 When the trend of commissioning model houses spread to the elite of Georgian England, it was not uncommon that well-known artisans and designers were recruited to execute the interiors, such as when, in the 1730s, Lady Susannah Winn commissioned Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale to execute the interiors of a miniature version of their country house at Nostell Priory in Yorkshire.28 But the dual functions of early doll cabinets—as displays of princely wealth and as didactic texts for elite children—often overlapped. Another early example, a grandscale Nuremberg kitchen featuring elaborate pewter vessels, flatware, and cooking accessories commissioned on Christmas 1572 for the three daughters of Anna Electress of Saxony, served more instructional purposes to educate the three young princesses in household management and domesticity.29 Several decades later, Anna Köferlin, a childless widow from Nuremberg, advertised her elaborate dollhouse (a 1631 model of a burgher townhouse) to paying visitors in a pamphlet, touting it as a tool for teaching domestic order and household management to young children, male and female alike.30 Indeed, even after consumption of dollhouses began to be democratized through mass production methods in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the dollhouse’s fluctuation between the conceptual realms of children and adults persisted. Often equipped with glass doors fitted with locks, it remained ambiguous whether the dollhouse was actually designed for children’s enjoyment. Indeed, criticism of the dollhouse figured prominently in pedagogical journals at the turn of the twentieth century, when toy reformers argued that dollhouses had always been designed to suit the artistic pretensions of adults rather than children.

10

Childhood by Design

Compounding toys’ problematic origins as adult amusements, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed unprecedented anxiety about the porous boundaries between the worlds of children, teenagers, and adults, particularly regarding the permeation of mass media references into an increasingly commercialized world of childhood.31 Over the course of the past century, parental advice literature has dished out conflicting prescriptions on children’s consumption, variously urging restraint and buying small numbers of high quality toys in the early twentieth century, to, by the postwar period, normalizing a new material abundance in which “the concept of being spoiled was itself re-defined as lack of emotional response from parents rather than a lack of material goods.”32 As Viviana Zelizer has convincingly argued, such consumption patterns were rooted in the changing economic value assigned to children in pre-modern and modern economies.33 Whereas children in traditional, pre-industrial societies were expected to contribute to the family economy from an early age, the introduction of compulsory schooling, the removal of children from wage labor, and the temporal lengthening of the age of minority increasingly made children a burden on the family economy, even as their emotional value, now necessitating unprecedented expenditures on material goods, rose in the eyes of parents. By 1900, children in the Western world occupied a position as productively useless but emotionally priceless as expressed through the consumer world around them. Children’s consumption is now the focus of a protective, paternalistic discourse in which children are supposedly victimized by their insatiable desires for material goods, absorbing materialism, greed, and hedonism from television, films, and other forms of popular culture and media. In interpreting the role of media and consumer culture on children, scholars and critics have been polarized into sharply-divided camps representing the perspectives of “the exploited child” and “the empowered child.” A position frequently assumed by parents and consumer culture critics, advocates of the “exploited child” paradigm (including, but not limited to, Juliet Schor, Susan Linn, and Shirley Steinberg) assume a largely negative view of children’s consumption, maintaining that market forces have, in essence, colonized a pristine state of childhood innocence through predatory advertising techniques.34 By contrast, a competing group of scholars and media critics interpret direct appeals to children by producers of children’s goods such as clothing, foods, and toys—a commercial innovation most commonly traced to the twentieth century—as empowering a previously marginalized consumerist group, long assumed to lack the knowledge,

Introduction

11

experience, and buying power to act as rational consumers. Providing children with autonomy, self-expression, and means of belonging among peer groups, the “empowered” child consumer is not, according to scholars like Ellen Seiter, David Buckingham, Henry Jenkins, and Allison Pugh, a naive innocent seduced by the evil brainwashers of the marketing and toy industries but a discriminating and savvy consumer of media texts.35 Like several essays in this volume (for instance Colin Fanning on LEGO or Lynette Townsend on children’s self-fashioned paper models), recent literature has stressed how children appropriate media and consumer commodities creatively, valorizing objects despised or discarded by adults and attaching alternative systems of meaning to adult objects.36 Yet, to critics of the “exploited child,” the alleged empowerment of the child consumer comes at a great price as the anti-adultist rhetoric marking much of children’s media culture and advertising interpositions market and commercial forces between parents and children, adversely affecting parent/child relationships and children’s emotional-psychological development.37 Hotly debated is the role of family television programming marked by slippages between promotional and editorial content and adult references to sexuality, violence, and alcohol.38 In The Disappearance of Childhood, cultural critic Neil Postman hardly frames such shifts as empowering children by integrating their consumer desires into the marketplace, as some media studies scholars have suggested, but as endangering the very separateness on which notions of childhood and adulthood rest.39 Postman forecasted the waning of cultural traditions of childhood innocence on the basis of television’s deleterious effects on family socialization as children became “adultified” through sharing in a common popular culture of television, films, and the internet, often sexual and violent in nature. In essence, as children’s culture and clothing increasingly take reference from the world of teenage and adult popular culture, contemporary society “is propelling us back into the Middle Ages, where kids were precocious and adults childlike.”40 But recent work in children’s media studies has refuted Postman’s dismissive stance towards television and popular culture, stressing how children actively negotiate meanings surrounding mass cultural texts and how forms of children’s media like cartoons—often deemed to embody “bad taste” in transgressing parents’ class and educational cleavages— offer children a space to escape adult surveillance and cement peer alliances.41 Yet other commentators question the role of external forces like mass media, finding the increasingly commercialized nature of childhood to be rooted in the contradictory impulses and consumption practices of adults. In line with

12

Childhood by Design

twentieth-century notions of the “priceless” child, increased expenditures on toys reflected the importance of awakening children’s wondrous innocence through consumption at precisely the moment when they were excluded from the commercial world as productive laborers, but also, in light of the income needed to sustain such expenditures, as a form of surrogate caregiving and substitute for family socialization. According to Gary Cross, the conflicting behavior of parents and adults in the postwar period—in which “sentiment … found an outlet in consumer spending” to cement intimate familial relationships—best explains the widespread anxiety surrounding the supposed commercialization of childhood.42 Adults, on the one hand, have consumed to awaken their children’s sense of innocent wonder—reliving their own childhood through the delight children derive from commercial novelty toys—but become disappointed when this wondrous innocence requires ever-increasing levels of consumption to sustain and expand it. Part of the confusion surrounding the material world of childhood—how children are simultaneously a primary motivation for and caution against overconsumption—are the efforts of postwar toy manufacturers to speak directly to children through television. Starting in the 1950s, but particularly the 1980s onwards, children’s “pester power” was targeted to influence parental buying patterns and overcome resistance to objectionable, faddish playthings. Under the influence of Reaganite FCC appointees, deregulation of advertising and children’s programming in the 1980s led to a new marketing strategy in which television was used to saturate the market with promotional character toys, snack foods, clothing, jewelry, and a plethora of other licensed goods.43 A new breed of syndicated animated series, or so-called “Program-Length Commercials” (PLCs), eradicated the difference between advertising and entertainment through thirty-minute commercials whose stars were none other than the sponsoring toy company’s own product lines. A successful formula followed by Mattel (He Man and the Masters of the Universe; She-Ra: Princess of Power), Hasbro (GI Joe; My Little Pony), Kenner (Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake), and Playmates (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), the proliferation of licensed, multi-media goods emerging in line with such “PLCs” has simultaneously emerged as a substitute form of advertising.44 Critically, the popularity of the character toy, typically produced in the form of plastic minifigures, rested less on the intrinsic design qualities of the toy itself but the meanings, plots, and character relationships children imposed on it from the meta-narratives of film, television, and comic books.45

Introduction

13

But even the PLC’s marketing strategies were not without precedent. The latest scholarship on children and consumer culture has not only challenged the assumption that the child consumer first emerged as a by-product of postwar television programming but simplistic, binary accounts of the child consumer’s victimization or empowerment. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, children were the target of print advertising campaigns to promote brand loyalty and future consumption patterns, with consumerism shaping the lives of children as producers, distributors, and purchasers of toys decades earlier.46 A pivotal turning point in the emergence of the child-as-consumer was the consumer democracy of 1920/30s America, when a new genre of “childas-lobbyist” magazine advertisements, incentive marketing programs, and radio clubs—a fantasy world of membership cards, decoder rings, and secret languages empowering an otherwise powerless group—instructed peer-conscious children how to lobby parents for goods.47 That retailers’ attempts to cater to the perceived needs and desires of children were powerful enough to institutionalize developmental life phases—prominent examples being found in the rise of the “toddler” as a clothing size range, merchandising category, and social persona, or the recent emergence of “tween” marketing—attests to the ways in which childhood and consumer culture exist in a mutually constitutive relationship in which it is impossible to pinpoint children’s entry into the marketplace.48 Today’s neonates are, to a large extent, thoroughly enmeshed in consumer culture even prior to birth. Parents and loved ones routinely “imagine children into being in part by imagining the kinds of consumer goods she or he will have and will want” with these children assuming the “ready-made” identities represented by the material world surrounding them.49 As socio-cultural constructions of childhood are inseparable from the material objects both constituting and performing such ideals, the essays in Childhood by Design stress a nuanced understanding of children’s consumption in which children are neither passive victims nor autonomous historical actors. In addition to marking the advent of the child-as-consumer, the trend of codependence between children’s literature, toys, and other forms of mass culture is often assumed to be a twentieth-century commercial innovation threatening the sanctity of childhood. In recent years, the American Girl Dolls (AGD), a line of high-quality dolls, books, and accessories launched in 1985 by educator Pleasant Rowland to offer young girls positive historical role models as an alternative to Barbie and other plastic fashion dolls, has profited enormously from this formula. Originally consisting of merchandised book and doll lines themed around three

14

Childhood by Design

fictional historical characters (the mid-nineteenth-century Swedish immigrant Kirsten, the late Victorian orphan Samantha, and the Second World War era Molly), in the 1990s the company expanded the AGD line to encompass a more inclusive, multicultural version of American girlhood, introducing a Hispanic, African-American, and Jewish immigrant doll, as well as a line of contemporary dolls in which players can create a mirror image of themselves from over twenty different combinations of skin tone, hair color and texture, facial features, and eye colors.50 But Rowland’s strategy of putting “[historical] vitamins in the chocolate cake [of play]” has come under fire for using a highly sanitized history of American immigration and minority ethnic groups—in which the fictional female protagonists are invested with an inflated historical agency that they never would have possessed in reality—simply to sell merchandise.51 Given the line’s origins as an “anti-Barbie” where girls were to derive play narratives from books rather than television, it is ironic that the Pleasant Company was acquired by Mattel, the parent company of Barbie, for $700 million in 1998. But, as the essays in Part One (Inventing the Material Child: Childhood, Consumption, and Commodity Culture) reveal, the Pleasant Company’s marketing formula is not entirely new. The commercial interdependence of books, toys, and accessories dates back to the eighteenth century, specifically, to the retail techniques of British publisher John Newbery, widely regarded as the “father” of children’s literature, whose Pretty Little Pocket Book (1744) was sold with accompanying playthings like balls and pincushions.52 The volume opens with Serena Dyer’s essay on “Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys and Learning to Shop in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” which surveys the puzzles, card games, mechanical toys, theaters, and pocket books flourishing in line with Locke’s ideas and retailers’ conscious efforts to mold the child into a consummate consumer who would acquire material literacy, knowledge of quality craftsmanship, as well as engagement with the act of consumption itself through play scenarios. In part, Dyer’s essay represents a call to re-periodize the emergence of the child-consumer—measured in terms of a nascent awareness of future consumption patterns if not direct marketing to children—back to the eighteenth century. One of several essays devoted to dolls/dollhouses, Ariane Fennetaux examines the role of eighteenth-century dolls as transitional objects between childhood and womanhood, scrutinizing the fashion doll’s redefinition as an object associated exclusively with girlhood and the accompanying changes in doll design. Traditional wooden faces and bodies were replaced with pliable wax that could be painted more naturalistically; likewise a new type of “baby doll,”

Introduction

15

made to replicate an infant’s facial and bodily features, first appeared to cultivate maternal virtues in girls. Subverting manufacturers’ expectations, however, adult women continued to collect and play with these “transitional Pandoras” throughout the eighteenth century. In tandem with specialty toy shops and toy departments that were regular features of nineteenth-century department stores, Sarah Curtis’s essay “The (Play)things of Childhood: Mass Consumption and Its Critics in Belle Epoque France” focuses on the proliferation of massproduced novelty and technological playthings reflecting the importance of scientific progress and commodity culture. Yet, while marketers touted such toys as providing valuable, gender-specific lessons for adulthood, critics lamented technological novelty toys on material, aesthetic, and national grounds: part and parcel of a broader pushback against a technologically driven culture that left French aesthetic standards behind. Colin Fanning, in his essay on Danish construction set LEGO (a brand name derived from the Danish leg godt, or “play well”), examines the ways in which postwar toy manufacturers commodified a purportedly inherent relationship between children, creativity, and individual expression. Relating to older traditions of architectural building toys, the classic LEGO system (first introduced in 1949 and then redesigned in 1955 as the “LEGO system of play” in which all pieces were interchangeable) was based on governing principles that overlapped with those of the Modernist movement, such as unlimited free play, imaginative creativity, and non-prescriptive openendedness. Beginning, however, with the 1999 “Star Wars Death Star” themed building set, a trend that accelerated a number of LEGO building themes first introduced after 1978, LEGO recast its founding mission into the world of transmedial popular culture, increasingly partnering with multi-media conglomerates to adapt licensed franchised characters and narratives from films, television, and comic books.53 A further outgrowth of LEGO’s corporate rebranding was a retreat from the gender-neutral ideals of free creativity on which the company was founded: the mainstream LEGO consumer was figured as a white, privileged male, with new lines of action and technological themed sets marketed to him (fictionalized as “Zack the Lego Maniac,” the protagonist of a successful 1980s advertising campaign), while separate pastel-colored fantasy building sets were pitched to girls.54 Fanning examines the productive tension between prescriptive and open-ended play in LEGO’s continuing efforts to commodify creativity in its postmodern phase. Fanning’s essay expands on recent scholarship scrutinizing how play and playthings served as a testing ground for innovative architecture and design.

16

Childhood by Design

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a dynamic relationship existed between full-scale architecture and construction toys informed by contemporary debates over tectonics and building styles. “Through miniaturization,” as architectural historian Tamar Zinguer has argued, “play became a testing ground for further, full-scale material implementations.”55 The most recognizable construction toy until engineering sets like Meccano (1901) or the Erector Set (1911), the Anker Building Block Set was invented in 1877 by German architect and engineer Gustav Lilienthal. The Ankersteinbaukasten consisted of dense blocks (pressed from a mixture of quartz, chalk and linseed oil) in red, blue and cream so as to emulate brick, slate and limestone, becoming the first building set that was additive in nature and, despite the presence of complex instructions, allowed for building configurations relatively less constrained by the formal limitations of prior sets.56 Encouraging children to create, rather than copy, entirely new structures according to their own creative instincts— an endeavor with clear parallels to Modernist architectural practice wherein “architects sought to free architecture from the fetters of history”—became central to further experimentations in toy design, even as Modernist construction toys like Bruno Taut’s colored-glass “Dandanah” (1919) attempted to bring smallscale versions of contemporary architectural innovations into the nursery.57 In postwar America, husband and wife design team Ray and Charles Eames, whose architectural office was known for its molded and laminated children’s plywood furniture, devised innovative construction toys marketed as fostering creativity and imagination through open-ended and relatively non-prescriptive play (although the sets did not, in fact, eschew the instructions and guidelines accompanying earlier building sets). Consisting of brightly colored triangular and square panels (which were stiffened with wooden dowels in the manner of a kite) and pliable connectors, the Eames’s “The Toy” (1950) could be configured into a variety of abstract two- and three-dimensional forms that did not refer to any preexisting built environment. “The Toy,” like other architectural innovations in toy design, reflected the sort of experimentation practiced in its creators’ full-scale work, particularly their landmark “Studio House” (1945–1949), which has been interpreted as an oversized version of “The Toy” in its use of planes of primary colors, pre-fabricated materials, and flexible variability.58 Focusing on constructions of childhood, children’s creativity, and the “childlike” as metaphors for artistic newness, the essays in Part Two (Child’s Play? Avant-Garde and Reform Toy Design) consider artistic interventions in toy design. Andrea Korda analyzes the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

Introduction

17

children’s picture books illustrated by artist and socialist Walter Crane. Informed by the philosophies of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Crane’s books strove to cultivate aesthetic principles in children who would grow to become critical of mainstream material and visual culture. Korda’s essay likewise delivers a novel take on Jacqueline Rose’s classic thesis on the “impossibility” of children’s fiction, or the idea that children’s books are necessarily authored for and by adults, through a close reading of the role of Crane’s own children in the production and reception of his books.59 Bryan Ganaway takes up the problem of gender-specific toys in late Wilhelmine Germany, spotlighting the role of women artists like Käthe Kruse and Marion Kaulitz in creating a new type of handmade, gender-neutral “character doll” that was altogether more individualized and childlike than mass-produced models. Relating to the subversive thrust of postmodern doll studies, Ganaway argues that consumer culture does not necessarily reinforce restrictive social hierarchies but that reform dolls represented an important medium for women artists hoping to carve out a feminist sphere in early twentieth-century Germany. In her essay “Work Becomes Play: Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning in the Bauhaus Legacy,” Michelle Millar Fisher investigates the early Bauhaus’s fascination with the spiritual, artistic, pedagogical, and wholly adult possibilities of play and “unlearning,” a conceit which, heavily influenced by early childhood education, became a foundational premise of Modernist design pedagogy in Johannes Itten’s celebrated Preparatory Course. Bauhaus playthings such as those by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher and Lyonel Feininger conveyed sophisticated social-spiritual agendas that, through the ludic experimentation accompanying their design, demonstrated the postwar avant-garde’s cooption of childhood as a site and metaphor for creativity. As broached by Fisher, Modernist design culture for children was shaped by a search for new forms and styles intended to express the experience of childhood rather than the miniaturized versions of adult furniture characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Around 1900 avant-garde artists sought to create a “childlike” visual aesthetic simultaneously based on Modernist design principles of simplicity, geometricity, and formal reductionism. Inspired by the Vienna Secessionists’ discovery of untutored children’s drawings, widely conflated with the “primitive” artifacts of tribal and folk cultures, the turn-ofthe-century art for the child movement appropriated the grammar and syntax of children’s drawings in an effort to release children’s supposedly innate creativity.60 In postwar America, Modernist discourses on children’s imagination and

18

Childhood by Design

creativity became popularized through progressive educational playthings and other forms of design culture—which, in the context of Cold War anxieties on social conformity and individualism, became matters of great political urgency— and continue to shape the child-centered nature of contemporary children’s design.61 Finding a formal precedent in Gerrit Rietveld’s Zig-Zag chair, the cover image of Peter Opsvik’s iconic Tripp Trapp highchair (manufactured by Stokke, 1972-present) exemplifies how design culture both reflects and constitutes the shifting discursive constellations surrounding children and childhood. In allowing the child to fully partake in adult conversation at the table by “growing” with the child through fourteen adjustable seat positions, the Tripp Trapp Chair materializes the child-centered, permissive model of democratic childrearing associated with the popular “baby book” advice literature of Benjamin Spock, Arnold Gesell, and other developmental psychologists.62 In her essay “Simply Child’s Play? Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde in Socialist Czechoslovakia before 1968,” Cathleen Giustino reveals that a preoccupation with children’s imagination was not unique to the postwar Western democracies. Giustino investigates the intersection of artistic and political reform agendas in socialist Czechoslovakia, underlining how a post-Stalinist loosening of cultural policies allowed toy designers limited freedom from the constraints of socialist realism. A point of continuity between Czechoslovakia’s interwar and postwar Communist avant-gardes was a fascination with the simplified, abstracted features of traditional Central European folk toys which seemed to embody the individualism and imagination so patently lacking in the present. Finally, in the last essay in Part Two, Karen Stock and Katherine Wheeler interrogate the politics of gender and domesticity in contemporary artists’ interventions in dollhouse design: specifically, the collaboration of architect Peter Wheelwright and artist Laurie Simmons on Bozart Toys’ Kaleidoscope House (2001). Furnished with contemporary art and design objects, the Kaleidoscope House subverts many historical traditions of the dollhouse including traditional notions of gender-specificity and, through its colorful, sliding Perspex walls loosely influenced by Modernist architecture and toy design, the self-contained, domestic interiority typically associated with the form. The essays in Part Three (Toys, Play and Design Culture as Instruments of Political and Ideological Indoctrination) investigate constructions of gender, race, class, and political ideologies as materialized through children’s playthings. In “Material Culture in Miniature: Nuremberg Kitchens as Inspirational Toys in the Long Nineteenth Century,” James Bryan considers the much understudied

Introduction

19

Puppenküche (or Nuremberg Kitchen), a distinct subcategory of dollhouse consisting of a single kitchen equipped with elaborate miniature paraphernalia for food preparation. Influenced by the ways in which doll scholars read dolls as dynamic texts with multivalent meanings, Bryan challenges traditional readings of such kitchens as instructional texts intended to provide girls with practical and tangible lessons in cooking and household management, insisting that their purpose was far more subtle, intended to beguile and seduce the user’s senses through the peculiar allure of miniaturization. Lynette Townsend’s “Making Paper Models in 1860s New Zealand: An Exploration of Colonial Culture through Child-Made Objects” investigates child-made toys under the premise that the material culture of children offers unique insights into the mentalities and lived experiences of settler children in late nineteenth-century colonial New Zealand. Townsend’s analysis of children’s paper-cutout model villages reveals an idyllic vision of English urban life very much at odds with a harsher colonial reality, suggesting colonial children’s engagement with wider discourses on colonialism, imperialism, and technology. Likewise dealing with colonialism and imperialism, Jakob Zollmann, in his essay “Toys for Empire? Material Cultures of Children in Germany and German Southwest Africa, 1890–1918,” raises the question of whether scholars can speak of a specifically colonial material world of childhood for German children in the colonies and metropolis. While the distinction between German and native African children was initially blurred after German Southwest Africa’s 1889 founding, as both groups of children played with the same balls, sticks, and bows and arrows, by the 1890s the colonial context served as a backdrop for increasingly hardened social constructions of race and class meant to steer children’s behavior and play. Rising numbers of well-heeled civil servants demanded factory-produced toys from the imperial center, which served as a social marker vis-à-vis African and lower-class children. Zollmann’s findings on how imperialism influenced metropolitan toy makers to cater to an exoticist, colonial taste relates to a broader body of literature on how Western toy manufacturers profited from discourses on imperialism and institutionalized racism. In the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, mechanical toys and toy banks animated pejorative racial stereotypes in automated, jerky motions, frequently portraying African Americans in lowstatus, low-paying manual jobs or as lazy but jovial musicians: toys reaching a peak of popularity at precisely the time when white middle-class labor was under threat from foreign migration.63 More recently, scholars like Ann duCille

20

Childhood by Design

have questioned the motives of mainstream toy companies in issuing new lines of “ethnic” and multicultural dolls, such as Mattel’s 1990s line of supposedly realistically sculpted black Barbies, “Shani and Friends,” touted by Mattel for her “authentically” black wider hips and buttocks, fuller lips and broader nose, as well as packaging and clothing (in woven textile prints) exploiting her proud African heritage. Intriguingly, anthropologist Elizabeth Chin has argued that users’ belief in the dolls’ physical and racial difference is not shaped by the material reality of the dolls, for, according to the author’s measurements, Shani’s larger derriere was merely an illusion, but by the persistent racist beliefs users inscribe upon the plastic playthings.64 It is precisely for this reason—“attend[ing] to cultural, racial, and phenotypical differences without merely engaging in the same simplistic big-lips, broad hips stereotype” generated by nineteenth-century scientific racism—that producing an authentically “black” doll has proven so problematic for manufacturers.65 Ultimately, despite efforts to make Barbie “go native” via dyes and costume changes, the toy industry’s answer to multiculturalism is little more than an additive campaign that does little to dislodge the institutionalized racism that Zollmann’s essay brings into high relief. The last two essays in Part Three consider toys as instruments of political indoctrination across different communist regimes. In the context of the Bolsheviks’ infantilization of the Russian peasantry as backwards children in need of enlightenment, Marie Gasper-Hulvat considers the art historical and ethnographic study of traditional folk art toys during the early Soviet era, utilitarian objects granted considerably more attention than other forms of “high” artistic expression. Ultimately, the author reveals the early Soviet fixation with simple peasant toys to be bound up in nostalgia for a utopian communal past and common Russian heritage. The final essay in the volume, Valentina Boretti’s “The ‘Appropriate’ Plaything: Searching for the New Chinese Toy, 1910s–1960s,” assesses the competing discourses on toy design and production intended to shape “new children” in China’s Republican and Communist eras. A driving theme throughout the history of national toy design paradigms, Boretti reveals that the actual newness and specifically Chinese qualities of such “appropriate” playthings remained largely elusive, as both regimes tended to package old toys in new labels. Collectively, the essays in this volume seek to bring the scholarly disciplines interested in toys into greater dialogue and demonstrate how the interpretive practices of scholars based in history, art history, and design, and childhood studies might be enriched by methods and types of evidence outside those

Introduction

21

routinely associated with their disciplinary home base. As tangible artifacts of a necessarily fleeting, yet culturally defined life stage, toys are problematic historical documents, notoriously difficult to interpret and connect with the lived experiences and mental universes of their intended users. It is to be hoped that further interdisciplinary studies will take up the question of children’s material culture in the non-Western world.

Notes 1 Karl Gröber, Children’s Toys of Bygone Days: A History of Playthings of All Peoples from Prehistoric Times to the Nineteenth Century, Philip Hereford, trans. (London: B.T. Batsford, 1928), 1. 2 For a discussion of adult nostalgia for the “timeless” toy, see the introduction to Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing Worlds of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 3 Gröber, Children’s Toys of Bygone Days, 2. 4 Walter Benjamin, “Kulturgeschichte des Spielzeugs,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 113–117. 5 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Robert Baldick, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1962). 6 For an overview of early toy histories and collections, see Anthony Burton, “Design History and the History of Toys: Defining a Discipline for the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 1 (1997): 1–21. 7 Exhibitions dedicated to toys and the material culture of childhood were held at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal (1993/94), the Vitra Design Museum at Weill am Rhein (1997/98), the Imperial Furniture Depot in Vienna (2006/07), at the Museo Picasso in Málaga (2010/11), the Grand Palais in Paris (2011/12), the Museum of Modern Art (2012), the Bavarian National Museum in Munich (2014/15), and the Bard Graduate Center in New York (2015/16). 8 For an overview of recent work in childhood studies, see Anna Mae Duane, The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). 9 Thomas Schlereth, “The Material Culture of Childhood: Research Problems and Possibilities,” in Cultural History and Material Culture: Everyday Life, Landscapes and Museums, ed. Thomas Schlereth (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990), 89–112; Sharon Brookshaw, “The Material Culture of Children and Childhood: Understanding Childhood Objects in the Museum Context,” Journal of Material Culture 14, no. 3 (2009): 365–383; Carla Pascoe, “Putting Away the Things of

22

10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17

18

19 20 21

Childhood by Design Childhood: Museum Representations of Children’s Cultural Heritage,” and Rhian Harris, “Museums and Representations of Childhood: Reflections on the Foundling Museum and the V&A Museum of Childhood,” both in Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Carla Pascoe, (London: Routledge, 2013), 209–221 and 222–239. Brookshaw, “The Material Culture of Children and Childhood,” 381. John Brewer, “Childhood Revisited: The Genesis of the Modern Toy,” History Today 30, no. 2 (1980): 32–39. Karen Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 47. Ibid., 48; Brewer, “Childhood Revisited,” 33. Brewer, “Childhood Revisited,” 35–36; Educational Toys in America: 1800 to the Present, ed. Karen Hewitt and Louise Roomet (Burlington: The Robert Hull Fleming Museum/University of Vermont, 1979), 38. J. H. Plumb, “The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 286–315. Calvert, Children in the House, 7. Ibid., 27–38; Sally Kevill-Davies, “The Wide World,” in Kid-Size: The Material World of Childhood, Alexander von Vegesack, foreword (Milan: Skira Editore/Vitra Design Museum, 1997), 51–54. Eva Ottlinger, “Children’s Furniture, Nurseries and an Imperial Childhood,” in Fidgety Philip! A Design History of Children’s Furniture, ed. Eva B. Ottlinger (Vienna: Böhlau, 2006), 25–33. Max von Boehn, Puppen und Puppenspiele (München: Bruckmann, 1929). Collector and doll historian Constance Eileen King disputed Boehn’s thesis on the primarily cultic function of dolls in the ancient world. While agreeing with Boehn that their main and earliest function was for worship, King argued that children, given their impulse to imitate adults, would have made their own dolls copying the idol figures. King posited her thesis on the existence of dolls of inferior quality, ostensibly made by parents or children themselves as copies of the religious figures. Constance Eileen King, Dolls and Dolls’ Houses (New York: Hamlyn, 1977). Cross, Kids’ Stuff, 14. Mary Rogers, Barbie Culture (London: Sage, 1999); Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995). Juliette Peers, “Adelaide Huret and the Nineteenth-Century French Fashion Doll: Constructing Dolls/Constructing the Modern,” in Dolls Studies: The Many Meanings of Girls Toys and Play, ed. Miriam Forman-Brunell and Jennifer Dawn Whitney (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 171.

Introduction

23

22 Dan Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 42. 23 Miriam Forman-Brunell, “Interrogating the Meanings of Dolls: New Directions in Doll Studies,” Girlhood Studies 5, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 3–13; see also Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories; Elizabeth Chin, “Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry,” American Anthropologist 101, no. 2 (June 1999): 305–321 and Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Ann du Cille, “Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (London: Routledge, 2003), 337–348 and “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (1994): 46–68; Sherrie Inness, “‘Anti-Barbies’: The American Girls Collection and Political Ideologies,” in Delinquents and Debutantes: TwentiethCentury American Girls’ Cultures, ed. Sherrie Inness (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 164–183. The work of Miriam Forman-Brunell has been particularly influential to the new field of feminist doll studies. Her 1998 study Made to Play Home challenged widespread assumptions that girls slavishly adhered to forms of doll play that necessarily supported pre-prescribed patriarchal gender ideals. See her Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 24 Birgitta Lindencrona, “Dollhouses and Miniatures in Sweden,” in Swedish Wooden Toys, ed. Amy Ogata and Susan Weber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 187–215. 25 Susan Broomhall, “Imagined Domesticities in Early Modern Dutch Dollhouses,” Parergon 24, no. 2 (2007): 52. 26 Lindencrona, “Dollhouses and Miniatures in Sweden,” 188. 27 Broomhall, “Imagined Domesticities,” 55. 28 Leonie von Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature: Four Centuries of Dolls’ Houses (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 57. 29 Deborah Jaffé, The History of Toys: From Spinning Tops to Robots (London: Sutton Publishing, 2006), 158–159. 30 Flora Gill Jacobs, A History of Dolls’ Houses, second edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), 28; Heidi Müller, Ein Idealhaushalt im Miniaturformat: Die Nürnberger Puppenhäuser des 17. Jahrhunderts (Nürnberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2006), 19–23. 31 Daniel Thomas Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Allison Pugh, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2009).

24

Childhood by Design

32 Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 66. 33 Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 34 Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004); Susan Linn, Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (New York: The New Press, 2004); Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of Television Advertising (New York: Verso, 1993), 107–143; Shirley Steinberg, ed., Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood, third edition (Boulder, CO: 2011). 35 Seiter, Sold Separately; David Buckingham, The Material Child: Growing up in Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011); David Buckingham and Vebjorg Tingstad, Childhood and Consumer Culture (London: Routledge 2010); Pugh, Longing and Belonging; Martin Lindstrom and Patricia Seybold, Brain-Child: Remarkable Insights into the Minds of Today’s Global Kids and Their Relationships with Brands (London: Kogan Page, 2003); Henry Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 36 See, for instance, sociologist Allison James’s “Confections, Concoctions, and Conceptions,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, 394–405. 37 Schor, Born to Buy, 51–55. 38 Kline, Out of the Garden, 143. 39 For such an argument, see Ellen Seiter’s Sold Separately (as cited above) in which the author argues that children’s consumption often revolves around a desire for peer acceptance and freedom from adult authority, leading to imitation of members of a peer group who do not necessarily adhere to adult standards of class- or racially-based consumption. 40 Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12. 41 Jeffrey Goldstein, David Buckingham, and Giles Brougére, eds., Toys, Games and Media (London/Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 2004); Marsha Kinder, ed., Kids’ Media Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). On cartoons, see Seiter, Sold Separately; Television and New Media Audiences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and “Power Rangers at Preschool: Negotiating Media in Childcare Settings,” in Kids’ Media Culture, ed. Kinder, 239–262. 42 Cross, The Cute and the Cool, 31. 43 Kline, Out of the Garden, 143–173. 44 Cross, Kids’ Stuff, 188–227. 45 Dan Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture, 112–113.

Introduction

25

46 Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Dennis Denisoff, ed., The Nineteenth Century Child and Consumer Culture (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). 47 Jacobson, Raising Consumers, 127–159. 48 Cook, The Commodification of Childhood; and “Commercial Enculturation: Moving Beyond Consumer Socialization,” in Buckingham and Tingstad, Childhood and Consumer Culture, 63–79. 49 Cook, “Commercial Enculturation,” 71. 50 Elizabeth Marshall, “Young Women, Femininities and American Girl,” Girlhood Studies 2, no. 1 (2009): 94–111; Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and Peggy Kreshel, “‘I’m an American Girl… Whatever That Means’: Girls Consuming Pleasant Company’s American Girl Identity,” Journal of Communication 52, no. 1 (2002): 139–161; Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and Elizabeth Lester Roushanzamir, “‘Everything We Do Is A Celebration of You!’: Pleasant Company Constructs American Girlhood,” The Communication Review 6 (2003): 45–69; Molly Brookfield, “From American Girls into American Women: A Discussion of American Girl Nostalgia,” Girlhood Studies 5, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 57–75. 51 Fred Nielsen, “American History through the Eyes of the American Girls,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 25, no. 1–2 (2002): 85–93; Lisa Marcus, “Dolling up History: Fictions of American Jewish Girlhood,” Girlhood Studies 5, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 14–36; Inness, “‘Anti-Barbies’,” 164–183; Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown, Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006). 52 Robin Bernstein, “Children’s Books, Dolls and the Performance of Race: or the Possibility of Children’s Literature,” in Dolls Studies, ed. Forman-Brunell and Whitney, 4. 53 Mark J. P. Wolf, “Adapting the Death Star into LEGO: the Case of Lego Set #10188,” in LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (London: Routledge, 2015), 15–39. On LEGO, see Lars Konzack, “The Cultural History of LEGO,” in LEGO Studies, ed. Wolf, 1–14; David Robertson, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry (New York: Crown Business, 2013); John Baichtal and Joe Meno, The Cult of LEGO (San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press, 2011); Sarah Herman, A Million Little Bricks: The Unofficial Illustrated History of the LEGO Phenomenon (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012). 54 Separate playsets like the 2012 LEGO “Friends” line (supposedly appealing to girls’ innate desires for fantasy role play and interior design) catered especially to girls, featuring pastel colored bricks and feminine, doll-like figures out of scale with

26

55 56

57 58 59 60

Childhood by Design the rest of the sets. Such toys were no longer sold in the “blue,” gender-neutral space of the LEGO aisle but in separate “pink consumption” aisles next to Barbie. LEGO’s new gender-specific marketing practices and play scripts were widely criticized by feminist interest groups for offering a limited version of creativity through sets focused on gender normative themes such as beauty, domesticity, cooking, and equestrian activities, in contrast to the action adventure themes of boy-targeted sets. Widely circulated through feminist social media networks was an image contrasting a 1981 print ad showing the freeform LEGO creation of a young girl and an image of the same model in 2014, holding a gender-specific toy from the new “Friends” line, with the provocative caption “What is different.” See Derek Johnson, “Chicks with Bricks: Building Creativity Across Industrial Design Cultures and Gendered Construction Play,” in Lego Studies, ed. Wolf, 81–104. For a critique of LEGO’s supposedly neutral racial identity via the yellow minifigure, see Derek Johnson, “Figuring Identity: Media Licensing and the Racialization of LEGO Bodies,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2014): 307–325. Tamar Zinguer, Architecture in Play: Imitations of Modernism in Architectural Toys (Charlottesville and London: The University of Virginia Press, 2015), 62. Although players could invent unlimited new configurations, the marketing materials and instruction booklets accompanying the Anker Building Sets tended to favor historicist styles (especially Gothic and Romanesque) and structures such as castles, cathedrals, and fortresses. Toy historians Brenda and Robert Vale dispute Tamar Zinguer’s interpretation of the set as prefiguring Modernist technical developments, maintaining that the set reflected a romantic historicist preference for the Romanesque and Gothic styles relating to a mythic version of Germany’s past around the time of German unification. Brenda and Robert Vale, Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), 24–37. Howard Shubert, “Toys and the Modernist Tradition,” in Toys and the Modernist Tradition (Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 1993), 18. Shubert, Toys and the Modernist Tradition, 28. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 1–2. Megan Brandow-Faller, “‘An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist’ Artistic Toys and ‘Art for the Child’ at the Kunstschau 1908,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 20, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 195–222; “Child’s Play? Memory and Nostalgia in the Toys of the Wiener Werkstätte,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 27 (2015): 148–171; “Kinderkunst between Vienna and Brussels 1900: Child Art, Primitivism and Patronage,” in Vienna

Introduction

61

62 63

64 65

27

Brussels 1900, ed. Helga Mittelbauer and Piet Defraeye (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, Forthcoming in 2018). See Amy Ogata’s important monograph Designing the Creative Child: Places and Playthings in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), which claimed an active role for progressive playthings and design culture in shaping the cultural norms surrounding the postwar cult of the creative child. See Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 201–244. Christopher Barton and Kyle Somerville, “Play Things: Children’s Racialized Mechanical Banks and Toys, 1880–1930,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16, no. 1 (2012): 47–85; Historical Racialized Toys in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2016). Chin, “Ethnically Correct Dolls,” 311–313. du Cille, “Dyes and Dolls,” 56.

Part One

Inventing the Material Child: Childhood, Consumption, and Commodity Culture

1

Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys, and Learning to Shop in Eighteenth-Century Britain Serena Dyer

Writing in 1798, Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), the prolific writer of children’s literature, together with her father Richard (1744–1817), stated that “the false associations which have early influence upon the imagination … produce the furious passions and miserable vices.”1 The Edgeworths argued that, in order to resist the destructive passions, the mind of the child required careful shaping, molding, and direction. These childhood “passions” referred to more than simple emotion. Rather, they were psychosomatic experiences which could be overcome with rationality.2 One of the key passions which afflicted eighteenth-century society was perceived to have been a tendency for middling consumers—and in particular female consumers—to be seduced and enthralled by an exciting new world of goods.3 Both women and children were perceived as irrational economic subjects—easily swayed away from rational consumption, and enticed by the sensuous delights of the material world. Targeting and training children to resist these materialistic consumer tendencies became a focus of pedagogical texts and didactic tools. Economic and material literacy were identified as the key skills required by this self-regulating child consumer, and were carefully cultivated through attitudes to toys and play. Play took on a central role in the cultivation of the child consumer; and the centrality of play in didactic thinking and practice of the eighteenth-century set pedagogues of this period apart from their early modern predecessors.4 The pedagogical discourse at the heart of this new conception of childhood held John Locke’s (1632–1704) notion of the infant being born as tabula rasa, meaning clean slate, at its core. Locke first posed this theory in his 1693 work,

32

Childhood by Design

Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in which he argued that the education of the individual while in the state of childhood, when their mind was blank and easily impressionable, was essential for the molding of a rational adult.5 This skill and knowledge encompassed not only religious and academic education, but also the molding and training of the practical economic and material skills of the child, ensuring their social and economic future as productive, rational consumers. That play could form a key component of the educational arsenal was, in fact, central to Locke’s theories. At the time Locke was writing, play was seen as a sinful dissipation linked with vice and immoral behavior.6 Yet Locke’s work, expanded and popularized by eighteenth-century writers such as the Edgeworths, reframed play and educational objects as key tools for training children, especially regarding the management and restraint of their engagement with the material world. The child as a consumer has long been recognized by scholars.7 Crediting middle-class children with a significant role in the birth of a consumer society in the eighteenth century, J. H. Plumb’s ground-breaking work on the “new world of children” has paved the way for discussions surrounding children’s education, status, and amusement, particularly in relation to consumption in the succeeding decades.8 However, the child as a distinct, independently-operating consumer figure has generally been considered the product of the marketing of toys and clothing targeted specifically at children in the twentieth-century postwar period.9 This essay draws a distinction between the commercial targeting of the child consumer by retailers, and the cultivation and training of the idealized child consumer by pedagogical figures (whether parent, educator, or writer) by utilizing didactic tools, such as toys and material playthings. When this welltrained middle-class child actively engaged in consumption, it was as a form of practice or play: an educational exercise for further consumption patterns. The argument put forward in this essay is not, therefore, for a full re-periodization of the phenomenon of the child consumer as targeted directly by commercial marketing and retailing; but rather that the growing perception of the moral and economic dangers of material enticement engendered a nascent awareness of childhood as being key in training self-regulating consumer practice. This, in turn, lay the groundwork for the commercialization of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century child consumer. As such, didactic materials and toys were created from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, which were designed to develop the child’s consumer skills: specifically, their economic and material literacy. Parents and educators of

Training the Child Consumer

33

eighteenth-century children—and in particular, girls—aimed to protect their charges from over-exposure to the consumer market, but not through shielding them from the encroaching seductions of the material, commercial world. Instead, such educators armed future female consumers, equipping them with an arsenal of economic and material skills, which would enable them to successfully navigate and contend with the adult commercial world with which they would soon be confronted.

Economic literacy and the pocket book The economic literacy of the child consumer, and the enactment of this childhood training in arithmetic and accounting, is most clearly evident in contemporary pocket books, which were created for and used by both children and adults.10 Pocket books acted as moral and economic navigational tools, providing their readers with indispensable knowledge, and encouraging them to be accountable for their own financial outlay.11 Some pocket books, such as The Important Pocket Book in the 1760s, specifically aimed to help children self-regulate their expenditure. These small books, usually measuring around five inches by three inches, became popular from the mid-century, and were available under a plethora of titles—directed at ladies, gentlemen, and children—and contained moral essays and stories, among other practical material. Central to the pocket book format were the diary pages, which were almost always accompanied by accounting columns. These columns were divided into daily sections for the “account of cash,” “received,” and “paid,” which were helpfully split into pounds, shillings, and pence. These books provided an economic framework through which adults and children alike should navigate their time and money, and furnish the historian with a unique resource through which to access the consumption practices of children. John Newbery (1713–1767) was both a prolific pocket book publisher, and a seminal figure in children’s literature. Newbery has been lauded as the father of children’s literature, and has been credited with founding the genre in 1740s London.12 His 1744 A Little Pretty Pocket-Book was his first publication for children. Purchasers also received a ball (for boys) or pincushion (for girls) along with the publication.13 This innovative marketing of book and object as one set an early precedent for Newbery’s acknowledgment of the importance of the material and visual when engaging with children. The ball and pincushion

34

Childhood by Design

were to be used as disciplinary aids, and were each half black and half red. The child’s good deeds were to be marked on the red side, and bad marked on the right, in order to “infallibly make Tommy a good Boy, and Polly a good Girl.”14 Marketed to appeal to adults who wished to embrace popular Lockean ideas of education by amusement, play and toys were presented as an educational supplement which aimed to morally instruct the child. The training encompassed in Newbery’s publications for children frequently connected moral goodness with economic responsibility. In The Important Pocket Book, a publication aimed at both girls and boys, and published in the 1760s, Newbery explicitly stated that keeping accounts was essential in order to maintain the social and economic security of the family unit; “[h]e that keeps his Accounts may keep his family, but he that keeps no Account may be kept by the Parish.”15 In other words, accounting functioned as a means of selfregulating financial and moral credit.16 The message is continued consistently in this publication, with the columns of the almanac section divided in a “Money Account” and “Moral Account.” The former was intended to record money paid and received, and the latter to record good and bad deeds, often with a financial element, mirroring the disciplinary format of the ball and pincushion which accompanied A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. For example, sample entries in The Important Pocket Book refer to the giving of small amounts of money to poor women and children. The Minor’s Pocket Book, which ran from the 1790s to the 1840s and was also aimed specifically at children, contained similar accounting pages.17 This apparatus for children’s financial self-regulation was supplemented by tables of coach fares, and more importantly, a table educating the young reader about money calculations, and providing information on the breakdown of one pound into shillings and pence. Keeping practical financial records was conceived as a form of practice-accounting, encouraging children to take charge of the small amount of pocket money they controlled, and to regulate their own spending, developing their personal sense of economic literacy. The economic training through accounting which was encouraged in pocket book publications for children reflected contemporary pedagogical theories. That children should learn accounts was supported by Locke in the 1690s. He argued that children should be encouraged “to learn perfectly merchants’ accounts, and not to think it is a skill that belongs not to them, because it has received its name from, and has been chiefly practised by, men of traffic.”18 Locke encouraged accounting as a means of self-regulation, which would enable analysis of an individual’s spending, rather than to provide dissuasion to consume.

Training the Child Consumer

35

Maria Edgeworth was also a proponent of encouraging children to keep accounts in order to temper and manage their understanding of the material world, and expressed her views in the important 1798 publication Practical Education, which she co-authored with her father. Edgeworth had previously published The Parent’s Assistant in 1796, and has been criticized, both by contemporaries and historians, for seeing toys as part of the work of education, rather than the joy of play.19 Toys, economy, and the material world were inextricably linked for Edgeworth, who argued that “economy cannot be exercised without children’s having the management of money” in the form of pocket money, and explicitly recommended that girls in particular were supplied with pocket books in which to record their expenditure.20 Edgeworth saw this rational management of money as central to training the child’s understanding of the material world, particularly in relation to new (equated with pretty, fashionable trifles) and old (meaning long-lasting, repaired, and cared for goods) things. The pocket money which Edgeworth advised that children received was not recommended in order to equip them with the means to buy new things, but was rather a practical training exercise in managing money. This practical consumer apprenticeship compliments Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s (1743–1825) ideas about childhood as a progression from restraint to liberation.21 Barbauld was a prominent poet, essayist, and children’s author, who notably penned Lessons for Children (1778–1779), a series of four primers for children, progressing from ages two to four with each volume. Mary Jackson has argued that Barbauld’s work reinforced the material and emotional dependency of the child upon adults at this early age.22 However, the gradual liberation of children as they aged granted them gradually increased consumer freedom, while the pocket book and parental authority could still provide a guiding hand. The combination of the pocket book and pocket money enabled children to practice consumption: to be consumers in training.23 Pocket books used by children in the late eighteenth century demonstrate a practical enactment of the methods proposed by Edgeworth. The childhood pocket books of Fanny Knatchbull, née Austen Knight, niece to Jane Austen, provide an excellent example of this usage. From the age of around ten in 1804, Fanny continually kept accounts of her expenditure. This habit continued into her adult life, providing an example of the effective implementation of this early economic training. The entries in the early diaries primarily record expenditure on ribbons and sweets: small, practice transactions, presumably made with small amounts of pocket money and under adult supervision.24 This pocket-money

36

Childhood by Design

consumption acted as an apprenticeship in consumption, allowing children to practice consumer interactions and manage a small personal budget, while still under the care and guidance of an adult. Harriet Youell, the daughter of a Great Yarmouth corn merchant and selfstyled gentleman, William Youell, also kept pocket books from around the age of ten. Only two of her pocket books survive, both from the early 1790s. Unlike Fanny, Harriet was less rigorous in recording her expenditure, only occasionally marking down odd figures. Her pocket books are more remarkable for the proliferation of sketches and scribbles which adorn them, demonstrating a sense of ownership and juvenile imagination, rather than serious economic practice. Her interaction with these books—designed to control and restrain the child’s mind and actions—instead subvert the expected usage of the pocket book to regulate economic activity. It is particularly worth noticing the elements of the diary which Harriet did make use of: the memorandum and diary sections. Harriet used these to make occasional records of appointments or events.25 In other words, while she was happy to make practical use of certain aspects of the pocket book, she did not feel compelled or restricted to conform to its designed intention to mold her economic literacy. This partial disparity between pedagogical discourse and publisher’s rhetoric, and the practical application— or lack thereof—of these ideas is significant, and explains the tensions between the efforts of Locke, Edgeworth, as well as other pedagogical writers such as Rousseau, with the material commercialization observed by Plumb.26 In practice, the training espoused by these writers was a reactive response to the proliferation of toys and new material goods for children, and enjoyed varying degrees of success.

Toys, materials, and things In Practical Education, Edgeworth remarked that the spreading popularity of toys, observed by Plumb, was a concern, and that toys should be used to encourage “natural vivacity and ingenuity,” and should not be used simply as amusements to entertain children.27 Children, Edgeworth argued, should be encouraged not to treasure, but to break their playthings, in order to see what things are made of, and to “examine into the structure of their toys.”28 In making these claims, Edgeworth identified two types of toys available to children in this period: manufactured toys (such as dolls) and improvised toys (such as

Training the Child Consumer

37

modeling clay or wax). Engagement with toys through play was conceived by Edgeworth, as it had been by Locke, to be key in developing children’s material literacy. This pedagogical philosophy was reflected both in children’s literature, as well as children’s actual interactions with their toys, and in particular dolls. Eleanor Fenn’s (1743–1813) 1783 work Rational Sports in Dialogues Passing Among the Children of a Family explicitly indicated the types of information that were deemed necessary in order for children to navigate both the material and retail worlds.29 Fenn, better known under the pseudonyms Mrs. Lovechild and Mrs. Teachwell, was inspired by Barbauld, and penned a series of children’s books in the 1780s to 1810s, and particularly aimed her work at girls and young women. Notably, Fenn created toys and games which were conceived in order to assist mothers in teaching their children at home; and after 1795 her works were published by Newbery. Fenn’s work takes the form of a series of dialogues which children could conceivably act out. The first of these is entitled Trades, in which children were to play out a series of different occupations through the dialogues primarily reenacting retail roles. As with the pocket book, enacting these dialogues can be read as consumer-training, and practical practice for their own consumption. The dialogues start with each child taking on the role of a type of shopkeeper, and describing it: JANE: I will be a Milliner; and I will sell a thousand things. Jack says, that is the meaning of the name; and I will make caps and ruffles and such things. GEORGE: And I will be a Haberdasher, and I will sell as many things as you: pins, tape, needles, thread; and I will have a great shop. WILLIAM: And I will be a Pedlar; and I will buy my goods of George, and carry them a great way about, and call at all the houses; and I will keep a stall at the fair and sell my goods. … JANE: Let Susan be a draper; then what shall she sell? GEORGE: Cloth to be sure, you know; there are both linen and woollendrapers.30

Although there is no evidence that readers of the book did so, the intention was clearly for parents and children to act out such scenes. Throughout her publications, it was Fenn’s desire to help mothers to become better teachers.31 Facilitated through play, children were supposed to learn about different varieties of retailer, what they sold, and how they conducted their trade. Not only does the imagined dialogue specify the exact goods each retailer would sell (such as pins, tape, needles and thread from the haberdasher), it also describes

38

Childhood by Design

where the pedlar would acquire their goods, and the location each retailer can be found, whether a stall at a fair or a shop on the street. Other trades, such as a cooper, druggist, stationers, and pastry-cook are also included, demonstrating that a wide knowledge of the retail market was deemed desirable. The dialogue is enacted through a series of questions, and when a player did not know an answer, he/she had to forfeit. The dialogue goes on to discuss the material properties of the goods each vendor sells: GEORGE: Draper!—When you are asked what your linen is made of, answer hemp or flax.—They are both plants.—You know what the woollen cloths are made of?32

Similar assessments were to be made about leather, butter, chocolate, cochineal, and turpentine, all echoing Edgeworth’s assertion that children should be made aware of what things are made of. The subtitle of the work states that these dialogues were “designed as a hint to mothers how they may inform the minds of their little people respecting the objects with which they are surrounded.”33 The explicit focus of this prescriptive literature on material literacy within the context of commerce and retail is evidence of the significance of the tangible and material world in developing the idealized child consumer. In line with Edgeworth’s ideas, playing out a consumer role was conceived by Fenn as an educational tool, and an understanding of the material properties of goods was central to the consumer knowledge the child could gain from such exercises. Literature was also produced and circulated which was intended to develop a child’s material knowledge of the world on a visual level through the innovative hybrid of the toy-book.34 Between 1810 and 1816, London publishers S. & J. Fuller created a series of ten books, designed for children, with accompanying paper dolls. These books were expensive, costing five shillings, yet ran to several editions within the first two years of publication. In these moralistic children’s tales, the young boy or girl is represented by a paper doll, which is accompanied by a selection of outfits, which correspond with sections in the story. In the case of The History of Little Fanny (Figure 1.1), the eponymous Fanny runs away, has her fashionable clothes stolen, and then has to work her way up through society until she is returned to her Mama.35 At heart, Little Fanny is a moralistic tale, and bares similarity to Edgeworth’s famous tale of “The Purple Jar,” published in 1796 as part of The Parent’s Assistant. In Edgeworth’s story, a young girl in need of new shoes is instead seduced by the beauty of a purple jar, which, on the girl’s insistence, her mother

Training the Child Consumer

39

reluctantly allows her to buy instead of the shoes. Upon closer inspection, the jar is only purple because it is filled with dark liquid, and, without shoes to wear, the girl’s father refuses to take her out in public. Both tales warn against moral and material irresponsibility; however, Little Fanny visualizes the tale, and the format recognizes the potential significance of play in reinforcing moral lessons about consumption and the material world. The application and demonstration of useful knowledge through play is profoundly evident in The History of Little Fanny. The text was accompanied by seven cutout figures, one movable head, and four hats; the object being for the child reader-user to dress Fanny in the outfits which suited her current station in the story as the story was read. Each chapter of the story required a different outfit, and was preceded by a description of what the paper doll of Fanny should be wearing. The first gown that Fanny wears is a fashionable white muslin dress with drawers and a pink silk sash, which would have been standard attire for wealthy little girls. Fanny clasps a doll to her, referencing the mimetic quality of dolls, and the general practice of learning through play with dolls.36 However, and quite ironically in light of the centrality of the paper doll to the publication, the book derides Fanny for her attention to dolls, similar to Edgeworth, who negatively associated doll play with “the first symptoms of a love of finery and

Figure 1.1 The History of Little Fanny, 1810, S. & J. Fuller, London, Briggs Collection of Educational Literature, University of Nottingham Special Collections, PZ6.H4.

40

Childhood by Design

fashion”.37 As the story progresses, Fanny loses her doll, along with her social position, due to idleness and vanity. When she is redeemed, she again wears her fashionable dress, but this time she clasps a book in place of the doll. The complex and often contradictory attitude to dolls espoused by contemporary pedagogical writers, provides useful context for understanding how girls used and played with dolls. On the one hand, as stated by Edgeworth, they were seen as frivolous toys, which promoted vanity and frivolity. But to other thinkers like Rousseau, dolls were prized as key tools which facilitated a girl’s material education and familiarity with rituals of female socialization.38 However, both writers agreed that dolls were a “means of inspiring girls with a taste for neatness in dress, and with a desire to make those things for themselves, for which women are usually dependent on milliners.”39 As miniature versions of the larger garments worn by adults, making clothing for dolls functioned in a similar fashion to the apprentice pieces constructed by boys learning the furniture-making trade. However, making doll clothes also furnished girls with the material literacy needed to be self-sufficient in their own consumption of fashionable clothing. A survey of the dolls’ clothing held in the Museum of London indicates that, unlike the shoddily constructed clothing of homemade nineteenth-century dolls, dolls’ garments from the eighteenth century were constructed in an identical manner to contemporary full-sized garments. An example of a doll’s gown from around 1805 in the collection of the Museum of London demonstrates the high level of skill involved in creating these miniature garments.40 The provenance for this dress places it as handiwork of a female student at a London school for the daughters of impoverished gentry, made while staying at the school during the summer vacation. The dress is a perfect miniature copy of a contemporary woman’s drop-front gown, and measures approximately thirty-three centimeters in length. It is made from white cotton, woven with a large check pattern, which out-scales the size of the dress, and the bodice is lined with white linen. Close inspection of the handiwork of this garment reveals the level of material knowledge and skill this young pupil had obtained. The lace inserts on the front of the bib are perfectly inserted, their edges butting the tiny rolled hems, and positioned carefully in line with the check pattern of the fabric. Knowledge of fabric and cutting is also demonstrated through the sleeves, which were cut on the bias, allowing for greater flexibility. The back of the garment demonstrates further skill in the topstitched construction of the side back seams, in which the side back is carefully lapped over the back and stitched in place using a backstitch. The dress fabric is

Training the Child Consumer

41

also used economically, with the flaps underneath the bib constructed only from the cheaper, plain lining. Eighteenth-century girls’ engagement with sewing provides a key area of accord between pedagogical discourse and evidence of the real experiences of girls in relation to the development of their material literacy. Girls began to learn plain sewing from around the age of five, and were encouraged to be active with their hands from an early age.41 Archival sources back up this assertion that girls were actively involved in the creation of miniature garments for their dolls, and consumed through making as well as purchasing. As early as the 1770s, Ann Hicks, a Gloucestershire gentleman’s daughter, dressed her doll in a full brocade gown.42 This evidence continues into the early nineteenth century, when Miss Betsy Nutt, writing to her friend Matilda Bosworth, the daughter of a country vicar, is recorded as having been working on a doll and “made it such a pretty frock and petticoat.”43 Similarly, in 1830, seven-year-old Caroline Pennant, relative of the naturalist Thomas Pennant, wrote to her grandmother to tell her that she was pleased with “the first little pocket handkerchief I have made for my doll.”44 Further extant examples of dolls’ garments show mistakes and faults in the cut and construction of the garments, which provide evidence of dolls’ clothes acting as a practical method of acquiring skill, knowledge, and material literacy through making. For example, a doll’s silk pelisse also in the collection of the Museum of London, is generally executed to a very high standard.45 The majority of pieces were cut following the methods used to create full-sized pieces. The right sleeve is cut correctly along the bias of the fabric, allowing it to cling at the forearm, and puff out at the head. However, the left sleeve has been cut at an incorrect angle, not quite on the straight grain, but not on the bias enough to create the same effect. It is possible that this was the result of needing to cut the garment from limited fabric. However, the effect would have been evident when placed on a doll, and is, indeed, evident in the way in which the garment does not lay correctly when stored. This apparent mistake makes it unlikely that this garment was purchased, and highly likely that it was made at home. This merging of the manufactured doll and the practical creation of garments reconciles Edgeworth’s opposing views of dolls and children’s toys. On the one hand, a purchased doll encouraged an interest in consuming novel and fashionable goods. However, the maintenance, care, and creation of garments for the doll fostered practical skills, enriched a child’s engagement with the material world, and promoted an appreciation of the value of goods beyond their monetary cost.

42

Childhood by Design

The self-fashioning of toys as a means of regulating consumption and understanding the material world was not confined to doll’s garments. Children also mimicked the paper doll and moral tale book-toy hybrid made popular through S. and J. Fuller’s publications. In 1832, Ann Sanders Wilson created sixteen different outfits, painted in watercolor on card, for the heroine of the accompanying manuscript. The story, The History of Miss Wildfire, tells the tale of a girl obsessed with fashion, who, after the death of her father, descends into poverty.46 She is then compelled to make a living as a lace maker, before finding redemption in marriage and Quakerism. The History of Miss Wildfire bares startling resemblance to the Fullers’ commercially produced History of Little Fanny; such a mimetic tribute is undoubtedly evidence of the influence that such morality tales had upon their readers. This particular tale and dolls were not, however, the playthings of children. Wilson inscribed the tale as being a gift for her sister Mary, who was at the time twenty-one. These dolls were an articulation of knowledge already acquired, and an awareness of a genre familiar to them. As such, they were also an extension of the domestic and polite training of young ladies, and a testament to the influence of the Fullers’ publishing.

Conclusion As consumers-in-training, active engagement with financial and material tasks were key didactic tools for eighteenth-century children. The expanding and tempting world of goods, which rose to ever-increasing prominence in the eighteenth century, brought with it a threat of moral decay, material decadence, and financial ruin. The importance of arming children in order to resist the allure of the commercial world was an issue of great importance to pedagogical writers such as Locke and Edgeworth, and was recognized as an appealing selling point by publishers such as Newbery and the Fullers. The didactic materials produced to promote the training of children to be economically literate, rational consumers were utilized with varying degrees of success. However, the material training of children to understand where things came from and how they were made was prevalent both in pedagogical literature, and in the practice of children making clothing for their dolls. This self-conscious development of children’s knowledge of the material world and consumer goods through unmaking and making aimed to promote restraint, and an understanding of the value of things.

Training the Child Consumer

43

Notes 1 Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (New York: Self, Brown, 1801), II, 298. 2 Helen Yallop, Age and Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 2016), 19. 3 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1997), 73–98; Kate Smith, “Sensing Design and Workmanship: The Haptic Skills of Shoppers in Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of Design History 25 (2012): 1–10. 4 Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 5; see also Brigitte Glaser, “Gendering Childhoods: On the Discursive Formation of Young Females in the Eighteenth Century,” in Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Anja Müller (London: Ashgate, 2006), 189–198; Anja Müller, Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals and Prints, 1689–1789 (London: Ashgate, 2009); Karen Smith, The Government of Childhood: Discourse, Power and Subjectivity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 5 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 7th edition (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1712). 6 Anna K. Nardo, The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 11–12. See also John Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989). 7 For work on later child consumers, see Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Daniel Thomas Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (London: Duke University Press, 2004); Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Steven Khan, “Harnessing the Complexity of Children’s Consumer Culture,” Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education 3, no. 1 (2006): 39–59; Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (London: Harvard University Press, 2009). 8 John Harold Plumb, “The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 67 (1975): 64–95; and “The New World of Children in EighteenthCentury England,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John Harold Plumb (London: Europa, 1982), 286–315. 9 See, for example, Seiter, Sold Separately, 51–95.

44

Childhood by Design

10 Rebecca Elisabeth Connor, Women, Accounting, and Narrative: Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 2011), 5. 11 Jennie Batchelor, “Fashion and Frugality: Eighteenth-Century Pocket Books for Women,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 32 (2003): 1–18. 12 Matthew Grenby, The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2. 13 John Rowe Townsend, Written for Children (London: Pelican, 1976), 31. 14 A Pretty Little Pocket Book, 10th edition (London: John Newbery, 1760). 15 The Important Pocket Book (London: John Newbery, 1765), 1. 16 Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 17 O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child, 104. 18 John Locke, The Works of John Locke, vol. 8 (London: Rivington, 1824), 199–201. 19 Teresa Michals, “Experiments before Breakfast: Toys, Education and Middle-Class Childhood,” in The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, ed. Dennis Denisoff (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 33. 20 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, II, 276. 21 Sarah Robbins, “Lessons for Children and Teaching Mothers: Mrs. Barbauld’s Primer for the Textual Construction of Middle-Class Domestic Pedagogy,” The Lion and the Unicorn 17 (1993): 135–151. 22 Mary Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from its Beginnings to 1839 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 131. 23 A similar argument is made in relation to the twenty-first-century child consumer in Jacobson, Raising Consumers, 56–92. 24 Kent Archives, U951/F24/1-69: Diaries of Fanny Knatchbull, née Austen Knight. 25 Great Yarmouth Borough Archives, Y/D 87/51-52: Ladies Pocket Book, 1793–1794. 26 Plumb, “The New World of Children,” 286–315. 27 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, I, 1–2. 28 Ibid., I, 20. 29 Eleanor Fenn, Rational Sports in Dialogues Passing Among the Children of a Family (London: J. Marshall, 1783). 30 Ibid., 18–22. 31 Andrea Immel, “Mistress of Infantine Language: Lady Elenor Fenn, Her Set of Toys, and the Education of Each Moment,” Children’s Literature 25 (1997): 220. 32 Fenn, Rational Sports in Dialogues, 22–23. 33 Ibid., i. 34 See Christina Ionescu, ed., Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).

Training the Child Consumer

45

35 Anon, The History of Little Fanny: Exemplified in a Series of Figures (London: S. and J. Fuller, 1811). 36 Juliette Peers, The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie (London: Berg, 2004). 37 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, I, 4. 38 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile: Or, Treatise on Education (New York: D. Appleton, 1892), 265. 39 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, I, 4. 40 Museum of London, MOL, A21412: Doll’s dress, 1805. 41 Katherine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 27; see also Patricia Crawford and Sara Heller Mendelson, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 90. 42 Gloucestershire Archives, D2455/F1/7/4: Letter to Martha Hicks from her daughter Ann, 1770s. 43 Northampton Archives, B(HH)/148: Letter to Matilda Bosworth, 1845. 44 Warwickshire Country Record Office, CR 2017/TP548: Letter from Caroline Pennant to her Grandmother, 1830. 45 Museum of London, MOL, A21160: Doll’s Pelisse, 1810. 46 Victoria and Albert Museum, T.360:1-3-1998: The History of Miss Wildfire, 1832.

2

Transitional Pandoras: Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century Ariane Fennetaux

Eighteenth-century Europe saw the emergence of a specific material culture destined for children ranging from clothing to playthings and literature.1 Dolls occupied a territory of their own in the emerging material culture of childhood. Despite the appearance of a specialist trade in dolls as playthings for children, dolls were also used by adults in very different contexts and for other purposes than play.2 Most famously, fashion dolls, sometimes referred to as “Pandora dolls,” were used as advertising by traders and businessmen and women, while perfectly grown-up women sometimes had large, elaborate dollhouses that served as curiosity cabinets.3 Conversely, children’s toys often doubled as educational. Dolls were no exception and were recruited into educating girls, grooming them into rituals and behaviors of appropriate womanhood. When cultural historians have interrogated dolls and dollhouses, such investigations have often considered doll play as instruments of discipline, as tools used to reinforce the patriarchal social structure that mostly assigned women to the domestic sphere and defined their area of accomplishment as pertaining to dress, adornment, and motherhood.4 In this narrative, dolls have been viewed as pedagogical, and even disciplinary instruments prescribing appropriate femininity to girls. If the pedagogical role of dolls in preparation for adulthood is manifest across a variety of sources in the eighteenth century, we should remember that girls retained agency and were not necessarily the docile objects of the disciplinary zeal displayed by pedagogues, moralists, or doll producers. Instead of a simplistic reading of dolls as the vehicles of a conservative ideology maintaining order and discipline, dolls should be seen as “contested

48

Childhood by Design

artifacts,” sites of conflict between adult producers and juvenile consumers. No matter what pedagogical role dolls were supposed to have, girls could resist and challenge adult prescriptions, and, through play, reappropriate the meaning of dolls.5 Play theory has developed as a field of inquiry since the 1950s, borrowing from such diverse fields as child psychology, sociology or anthropology. Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and Donald Winnicot have coined various conceptual tools to understand human interaction with playthings from play as “a free activity” outside ordinary life, to mimicry or the notion of the transitional object, that is the idea of a plaything acting as surrogate for the mother and providing both comfort to the child and access to independence.6 Yet these categories have seldom been used by historians to look at historical dolls or doll play. This essay undertakes a reevaluation of dolls—an area of material culture long suffering from academic neglect—in the context of eighteenth-century British culture by using material, archival, and literary sources in conjunction with some of the critical concepts developed by play theorists to analyze a combination of written and material sources. Building on Huizinga, Caillois in particular has defined play as an activity that is free, separate, unproductive, uncertain in its outcome, governed by rules and accompanied by an awareness of a second reality.7 Eighteenth-century British dolls will be interrogated in the light of such analytical tools to show how, in spite of being entrusted with establishing order (ludus), they always also opened up the possibility of chaos (paidia). Although primarily based on British sources, this essay will also draw on evidence from other European countries and in particular Germany and the Netherlands, where doll making is thought to have originated and the British context will be taken as a particularized example of phenomena also at work in other European cultures.8 Despite the many pedagogical purposes dolls were made to serve—in Britain as elsewhere—through play, girls appropriated and subverted them to their own ends. In the process, dolls’ in-betweenness, the fact they occupied a contested terrain between children and adults, half way between usefulness and unproductive playfulness, and that at the same time they were supposed to transition girls into accomplished womanhood, will be shown to turn them instead into “transitional objects” in the sense that they could empower rather than discipline. In that sense, this essay intends to add to the existing scholarship that sees material culture as a potential instrument of female emancipation rather than subjugation. Although eighteenth-century women’s involvement with material culture—from dress to needlework or home decoration—may be seen as evidence of their submission to the patriarchal

Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century

49

order and the gendering of the spheres, revisionist feminist readings of material culture have challenged this superficial interpretation and reclaimed female agency.9 In a similar fashion, through play as an open-ended, uncertain practice, dolls often proved to be subversive, empowering tools which enabled their users to experience agency and become autonomous individuals.

In-between objects The eighteenth century coincided with the rise of a specific material culture for children in Britain as shown by historian J. H. Plumb in his milestone article.10 In line with the “invention” of childhood as a specific age that called for specialized care, tools and material culture, the period saw the appearance of distinctive clothes, books and playthings for children.11 Just as children’s dress changed from being a miniature version of adult fashions to being specifically adapted to the perceived needs of childhood, the emerging consumer society in Britain was quick to seize on children’s need for play as a new niche in the market. The number of so-called “toy-men,” the primary providers of playthings for children, rose dramatically in the course of the century in Britain for instance.12 Yet if the commodification of childhood in the eighteenth century cannot be denied, the category of the “toy” was not always well defined as it was often associated with adulthood and not solely with childhood.13 As A Description of All Trades explained in 1747, toy-men “are the sellers of or dealers in toys … not only of all sorts for the diversion of children, which are pretty numerous, … but in an exceeding variety of curiousities [sic].”14 Toy-men, for instance, sold board games such as backgammon and checkerboards, but also often useful articles such as knives, shavers or snuff as well as “all sorts of toys for children” as their tradecards sometimes stated, an indication that the word toy was not self-evidently associated with childhood.15 Dolls themselves occupied a rather ambiguous territory in this emerging consumer culture. Toy-men’s trade-cards commonly listed them with mentions such as “Undrest and dress’d, jointed, wax and common babies,” “Fine Babies and Baby Houses, with all sorts of Furniture” or else “wax and naked babies.”16 With a body of wood, and head and limbs either of painted wood, sometimes leather or stuff and, for the more expensive models, of poured wax, dolls or “babies” could be articulated at the hips and knees and came dressed or undressed. Most eighteenth-century dolls, despite being called “babies,” rarely represented

50

Childhood by Design

infants or toddlers and mostly had adult features. In some cases, however, the dress worn by dolls indicated they were not supposed to represent adults. Some dolls for instance wear back-fastening gowns equipped with leading strings, that is straps at the back by which toddlers could be held when learning to walk, indicating they represented toddlers or young children.17 One rare early eighteenth-century doll wears long open gowns, an outfit characteristic of the dress worn by infants. But in both these cases the physiognomy of the dolls— their face and body-shape—remained that of adult women, being at best smaller in size than adult dolls. With no attempt at anatomical realism, the bodies of these “babies” were all similar, a bare structure onto which dress was pinned into place and with it sex, age and social identities conferred. The disregard for anatomical resemblance, coupled with the singular misnomer “baby” that was used to refer to a doll that mostly represented an adult woman rather than a child, are characteristic of dolls’ ambiguous status in the eighteenth century: sitting uneasily between playthings and curiosities while serving as both toys for children and collectibles for adults. That dolls were part of the new consumer culture that emerged around children in eighteenth-century Britain is illustrated across a variety of sources. Kirk, a toy-man working in London from around 1784 to around 1791, had a trade token (Figure 2.1) made for his shop that features a scene in the interior of his shop where the youth and playfulness of his trade is clearly put forward.18 Accompanied by a woman, a girl and a boy look at the goods on display on the shelves behind the counter. A variety of toys can be distinctly recognized, including dolls of different sizes, which are categorized here as playthings fit for children. Arabella Furnese, an early eighteenth-century Kent aristocrat with money to spend on herself and her children, regularly paid “for some Playthings for ye Children.”19 Among those she bought a “baby” for 7 shillings in 1715 for her daughter born earlier that year. The price of the baby might have been moderate but it entailed regular outlay when Arabella had dress and furniture made for it. Later in 1715, she employed a Mrs. Fraizer who made her own petticoats to make a quilted petticoat for the doll. When her daughter turned six, she had her own upholsterer make a bed and her silk merchant fit up the bed in silk at the cost of £4 10s and £2 9s each. However, numerous sources also make it clear that dolls were not the exclusive preserve of girls. Some eighteenth-century dolls were put to very serious, sometimes professional uses by adults, both male and female. The famous Pandora dolls were thus used as fashion models by traders to advertise

Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century

51

Figure 2.1 Trade Token for J. Kirk, Toy-man, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, inv: B.77-1996. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

and promote their productions.20 Not meant as playthings, fashion dolls— usually from France—were a commercial tool used in a professional context by businessmen and women as a ready way of communication about dress before the widespread use of fashion prints. There is also ample evidence of adult women buying and keeping dolls for recreation. Living in mid-Georgian London, Laetitia Powell, née Clark, is thus known to have owned thirteen dolls which she collected throughout her life. If the earliest doll in the series, dated 1754, would have been acquired when she was fifteen, the rest of the collection dates from different moments of her adult life, including her wedding (Figure 2.2) when she married David Powell in 1761, aged twenty-two. The last doll related to Laetitia Powell dates back to 1812 when she was a 71-year-old woman, hardly a little girl in need of youthful diversion. A feminine equivalent to the masculine cabinet of curiosity, the elaborate dollhouses produced in the Netherlands in the late seventeenth century were grown-up projects, curated by adult female owners often over several years. Extravagantly expensive, such dolls’ cabinets fit in with Caillois’s definition

52

Childhood by Design

Figure 2.2 Doll, wax and cloth, dressed in white figured silk sack-back wedding gown and petticoat, 1761, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, inv: T.183 :7-1919, © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

of playing as wasteful and unproductive use of time and resources. Petronella Oortman, a Dutch elite woman born in 1656, is thought to have started on her impressive dollhouse in 1686, when she was thirty. English elite women took up the hobby and there are several large, evidently luxurious eighteenthcentury dollhouses made in England. In Nostell Priory in Yorkshire is an early Georgian dollhouse which minutely reproduces Chippendale chairs, hallmarked

Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century

53

silverware and ceramic tea sets.21 Made for Susanna Lady Winn shortly after her wedding to Sir Rowland Winn in 1729 by Thomas Chippendale who also designed Nostell Priory itself, the dollhouse has many similarities with the larger house which houses it. Far from being “removed” from the real world—since they often replicated it in painstaking miniaturization—these dollhouses did not signal play. The minutely-reproduced furnishings of such houses, with all their attention to detail and the intense amount of skill and labor they evidence, instead belong to what Susan Stewart identifies as the pure miniature, the miniature as a display of craft.22 What was on show in these houses was the skill of the adult craftsmen able to reproduce everything to scale and with the utmost attention to detail. On the receiving end, these houses were not played with but curated. Sometimes known as cabinet houses, they were objects of curiosity for adults who derived pleasure from the exact copies of things made in exquisitely small format. As true miniatures, such exquisite dollhouses were to be enjoyed mostly through the eye, rather than the hand.23 But British women in the eighteenth century did not just collect dolls as curiosities to go in cabinet dollhouses. They also sometimes made garments for them and, therefore, to some extent, also played with them. Laetitia Powell, for instance, is thought to have dressed her thirteen dolls, making garments “specially modeled” for them so her collection was not purely enjoyed through the eye. More generally speaking, the collection, which spans Powell’s life from age fifteen to age seventy-one, illustrates the ability of dolls to cross from childhood into adulthood but also to be at the crossroads of different practices, resisting clear categorization. Although Laetitia Powell’s dolls were not fashion dolls per se, they were turned in effect by their owner into three-dimensional fashion plates for various years. Pinned onto the underskirts of the dolls are notes in an eighteenth-century hand giving information about the year the dress dates from. But the collection also presents a sort of sartorial autobiography of its owner since she is thought to have modeled the dresses after her own, using remnants of fabric from her own gowns as in the case of her wedding dress.24 The Powell dolls are part curiosities, part fashion dolls, part playthings, part intimate record. Because they recorded personal events, they were also appropriated by Powell as a sort of sartorial self-portrait in dolls, in a type of free and unproductive activity to which role-play and imagination contributed. Conversely, children’s dolls were not purely recreational. If children’s particular need for play and diversion was recognized in the form of a dedicated material culture made of playthings created specifically for them, children’s toys were also

54

Childhood by Design

frequently invested with some level of instruction and edification.25 Girls’ dolls were at the center of this conundrum. In pedagogical discourses playing doll was often represented as a “useful” diversion for children that would inculcate good practices in domesticity and housewifery.

Dolls and the discipline of the domestic One of the earliest recorded dollhouses, built in Nuremberg in 1631 for Anna Köferlin, seems to have been used primarily as an educational aide. Anna Köferlin is thought to have charged admission for people to come and see her dollhouse and gain instruction from the spectacle. Although boys were encouraged to come and see some parts of the house, the target audience was primarily that of girls and young servants. The bill printed to advertise the exhibition read: So look you then at this baby house, ye babes, inside and out. Look at it and learn well ahead how you shall live in days to come. See how all is arranged in kitchen, parlour and bedchamber, and yet is also well adorned. See what great number of chattels a well arrayed house does need. … Look all around you, look behind you, look everywhere, how much there has been put on show for you, hundreds of pieces. Of bedding, of handsome presses, of pewter, copper and brass, fitted up in such a way that though small, yet everything may well be put to general use.26

Providing a kind of object lesson in miniature, dollhouses, just as this early pedagogical forerunner from Germany, gave British girls a practical introduction to their future role as house managers. The ideological program inscribed in these toys was that of domestic neatness and discipline. Reiterating patriarchal order in material form, they were clearly on the side of ludus (order) rather than paidia (chaos), to use Caillois’s categories. Some pedagogues such as British novelist and pedagogue Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), however, warned of the dangers of idleness and laziness such minutely reproduced miniature replicas could encourage. She writes: Our objections to dolls are offered with great submission and due hesitation. With more confidence we may venture to attack baby houses; an unfinished baby house might be a good toy, as it would employ little carpenters and seamstresses to fit it up; but a carefully furnished baby house proves as tiresome to a child as a finished seat is to a young nobleman. After peeping, for in general a peep may be

Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century

55

had into each apartment, after thoroughly satisfied that nothing is wanting, and that consequently there is nothing to be done, the young lady lies her doll upon the state bed … and falls fast asleep in the midst of her felicity.27

According to Edgeworth, what made dolls and dollhouses a good educational tool was not so much the spectacle they offered of a well-regulated domestic interior but the encouragement they gave girls to practice needlework. Pedagogical literature routinely made the link between making garments for one’s dolls and the acquisition of needlework skills. Famously—and rather contentiously— Jean-Jacques Rousseau put doll play on a par with what he called a girl’s “life’s work,” i.e. needlework. Decried by generations of feminists starting with Mary Wollstonecraft, his principles of female education rested on the idea that it was precisely because the little girl was keen to make clothes for her doll that she so readily learned needlework—rather than reading and writing.28 The doll is the girl’s special plaything; this shows her instinctive bent towards her life’s work. … Here is a little girl busy all day with her doll; she is always changing its clothes, dressing and undressing it, trying new combinations of trimmings well or ill matched; … What the little girl most clearly desires is to dress her doll, to make its bows, its tippets, its sashes, and its tuckers; she is dependent on other people’s kindness in all this, and it would be much pleasanter to be able to do it herself. Here is a motive for her earliest lessons, they are not tasks prescribed, but favours bestowed. Little girls always dislike learning to read and write, but they are always ready to learn to sew.29

Whether or not one agrees with Rousseau’s vision of girls’ supposedly “instinctive bent,” making small-size garments as an exercise was a common educational practice in late Georgian and early Victorian schools.30 There are several sampler books (Figure 2.3) that survive from the period showing miniature versions of garments and underwear made by girls as a means to run through the gamut of the various sewing and construction techniques they needed to acquire.31 These were clearly school exercises, sometimes part of school manuals.32 Consigned into the pages of a book these miniature garments were not, indeed, to be played with but learned from. In domestic settings, however, it was also common practice to have girls make tiny scaled-down whole and part garments as practical exercises to learn the basic techniques for full-size garments. Making clothes for their dolls might have been difficult tasks for their little makers but equally they offered small projects that would have been manageable with quick results and the chance of immediate reward in the form of play. That this worked

56

Childhood by Design

Figure 2.3 Ellen Mahon’s Sampler Book, 1852–1854, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, inv: V&A T.123-1958, © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

to some extent to entice reluctant girls into needlework is illustrated by Elizabeth Ham (1783–1859), a late eighteenth-century British writer and poet who wrote an autobiography telling of her childhood in Somerset. Although she hated needlework and showed very little inclination for it as a girl, she remembers her dedication when she made “a frock for [a] doll from a piece of real India gingham” when aged four or five.33 Beyond the acquisition of the actual needlework skills required to make garments for dolls, in British didactic novels embroidery and dressmaking for dolls also encoded values thought to be paramount for femininity such as thrift, industry and benevolence. In Adventures of a Pincushion by Mary Ann Kilner (1753–1831) the story begins by comparing two sisters, one thrifty, tidy, and obedient, the other one improvident, slipshod, and wayward. Their opposing characterization is neatly encapsulated by the way Martha makes a pincushion— which will be the narrator of the story—from “a square piece of pink satin” given by her mother and then “saved the rest of the silk towards making a housewife for her doll” whereas, her sister Charlotte “though her Mamma had given her as much silk as her sister had only cut it to waste” leaving “threads and slips

Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century

57

littering the room.”34 That small off-cuts and salvaged scraps were used to make dolls’ garments and accessories is also illustrated in private correspondences. Ellen Weeton writing to her nine-year-old daughter Mary Stock in 1814 to whom she was sending a series of off-cuts and preserved textile fragments links such salvaged bits to small needlework projects for dolls: “I have inclosed [sic] 4 different kinds of Gimp, of 4 and 2 yds length … and a little narrow green ribbon which is of little value; it may serve you to draw your doll’s work bags.”35 In a 1780 pedagogical manual for young girls written by Dorothy Kilner (1755–1836) making garments for a doll provides early exercise of good domestic practice. It anticipates motherhood while representing selflessness and care. In one of the letters the author illustrates sisterly love and benevolence by one of two sisters expressing her love for the other, absent due to illness, through choosing to “sit still and work” rather than play, “which she did very diligently, till she had finished her pocket; and then, when she had made it up, she fetched [the absent girl’s] doll and tied it on.”36 In a slightly later book by British educationist Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810), dolls are similarly made part of the pedagogical project. Trimmer clearly articulates the idea that from dolls’ clothes and accessories, girls were supposed to move smoothly to making children’s clothing. In her book, in essence a series of short moralistic tales, dolls prepared girls for motherhood but also for benevolence to the poor. Opening with the sentence “Miss Jane Bond had a new doll,” the first story in the book shows a girl making a petticoat for her doll as an example of youthful industry. The last story in Trimmer’s book features two girls about to make a cap for their “baby” doll before their mother encourages them to put their needle to better use and make a cap for a poor neighbor’s real baby. They happily comply, declaring “they never did any work with more pleasure in their lives than for this live doll and were glad they had learnt to work for their wooden ones, as they would not otherwise have known how to be useful.”37 Trimmer’s book thus brings the process to its logical end by finishing on a story where needlework lessons practiced on dolls’ clothing are redirected towards actual “usefulness.” In these didactic discourses, dolls were a ploy. Rather than actual play, the purpose of these dolls was to lead to productive work. Didactic literature, however, is not necessarily the best indication of whether the ideological program it pursued did or did not work. Not all girls necessary liked dolls or absorbed the mothering lessons they were supposed to inculcate. In her memoirs, British actress Fanny Kemble (1808–1893) thus recalls her estranged relationship to a doll she was given as a girl c. 1815:

58

Childhood by Design To Miss B—I was indebted for the first doll I remember possessing—a gorgeous wax personage, in white muslin and cherry-coloured ribbons, who by desire of the donor was to be called Philippa, in honour of my uncle. I never loved or liked dolls, though I remember taking some pride in the splendour of this, my firstborn. They always affected me with a grim sense of being a mockery of the humanity they were supposed to represent; there was something uncanny, not to say ghastly, in the doll existence and its mimicry of babyhood to me, and I had a nervous dislike, not unmixed with fear, of the smiling simulacra that girls are all supposed to love with a species of prophetic maternal instinct.38

Like Kemble, other girls would have been deaf to the virtuous lessons in domestic orderliness and nurturing instinct dolls were supposed to carry. Through actual play and usage, doll users did not always follow gendered expectations or adhere to a rigidly-determined script. In Dorothy Kilner’s Dialogues on Morality, a girl is shown “bolting the door whilst she undressed her doll, for fear any body should come and see her about it, as her mamma had told her not.”39 Although the naughty girl is frowned upon by the virtuous narrator, the episode is a reminder that disobedience and unruliness were always possible. Dolls might have been entrusted by pedagogues to bolster orderly domesticity but they always also contained the threat of wasteful, unproductive use of time, of disobedience and disorderly divergence, of play derailing the pedagogical project to lead to chaos (paidia) rather than order (ludus).

Pandoras unbound British author H. G. Wells, whose mother was a housekeeper in the great landed estate of Uppark, West Sussex, tells in his memoirs of playing with the eighteenthcentury dollhouse: “we even went to the great doll’s house on the nursery landing to play discreetly with that, the great doll’s house that the prince Regent had given Sir Harry Drew’s first-born … and contained eighty-five dolls and had cost hundreds of pounds. I played under imperious direction with that toy of glory.”40 As this anecdote reminds us, it was impossible to prescribe what use would be made of a particular toy. Given to a child as a present, it could be played with by another, over a hundred years later. Pandora dolls might have initially been used for business communication by adults (male and female alike) but it is more than likely that they would have been transferred to children after fulfilling their first mission, moving from adult to child and from professional purpose to play.

Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century

59

So although they might have been created with one intended use in mind, such fashion dolls would have often been reinvented into something else, migrating from one category into another. A life-size wax effigy of an infant represented with his eyes closed thought to have been created as an ex-voto for a sick child in Portugal in the late seventeenth century was used as a baby doll in a Canterbury inn by several generations of children until it was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1917.41 Play, because it constantly reconfigures objects into things they are not, is always potentially subversive. As Walter Benjamin reminds us: “the most enduring modifications in toys are never the work of adults, whether they be educators, manufacturers, or writers, but are the result of children at play. Once mislaid, broken and repaired, even the most princely doll becomes a capable proletarian comrade in the children’s play commune.”42 Material evidence of these playful subversions, of these nursery-room revolutions, is still to some extent visible in surviving dolls. To curators’ and fashion historians’ often repeated frustration, surviving dolls are notoriously hard to interpret precisely because they were played with, their clothes and accessories constantly taken off and put back on again, possibly in a different order or combination than initially intended. Moreover, girls, as we have seen, were encouraged to add to their wardrobes by hand-making new pieces. If one adds the fact that dolls sometimes remained in use over several generations, one is better placed to understand how their wardrobes sometimes contain ill-matched garments from various time periods. However frustrating this unreliability or impurity might be for doll collectors or fashion historians, it actually signals precisely the specific ways in which doll playing worked as an open-ended process that followed no script. Girls resisted disciplining attempts encoded in the dolls, not necessarily because they were subversive rebels intent on challenging the established order, but through sheer play dynamics. Intentionally or not, the result however was sometimes subversive. An early nineteenth-century wax doll (Figure 2.4) came into the collection of the Museum of London wearing a small straw hat trimmed in green satin and a white muslin short-sleeved dress.43 Over this summer ensemble is tied a large corded dimity “apron” of a heavier fabric which does not match the rest of the outfit. On closer inspection, the “apron” is revealed to be a child’s tie-on pocket. Slightly pear-shaped with a vertical opening and tape to tie it with, the pocket follows the standard construction for such items and is of dimensions that would only make it suitable for a young girl. Showing marks of wear, it was nevertheless still perfectly functional as a pocket when it was transferred from

60

Childhood by Design

Figure 2.4 Doll with wax head, painted features and glass bead eyes c. 1800, Museum of London, inv: MOL.A.25315, © Museum of London.

Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century

61

girl to doll. Whether the girl had outgrown it or whether she had decided to give it to her doll for any other reason we cannot know. Neither can we know whether the transfer was condoned by adults or not. Whatever the case may be, the mismatched clothing on this evidently well-used doll, which has lost both its arms and feet, manifests play as an open-ended practice that always potentially signaled towards chaos, despite pedagogues’ best efforts to discipline girls. Instead of taking her needle to make an apron for her doll and rehearse her sewing lessons in the process, the child has been “lazy” and appropriated an existing, still functional pocket for play. She has also brought the pocket to the surface of the dress while this was an accessory whose associations to underwear and sexually-suggestive shape made it somewhat intimate and shameful at the time.44 Displayed over the dress, the oversize pocket worn centrally subverts sartorial order as well as social and gender expectations suggesting indecency rather than goodly femininity. Dressing and undressing dolls invited such carnivalesque reversals and experimentations, whether these were intentional or not. More broadly, dolls could take part in games and scenarios that escaped adult control, providing children with tools for emancipation. Anthropologists have highlighted the subversive role of dolls and their capacity to open up a world controlled by the child, at odds with expectations and rules set by adults: The doll is not a means to imitate adult behavior but to escape from adult control. It enables the child to invent a world of their own where they can make the decisions adults will not make … where they can give permission or not, where power of decision is in their hands. Dolls allow the child to go through the looking glass, to imagine into existence a topsy-turvy world … where the magic power of a child’s wishes makes things happen in imagination whilst everyday circumstances would be contrary. In a way, it is with the doll that differing education principles from those undergone by the child are first tested. … The doll is the beginning of Promethean temptation as well as Pandora’s box first being opened. Adults give dolls to children to please them, to keep them busy but they are the beginning of a child’s emancipation.45

Subversion happened when make-believe, or “pretending,” replaced mimicry. Instead of rehearsing their roles as mothers and housewives, girls could use their dolls to build a world of their own. Pandora dolls, those messengers of dress orthodoxy, once appropriated by a child through play, could turn into Pandora’s boxes unleashing unsuspected possibilities of subversion and imagination.

62

Childhood by Design

In her memoirs, novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) linked her vivid imagination and story-telling obsession with the formative experience of playing with her dolls in a chapter boldly entitled “Literature and the Doll.”46 Not all girls became novelists but all did experience the rich mutability of dolls and the unbounded possibilities these offered for reinvention. In this context, the contested terrain occupied by dolls in the long eighteenth century, their resistance to clear categorization might have been critical to their subversive potential, making them particularly apt instruments for emancipation and discovery.

Notes 1 Philippe Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Plon, 1960); J.H. Plumb, “The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 67 (1975): 64–95. 2 Other adult uses of dolls, not dealt with in this essay, comprised anatomical dolls and artists’ mannequins. On these two types of dolls see respectively Joanna Ebenstein, The Anatomical Venus (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016); Jane Munro, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (London: Yale University Press, 2014). 3 The term “Pandora” as referring to a fashion doll is associated with Madeleine de Scudéry, a French seventeenth-century précieuse and salonnière, whose circle of female intellectual friends is reported to have been discussing and composing literature while dressing two dolls, one in full dress, the other one in undress (“la grande et la petite pandore”) to be sent around to spread the latest fashions. The narrative of this anecdote is first found in Louis-Gabriel Michaud, Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, Tome 41 (Paris: Michaud, 1825), 390. Michaud must have had access to manuscripts left by the Scudéry circle as the anecdote can be found in Madeleine de Scudéry and Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, Chroniques du samedi suivies de pièces diverses (1653–1654), ed. Alain Niderst, Delphine Denis, and Myriam Dufour-Maître (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), 166. Yet the term Pandora as referring to a doll is not found in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century dictionaries in French or English, a point noted for the French by Barbara Spadaccini-Day in Pierre Arizolli-Clémentel and Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros, eds., Fastes de cour et cérémonies royales. Le costume de cour en Europe, 1650–1800 (Paris: RMN, 2009), 226. My thanks to Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros for drawing my attention to this reference.

Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century

63

4 Leonie von Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature. Four Centuries of Dolls’ Houses (Viking Press, 1980). See also Susan Broomhall, “Imagined Domesticities in Early Modern Dutch Dollhouses,” Parergon 24, no. 2 (2007): 47–67. 5 See Miriam Forman-Brunell, Made to Play House. Dolls and the Commercialization of Girlhood, 1830–1930 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), 1. See also Miriam Forman-Brunell and Jennifer Dawn Whitney, eds., Dolls Studies: The Many Meanings of Girls’ Toys and Play (New York: Peter Lang, 2015). A similar subversive reading of dolls can be found in the contributions of Juliette Peers and Robin Bernstein: Juliette Peers, “Adelaide Huret and the NineteenthCentury French Fashion Doll: Constructing Dolls/Constructing the Modern,” in Dolls Studies, ed. Forman-Brunell and Dawn Whitney, 157–184; Robin Bernstein, “Children’s Books, Dolls and the Performance of Race: Or the Possibility of Children’s Literature,” in Dolls Studies, ed. Forman-Brunell and Dawn Whitney, 3–14. 6 See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955); Roger Caillois, les jeux et les hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1958); Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971). 7 This is developed in Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Barash Meyer (University of Illinois Press, 2001). 8 See Halina Pasierbska, Dolls’ Houses from the V&A Musem of Childhood (London: V&A Publishing, 2008), 13–14. 9 The first author in that vein was Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1984). For recent examples of this feminist reading of female involvement with material culture see Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., Women & Things, 1750–1950. Gendered Material Strategies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) and Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). See also the author’s own contribution to the former collection “Female Crafts: Women and Bricolage in late Georgian Britain,” in Women & Things, 1750–1950. Gendered Material Strategies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 91–109. 10 Plumb, “The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England.” 11 Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime. 12 Plumb, “The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England,” 67. 13 Ariane Fennetaux, “Toying with Novelty: Toys in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Between Novelties and Antiques: Mixed Consumer Patterns in Western European History, ed. Ilja Van Damme et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 17–28. 14 Anon., A General Description of All Trades Digested in Alphabetical Order (London: T. Waller, 1747), 210.

64

Childhood by Design

15 See for instance British Museum, Banks collection of Tradecards, Banks 119.7 and Heal collection of Tradecards, Heal 119.1. 16 See Heal Collection of Tradecards, Heal 119. 10, HEAL 119. 3, and HEAL 119.22. 17 See V&A MISC.271-1981 for instance. 18 V&A, inv : B.77-1996. 19 East Kent Archives, Personal Accounts of Lady Arabella Furnese, U471/A50. 20 See Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Yale University Press, 2000), 61–62. 21 National Trust, Nostell Priory. 1730–1740, NT 959710.1. 22 Susan Stewart, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, The Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993). 23 Ibid., 63. 24 V&A Archives, Blythe House, Acquisition file, MA/1/P1874. 25 For instance John Locke devised playthings to “teach children to read whilst they thought they were only playing,” Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, 1693), 178. 26 Cited in von Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature, 15. 27 Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education (London, 1798), 11. 28 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1993), 150–166. 29 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (New York: Dover, 2013), 396. 30 On needlework education and sewing samplers in the form of miniature garments see Vivienne Richmond, “Stitching the Self: Eliza Kenniff ’s Drawers and the Materialization of Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century London,” in Women & Things, 1750–1950, 43–54; Vivienne Richmond, Clothing the Poor in NineteenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Vivienne Richmond, “Stitching Women: Unpicking Histories of Victorian Clothes,” in Gender and Material Culture in Britain since 1600, ed. Hannah Greig, Jane Hamlett, and Leonie Hannan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 90–103. 31 A sample book with examples of diminutive stockings, shirts, caps and dresses associated to Ellen Mahon, a student in the Boyle school in Ireland in 1852–1854 is thus kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum, V&A T.123-1958. The same miniaturization was used in knitting samplers, see for instance V&A T.31-1925 dated 1800. 32 Simple Directions in Needlework and Cutting out Intended for the Use of the National Female Schools of Ireland (1835) thus offers a series of miniature exercises to be done with students. V&A, T.2 to C-1942. 33 Elizabeth Ham, Elizabeth Ham by Herself, ed. Eric Gillett (London: Faber and Faber, 1945), 24.

Dolls in the Long Eighteenth Century

65

34 Mary Ann Kilner, The Adventures of a Pincushion. Designed Chiefly for the Use of Young Ladies (London: J. Marshall & Co, 1780), 17. 35 Ellen Weeton, Miss Weeton’s Journal of a Governess, 1807–1825, ed. Edward Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), II, 325. 36 Dorothy Kilner, Dialogues and Letters on Morality, Oeconomy and Politeness (London, 1780), 1, 19. 37 Sarah Trimmer, Easy Lessons for Young Children (London: Joseph Johnson, 1790), 132. 38 Fanny Kemble, Records of a Girlhood (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1893), 16. 39 Kilner, Dialogues and Letters on Morality, Oeconomy and Politeness, 2, 91. 40 H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (New York: Duffield and Company, 1908), 33–34. 41 V&A inv. T.239-1917, see Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, “Recycling the Sacred: The Wax Votive Object and the Eighteenth-Century Wax Baby Doll,” in The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua, and Sophie Vasset (London: Routledge, 2015), 152–165. 42 Walter Benjamin, “Old Toys,” in Selected Writings, 1927–30, Vol. 2, Part I, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 101. 43 Museum of London, inv: MOL.A.25315. 44 On pockets and their associations, see Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, The Artful Pocket: Social and Cultural History of an Everyday Object. 17th–19th Century, forthcoming. See also Barbara Burman and Johnathan White, “Fanny’s Pockets: Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy, 1780–1850,” in Women and Material Culture 1660–1830, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 31–51; Ariane Fennetaux, “Women’s Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 3 (2008): 307–334. 45 Translated from Musée de l’homme, ed., Poupée jouet: poupée reflet (Paris: Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 1983), 5. 46 Frances Hodgson Burnett, The One I Knew Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1893), 44–69, which is discussed in Bernstein, “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race.”

3

The (Play)things of Childhood: Mass Consumption and Its Critics in Belle Epoque France Sarah A. Curtis

The December 1868 issue of La Poupée Modèle, a French magazine published for young girls, featured an invented conversation between four dolls who were sewing small presents such as scarves, slippers, cushions, and eyeglass cases for their relatives, especially their “little mother” (that is, the girl who owned the doll). When the conversation turned towards gifts they would like to receive, Bleuette responded that she would be happy if she could only choose toys at one sou to decorate a tree for poor children. Frivoline wished for a silk dress to replace one that was worn out, and the magazine helpfully provided the name and address of the store where such a dress could be obtained. But it was Lolotte who expresses consumer desire at length: I would like a pretty notebook with a lock and a case containing ink, stamps, a paper knife, envelopes, wax, a pen knife, a pencil, etc. and also paper marked with my initial and next a nice game of historic lotto to play in the evenings with my little brothers, and next a magic lantern that I can display for them when they have been very good, and next a silver tea set for my English doll.1

Everything about this scene reflects a new, self-referential consumer world for French children in the second half of the nineteenth century. The magazine itself was a consumer item that needed to be regularly renewed and a form at the back of the magazine encouraged gift subscriptions at Christmas time. It sold a doll, Lily, who fit the patterns included in the magazine. Not only were dolls, their accessories, and other small items for sale at their Paris offices or by mail order, it advertised specific establishments in the guise of articles or “chats” between dolls like this one. This was product placement at its best. But the conversation also

68

Childhood by Design

illustrates the number of consumer items that girls, in this case, were encouraged to wish for (along with some other, somewhat mixed, messages about generosity and frugality). No fewer than seven specific items (notebook, case, paper, lotto, magic lantern, silver tea set, doll) were mentioned in a single sentence. Even the dolls had dolls who required presents. And it was not just girls. Department store and toy catalogs featured pages and pages of available gifts for children, both boys and girls. Industrial production and new retailing practices made toys less expensive to produce and easier to sell. A cultural shift in the social, emotional, and spiritual value of children, especially in France where the size of middle-class families had contracted in the second half of the nineteenth century, made the happiness of children a key element in bourgeois households, which encouraged parents to spend more on their children.2 Yet simultaneous to the proliferation of commercially manufactured toys was a critique on material, aesthetic, and national grounds. Children had too many toys, critics contended; their toys interested them for only a short time before being cast aside; they were cheaply made and easily breakable and above all ugly. Inspired by the international decorative arts movements, designers aspired to create children’s toys that stimulated their imaginations and initiated their artistic education. Simple, beautiful toys were the best. Crudely humorous toys were American or English (“Anglo-Saxon”) imports; ugly, heavy toys came from Germany where aesthetic standards were lower than in France. These critics called for a renaissance in the French toy industry as well as in the material object of the toy itself. As children acquired more and more toys, to the adults in their lives, those toys became far more than commodities but bearers of culture that had the power to shape both individual children and the nation itself. Between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, toys became both consumer items that defined modern childhood and sites of national identity that played out in the context of international economic and political competition. ******* While French children in previous periods might have owned a few toys, middleclass children after 1850 were the targets of advertising and marketing campaigns designed to sell them and their parents playthings of all sorts—from traditional ones like dolls and toy soldiers to newfangled mechanical and scientific toys—that intensified during holiday periods, especially Christmas. Retailers

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

69

in France pioneered new methods that made toys part of an advertising and marketing structure aimed at middle-class consumers, especially women. The opening of magasins des nouveautés (literally, novelty stores) and the invention of the department store concentrated goods under one roof, introduced fixed pricing, encouraged browsing, mounted elaborate displays of merchandise, and innovated new marketing techniques such as seasonal sales and specialized catalogs.3 In addition to these establishments, there were almost four hundred shops in Paris specializing in toys by 1889, a fivefold increase since 1830.4 The rebuilding of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s provided new thoroughfares that allowed for destination shopping on the boulevards. Both specialty and department stores offered a wide range of toys and games for children, as seen in the pages of their catalogs, which served both as advertising for Parisians who could shop in the store and for provincial residents who could order by mail. Although most historians have emphasized the visibility of children in advertisements and promotions as reflective of female domesticity, the proliferation of toys and games as well as child-centered marketing efforts also spoke to a new focus on children themselves as consumers.5 Children might not have been doing the actual purchasing, but retailers targeted them directly via displays and advertising, hoping, one assumes, that they would not only pester their parents to buy them new toys, but also that parents sought to please their children through toy purchases. In part, this was a strategy that trained children to become consumers once they grew up, but it also suggests that children’s playthings and the shopping rituals around them were becoming an essential part of the new culture of childhood in the second half of the nineteenth century. The emergence of Christmas as a family and consumer holiday increased the emphasis on children and their toys. As cultural historian Gary Cross points out in The Cute and the Cool, the commercialization of Christmas in the United States in the same period was subsumed under rituals of childhood wonder, and a similar transformation took place in France.6 Although in France children and adults had traditionally exchanged gifts on New Year’s Day (étrennes), by the end of the nineteenth century the entire month of December, encompassing the feast of St. Nicholas as well as Christmas itself, became dominated by gift marketing. Increasingly children became the center of the season. “The reign of children,” wrote Edouard Fournier in 1889, “began eight days ago and will last another two weeks … Everywhere there is such an overload of toys on the boulevards, in the streets, in houses, that Paris has become truly uninhabitable for everyone.”7 A press clipping from 1883 stated that on New Year’s Eve, “according to tradition,

70

Childhood by Design

papas and mamans, uncles and aunts, cousins and cousines of little Parisian boys and girls scour the boulevards in order to choose the gifts that they intend to give tomorrow to all the dear little beggars.”8 Afterwards, according to critic and toy enthusiast Léo Claretie, “The displays are pitiful, like a rice field after the passage of a swarm of locusts.”9 Parisian department stores such as the Bon Marché, Au Printemps, and La Samaritaine organized their publicity around seasonal expositions and sales, so that by the mid-1870s, December publicity and displays focused on children’s toys. Specialized catalogs for this season were first issued in 1875, and most stores had them by the 1880s. These multiple-page catalogs with ample illustrations and increasingly flashy covers showed children what retailers thought they should receive and their parents what they should give for the end-of-year holidays. Although these catalogs also advertised clothing and gifts for adults, the lure was the toy section, featured on the front and back covers and at the beginning of the catalog. Increasingly covers became more eye-catching and elaborate, like miniature works of art, especially with improvements in color printing. That this was serious business is shown by the fact that some advertising posters and catalog covers (Figure 3.1) were illustrated by the most famous poster artists of their time, such as Jules Chéret. Toy catalogs became dictionaries of desire, whose illustrations and publicity copy were directed especially towards children. One of the largest toy stores in Paris, Le Paradis des Enfants (The Paradise of Children), even published a small book, entitled Un Voyage au Paradis (A Trip to Paradise), that advertised the shop’s wares in story form. The author addressed children directly, putting himself in their shoes: “I have with you, my little dears, more than one point of resemblance. I love bright colors, simple images, harmonious noises … So sometimes I join in your games.” He describes how upon entering the store, it seemed as if the toys were calling out to him and he didn’t know where to turn, until the store director arrived to guide him.10 The Louvre department store (not to be confused with the Louvre museum) published an illustrated story in its 1913 Christmas catalog (Figure 3.2), featuring Father Christmas taking children on a tour of “a marvelous palace where the most beautiful toys are piled up”; the palace, of course, is the store itself, but the story plays out as an adventure through many lands.11 In both of these cases, promotional material was disguised as children’s stories, blurring the boundaries between the commercial and the educational. During the Christmas season in an effort to compete for customers’ attention, stores also mounted toy displays in their shop windows and inside the store. By the end of the century, these had become more and more elaborate and often

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

71

Figure 3.1 Catalog cover, Samaritaine department store, December 1901. Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Éphémères.

mechanized. The Bon Marché department store displayed an ice-skating scene in 1893, a North Pole scene in 1909, and an airplane with a propeller and toys, also in 1909.12 In 1910, the Printemps department store created an “enchanted

72

Childhood by Design

Figure 3.2 Palais du Père Noël, Louvre department store catalog, December 1913. Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Éphémères.

village,” centered around traditional French songs because “Christmas and New Year’s Day are children’s festivals”; each page of the accompanying catalog advertised toys relating to lyrics of one of the songs.13 Literary critic Jules Claretie

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

73

(uncle of Léo) wrote in 1914, “Big children have their [art] Salon; little ones have theirs also: the toy displays in the department store windows.” Passers-by, especially children, he claimed, were “hypnotized” by decorations.14 What was most notable about the newfangled toys, according to contemporaries, was not only their ubiquity, but their variety and complexity. In the promotional brochure produced by Le Paradis des Enfants, the narrator described the types of toys available by gender and by age, from one to sixteen, revealing that at age five, “the choice becomes considerable.”15 If only toy stores remained of French civilization, another commentator alleged, it would be “possible to reconstitute practically our entire society.”16 Most of all, however, those toys reflected an era obsessed with technology and science. “All children today,” according to Jules Claretie, request either a mineralogy set or a chemistry set or an electric machine…. All the seduction and charms and the plumes and ribbons of Polichinelle, to a modern child, even a young one, will never be worth the mystery, the charm of a steam engine … It is not by chance that Jules Verne has invented in these times a scientific fairyland: he is aware that his audience has been born.

Parents who in the past only had to put up with the noise of a drum now risked blindness and fires from their children’s chemistry sets.17 According to the report by the jury of the toy division at the 1900 Universal Exposition, whole stores had been established to sell only electric toys including a miniature telegraph and a child-sized telephone set (consisting of two phones, a bell, and a microphone).18 Transportation-themed toys also boomed, from trains to metros to automobiles to submarines, many based on real-life models representing technological advancement and progress. Sleds, automobiles, and dirigible balloons, reported Journal des Debats in 1907, have dethroned horses; toy manufacturers have even outpaced reality by inventing the “triplane” that “swims, flies, races.”19 In 1913, a miniature film projector (cinématographe) appeared, with fireproof film.20 Inventors like Fernand Martin, who began in 1878 with a mechanical fish, turned his engineering talents into a business specializing in “mechanical and scientific toys” that produced novelties every season and won thirty-eight prizes in French and international competitions between 1904 and 1911 alone.21 The key element was verisimilitude: whistling and steaming locomotives, electric tramways that ran on batteries, automobiles powered by alcohol vapor or electricity, electric torpedo boats that could dive under water, maneuver,

74

Childhood by Design

and surface.22 The first toy automobile appeared in a department store catalog in 1900 in two sizes; the larger one cost 22.50 francs.23 Two years later, after a Renault car had won a race against more powerful German cars, it capped its victory by creating a toy version that sold for a mere 2.45 francs. And two years after that, two Paris workshops came out with two miniature toy cars, L’AutoCatastrophe and L’Automobile-Accident, that could fall to pieces, just like real race cars.24 When the newspaper Le Soleil interviewed an official at the Syndicat des Fabricants de Jouets in 1900, he asserted that “the public demands of us toys that copy life …”25 Even poor children, critics alleged, wanted “authentic autos, boats as complicated as steamships … no longer content with wooden or paper toys.”26 Toy manufacturers were constantly inventing and searching for new toys to put on the market to replace last year’s novelties; these too “will live briefly and make way for others.”27 Nowhere was the search for novelty greater than in toys that followed current events. The Franco-Prussian War resulted in “an enormous fabrication of guns, cannons, sabers, képis, and toy arsenals” and the Franco-Russian alliance in Russian-themed dolls and soldiers.28 For the Christmas season of 1893, Le Figaro described “a little sailor who climbed to the summit of the mast of a ship, and once up high, waved the two flags [of Russia and France].” Another toy ship had a music box that played the Russian national anthem.29 Marcel Prevost reported in Le Journal in 1896 about a new “feminist doll” in mannish clothing who could cry out “Down with men!”30 In 1900 the novelty toys were “the valiant Boer” and “the gentleman in khaki” to be replaced in 1904 with toys with which to reenact the Russo-Japanese War (for boys) and Russian and Japanese dolls (for girls).31 The Universal Exposition of 1900, itself an important showcase of French and foreign toys, was also a subject for toy manufacturers who created models of the monumental gate, the Swiss village, the moving sidewalk, and a variety of games with exposition themes.32 In 1907, the Journal des Debats praised toys that “have rendered homage to the heroism of the troops in Africa … a heartwarming spectacle of our incessant achievements.”33 What did children themselves think of these toys? Due to a lack of available primary sources, it is impossible to excavate children’s voices in a comprehensive fashion, but scattered evidence available from memoirs and letters suggests that the marketing efforts directed towards children, as well as their parents, created new desires. Valérie Feuillet described her joy on New Year’s morning when she and her brother ran into their parents’ bed to receive “all the surprises on earth.”34 The letters of Zélie Martin (mother to the future St. Thérèse de Liseux) never

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

75

failed to thank her brother and sister-in-law for the end-of-year gifts sent to her daughters, who grew to expect them every season: “At the opening of the trunk, there were such cries of joy that they deafened my father.” In 1874, she reported that when Thérèse “saw her pretty little house, she was mute with pleasure.”35 A diary entry from teenage Marie Lenéru on December 11, 1886 stated, “Yesterday, we leafed through a Christmas catalogue. I think I will order for my room a toilet set in Baccarat crystal; it costs 12 francs 50 and is charming.”36 A year later, she made a list in her journal of no less than eight different gift givers and gifts ranging from a jewelry case from her mother to candy from family friends.37 The future Comtesse de Broglie (née Pauline Pange, born 1888) waxed nostalgic about the “toy cupboard” in her grandmother’s room, full of a variety of toys, although many dated to her mother and grandmother’s generation. But she also described the phonograph given to her by her Aunt Marie as well as “another toy, of scientific appearance,” a praxinoscope, a round animation device using light and mirrors.38 Francis Jammes (born 1868) recalled in his memoirs how, thanks to the influence of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, he fantasized about becoming a sea explorer; he and his friends formed a chemistry club, though his father banned experiments, perhaps afraid of the explosions that might occur.39 Children may have wanted toys for diversion and amusement, but advice manuals for parents had long supported the importance of toys in the development of children. In Les Mères et les enfants, published in 1867, for example, the authors recommended toys and games “for bodily health, for distraction of the mind and the soul.”40 Toys were considered the first educators of children, especially important for training them in the roles they would play as adults. But toys were important in less instrumental ways as well. By 1900, the jury judging the toy entries at the Paris Universal Exposition claimed that toys “exercised in children imagination, invention, curiosity, need for investigation and information, attachment, protectiveness, social instinct, even moral sense,” having “a decisive importance over the spirit of a race.”41 According to critic Léo Claretie, they were “the first educators of the senses, touch and above all sight” and also “objects that we give to children so that they can be the masters, the little despots and tyrants, the curious destroyers.”42 Yet by the end of the century the newfangled toys also worried many critics. Mechanical toys or those that were too exact replicas of real items deprived the child of the opportunity to decide for him or herself how to play. “An old wagon,” Frédéric Queyrat wrote, “is by turns a locomotive, an automobile, and

76

Childhood by Design

a wagon. The doll changes sex, age, character, and costume, at the whim of its little mother.”43 This attitude was echoed by Marcel Braunschvig in his book L’Art et l’enfant where he argued that children preferred simple toys to fancier ones because they allowed more scope for the imagination.44 The implicit and sometimes explicit message was that commercialism had ruined childhood of its simpler pleasures. Critic Gérard D’Houville wrote in 1911, with no accompanying evidence, “Children don’t like being taken into toy stores very much. Their greed dissipates, and for lack of being able to take away the entire store, they no longer want anything, which makes them want everything. And that must be an awful torture for their little hearts and their little heads.”45 Scientific toys earned praise for their educational and forward-looking qualities, yet their dominance, however “admirable, ingenious, clever,” came at the expense of “imagination and illusion.” Léo Claretie urged instead that manufacturers make “toys that the child could break with impunity,” expressing a fear that “all our baby mechanics and electricians” would become “a generation of positivist and practical spirits” whose qualities of precision and logic would displace imagination and poetry.46 Claretie was at the center of a group of educators, critics, and artists who argued that children were better off in health and education than ever before, yet “taste, artistic sense, and the cult of beauty” were completely neglected, as evidenced in the ugliness of so many of their toys.47 This group founded the Société des amateurs de jouets et de jeux anciens (Society of Amateurs of Antique Toys and Games) in 1905, publishing a review of the same name (later changed to L’Art et l’Enfant) from 1905 until 1914. These toy collectors and critics were part of a larger movement of decorative arts reformers who wished to extend art to the masses while eschewing commercial values. In France, proponents of Art Nouveau sought to preserve an elite culture debased, in their view, by industrialization and bourgeois commercialism. A subset of decorative arts reformers, however, exemplified by groups such as L’Art dans Tout (Art in Everything), L’Art pour Tout (Art for Everyone), and Société de l’Art à l’école (Society for Art in Schools), sought— not always successfully—to expand elite aesthetic standards to a broader population.48 They did not, however, necessarily consider the masses capable of finding that aesthetic for themselves, but saw artist-educators as pivotal in the process of reforming aesthetic tastes, especially in childhood. Admirers of similar initiatives in other countries, these critics emphasized the importance of early aesthetic education for children, inside and outside of school. Toys, they argued, began a child’s aesthetic education and therefore should be chosen with

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

77

care. “It is necessary to habituate generations from their birth to hate ugliness,” proclaimed an article in the review L’Art et l’Enfant in 1908, “to love that which is pretty, elegant, harmonious …”49 At the end of the Christmas season, children were left with toys that represented the “banality” of the “big novelty stores.”50 Children themselves admired fancy toys, but they were not passionate about them.51 Modern toys, according to Marcel Prévost, were either “too luxurious” or “too ingenious,” marketed more for the adult than the child, who needed instead “toys to exercise his intelligence, his comprehension, his muscles, and even his heart.”52 In addition to collecting and writing about antique toys, these critics encouraged artists to create playthings for children that were aesthetically inspiring, often looking to the past and to folk art for models. The toy designers they praised were artists like Caran d’Ache (pseudonym for Emmanuel Poiré), Benjamin Rabier, and André Hellé who created simple new toys such as wooden figurines, animal toys, and Noah’s arks in the decade before the First World War.53 These toys featured clean lines and vibrant colors. They did not spin, talk, explode, or indeed move without human intervention. Hellé’s “French village,” for example, consisted of fifty-two painted wooden pieces: small houses, farm buildings, people, farm animals, and trees that could be laid out in any position to create an entire imaginative world. The carved wooden dogs created by Caran d’Ache were playful in style, with elongated bodies and raised ears, “a toy but at the same time a work of art,” according to the publicity copy.54 Many of these artists had already displayed at the annual Paris Autumn Salon (Salon d’Automne), founded in 1903, which showcased modern art and design. In 1913, these critics helped organize an exhibition at the Musée Galliera in Paris, entitled L’Art pour l’Enfance (Art for Childhood). Like other such exhibitions mounted around Europe in the early twentieth century, this one brought together antique (historical) toys, many lent by the same collectors who belonged to the Society, and toys created by contemporary artists. It also featured decorations and furniture for children’s rooms. The exhibition’s view of childhood was nostalgic and sentimental, emphasizing the timelessness of toys rather than their commercial value. The courtyard of the museum was dedicated to a “village” of small houses no more than two meters high, which, according to one article, gave one the desire “to become again a small child.” One review called the exhibit the “exposition of all childhood dreams …” and praised it for the memories it evoked.55 The catalog text was interspersed with pen and ink drawings of children playing with simple toys, such as dolls, rocking horses,

78

Childhood by Design

and toy soldiers, or engaging in simple outdoor activities, such as flying kites, jumping rope, and sailing toy boats.56 In addition to the toys exhibited in glass cases, several entire rooms were created, with decorative friezes, linens, childsized furniture, and toys. The furniture, like the toys favored by these artists, had a simple, functional aesthetic; the furniture was lacquer, white and gold in one room, white and blue in another. The friezes were playful and colorful with simple lines and childlike themes. The exhibition was also self-consciously didactic, claiming to be part of a “democratic” movement to “form and refine” the taste of the people by starting with children. According to the exhibition catalog, the toys, décor, and furniture on display aimed to develop in the child “the taste for beauty … so that his brain becomes accustomed to the logic of lines and the harmony of colors.” Children, the catalog declared, were “too weak” to know their preferences and “families obediently follow the suggestions of the merchants.”57 Speeches at the exhibition’s opening and much of the press commentary emphasized similar themes. The prefect of the Seine claimed that toys “that inspire good taste” will “reveal the profound relationship between beautiful, true, and good.” Officials also emphasized the French nature of the exhibition, praising toys made by peasants in the Lozère, a region whose toy makers, they claimed could rival those of Nuremberg, Germany.58 Yet a smaller group of reviewers questioned whether the exhibited toys and decorations really engaged children or were rather “art for grown-ups,” in the words of critic Achille Segard. André Hellé’s wooden toy soldiers, which featured rounded bodies, tall hats, and startled expressions, for example, derived their charm from the discrepancy between their exaggerated features and “an era [eighteenth-century] that we usually represent as solemn and pretentious,” an aspect that he thought children would miss entirely. Likewise, historical accuracy in dolls as in toy soldiers was for the benefit of adult collectors, not children. “True toys” were those by rural artisans who sent ones with “a variety of color and movement that would please children.” Arsène Alexandre wrote that although it was possible to make toys more artistic, that was of little interest to children, only to the adults who made the purchases. Another review, generally positive, asked whether the exhibits “seduced the small visitors,” concluding that many preferred “reproductions of industrial objects where the principal function is electric.” Léo Claretie’s critique of toys on nationalist lines, expressed in an essay in the catalog, was criticized by the reviewer of L’Humanité, a socialist newspaper, as the “tic of a convulsionary” that had no meaning for children.59

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

79

Unfortunately, we have no commentaries by children themselves in order to determine the veracity of these critiques. The desire of the toy critics to isolate children from the commercial world, however, was an illusion. The world of these artistic toy designers remained dependent on the new forms of retailing. The work of André Hellé, one of the most admired artists engaged in Modernist design for children, provides an example of the interrelationship between commercialism and new aesthetic standards for children’s toys and décor. At the Palais Galliera, the exhibitors gave Hellé three rooms in which he displayed toys, books, and furniture. Among his most lauded designs were a Noah’s Ark (consisting of the ark and animal figurines) and a toy windmill, both made of brightly colored wood and easy to manipulate. He also designed a suite of furniture especially conceived for children (Figure 3.3), which was first displayed at the Salon d’Automne in 1911 and recreated at the Palais Galliera. Hellé’s Modernist nursery used the artist’s own Noah’s ark designs—a common subject among vernacular toy makers—as a decorative motif reproduced in a wallpaper frieze, the bed linens, and a child-sized porcelain dish set. Indeed,

Figure 3.3 Child’s room designed by André Hellé, 1911. As exhibited in the decorative arts section of the Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1911 and “Art for Childhood” at the Musée Galliera, Paris, 1913. Courtesy Association des amis d’André Hellé.

80

Childhood by Design

far from eschewing commercial success, Hélle sold toys and furniture at the Printemps department store (Figure 3.4) where they were prominently featured in its catalogs. Even at the Palais Galliera in 1913, Printemps displayed a selection of toys in the vestibule of the museum. As much as critics like Claretie might bemoan the forces of commercialism, department stores could also be partners in bringing

Figure 3.4 Advertisement, Au Printemps department store catalog, December 1913. Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Éphémères

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

81

new aesthetic standards to the masses. Historian Lisa Tiersten argues that the modern department store marketplace worked as a democratic space not in its affordability to the popular classes, but in its “aesthetic sensibility” imagined by its owners as open to everyone.60 The Printemps department store, in fact, created a new department of decorative arts in 1912, which sold decorative arts objects like ceramics and glassware and eventually wallpaper and furniture.61 As in the case of these adult products, Hellé’s museum exhibits and those in the department store could work together to bring an education in taste in children’s toys and furniture to ordinary French consumers. Intertwined with aesthetics, another anxiety around toys in the years leading up to the First World War was their national origin. In one of his last writings in 1914, Jules Claretie lauded “classic” “French” “traditional” toys such as “the babyfaced and elegant doll in her pretty dress …” and “the little rifle of yesteryear” over humorous dolls and clowns that he found crude and ugly, “American or English importations, an invention of the Saxon race.”62 But no country garnered as much attention, mostly negative, by French critics for their toys as did Germany, which had long dominated in toy manufacturing. The 1913 exhibition prohibited German toys which critics claimed were “exhibited sufficiently in Parisian stores.”63 The rivalry between France and Germany in toy production was, in part, economic, with French critics emphasizing lost revenue and lost jobs. The Germans had the advantage, those critics contended, because they paid their workforce less, they had lower transportation costs, and they stole patented designs from the French and then produced large quantities of toys for the English and American markets.64 In the nationalist climate immediately preceding the First World War, toy manufacturers and retailers were careful to advertise the French provenance of their toys. In the promotional brochure published by the toy emporium Le Paradis des Enfants, the author claimed: “The Prussians have wanted you to believe that they make all the toys. It’s a lie, Nuremberg does not manufacture serious dolls and German products are not generally more than shoddy copies of the marvelous work of French workers. Le Paradis des Enfants finds its marvels in Paris rather than abroad.”65 Critics also lauded the work of small-scale French manufacturers in bringing new toys to market for affordable prices. In 1901, the Paris police chief inaugurated a competition among toy inventors that attracted 350 competitors in its first year vying for 7,000 francs in prize money. It was successful enough to become an annual event named the Concours Lépine (after the chief) at the Grand Palais, and was a reflection of government interest in supporting small French inventors.

82

Childhood by Design

But French commentators also criticized German toys on aesthetic grounds. One longstanding trope in the rivalry between French and German toys was that French toys were more refined and sophisticated than German ones. Nowhere was this perceived gap in elegance more evident than in doll manufacturing, where French dolls had a reputation as fashion plates. In the children’s book L’Education d’une poupée (A Doll’s Education), published in 1852, a French girl rejects a German wooden doll in favor of “a beautiful doll, nice and big, with a pretty face … that is to say, not German.” A German model that is brought instead is described as badly made and even more badly dressed, like a circus performer.66 In another children’s book, La Reine des Poupées (Queen of the Dolls), published in 1864, the (living) dolls notice one of their own with violet cheeks, black wax hair, and red suspenders holding up arms of the same color, and “as for her legs, horrors! She had none.” This grotesque specimen turned out to be a doll from Nuremberg who spoke in a strong German accent. The altruistic French girls who owned the other dolls joined together to sew a “modest” wardrobe for her and gave her to a poor sick child deprived of toys, who, knowing no better, was thrilled with her new acquisition.67 In 1899, many French doll makers joined together in the Société Française de Fabrications de Bébés et Jouets in order to compete more effectively with their German counterparts, although to cut costs, they imported porcelain heads from Germany until the First World War. Only the clothes, admonished Le Petit Journal, remained French.68 Yet the clothes made the doll. “The Parisian doll,” wrote Léo Claretie, “with a few rags immediately takes on this cachet that women in other countries envy,” whereas the German attempt to imitate this look resulted in an ugly doll with huge hats modeled after Parisian music hall performers.69 The general consensus among the critics who were concerned with aesthetic standards was that German toys were ugly and heavy whereas French toys were more elegant and tasteful. When French manufacturers began making toy soldiers, for example, they claimed they had improved on the German model which simply slapped two pieces of tin together: “Today, the little trooper no longer has the skinny, flat look … he has taken on some weight, roundness, depth; he is natural, precise, elegant, almost lively.”70 The toy made in Paris, according to Henri d’Allemagne, “lasts longer, and stands up more victoriously to the caresses, sometimes a little brutal, of those little hands … The child recognizes in the Paris toy a fellow citizen …”71 Léo Claretie in particular positioned the difference between German and French toys as a racial difference: “Those of Nuremberg and Sonneberg were created by Saxons for Saxons, they are not suited to Latins,

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

83

they interfere with the instinct and taste of the race. The French toy is stylish and clever, or witty.”72 His alarm only grew by 1911: We must declare war on the German toys that invade us … German toys are conceived and fabricated by and for Germans, Saxons. We are of the Latin race. To give to Latin children Saxon toys is about as unreasonable as giving the skins of white bears to Nubians … German taste is different from ours.

He followed up with three pages of examples of German taste in art, architecture, and fashion that he found heavy, funereal, or downright ugly. Toys, he claimed, differentiated themselves by race; a child of one race would not be amused with a toy designed for another race.73 Yet the new Modernist style exemplified in the toys and decoration by artists like André Hellé and championed in exhibitions like L’Art pour l’Enfance in 1913, paralleled those of designers in Austria and Germany in the same period, sharing a set of core beliefs and aesthetic standards. Art historian Nancy Troy has emphasized that the development of modern decorative arts in France resulted from both emulation and fear of German dominance in the field, and this appears to be true of design for children as well.74 We can see the commentary about German toys therefore as reflective of deeper concerns about perceived German cultural encroachment rather than an accurate description of stylistic differences. It should not come as a surprise that debates over children’s toys reflected larger political and cultural issues, of which fear of German dominance loomed large in the years leading up to the First World War, especially considering France’s falling birthrate and concern over future manpower resources. In an increasingly child-centric age, toys had special meaning as bearers of cultural traditions to a new generation of French citizens. On the one hand, the sheer profusion of toys as consumer goods and the popularity of toys sporting the newest technologies reflected an age increasingly defined by commodity and scientific cultures, as much for children as for adults. On the other hand, the critique of these toys demonstrated a pushback against a technologically driven culture that appeared to leave aesthetic standards, long a sign of Frenchness, behind. Toys, more than other consumer goods, had the power to shape children’s minds and souls and therefore, in the minds of these critics, could not be left to mere market forces. At the same time, the overwhelming evidence suggests that the power of the market could not be denied. The critics might fulminate about mechanical toys or German toys, but parents—undoubtedly encouraged by their

84

Childhood by Design

children—bought what they saw in the catalogs and the shop windows, enticed by novelty and increasing affordability.

Notes 1 “Causerie: Chiffonnette à Lily à propos des étrennes,” La Poupée Modèle, December 1868, 39–41. 2 These changing attitudes towards children and toys were not limited to France, but appeared simultaneously in other industrial economies, especially Britain, Germany, and the United States. See David D. Hamlin, Work and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), chap. 4; Bryan Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and MiddleClass Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (New York: Peter Lang, 2009); Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 3 Although there is a significant literature on consumption in general and department stores in particular in nineteenth-century France, little of it looks directly at children and their parents as a new consuming class. See Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001); Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1982); H. Hazel Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 4 François Theimer, Les Jouets (Que sais-je?) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 9. 5 On women as consumers, see Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, 190–194; Miller, The Bon Marché, 180–182. 6 Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85–100. 7 Edouard Fournier, Histoire des jouets et des jeux d’enfants (Paris: E. Dentu, 1889), 1.

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

85

8 Le Figaro, December 31, 1883, Coupures de Press, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris [hereafter BHVP], Actualités: Série 120 (Jouets, Cadeaux, Etrennes). 9 Léo Claretie, Les Jouets: Histoire—Fabrication (Le Lavandou: Editions du Layet, reprint ed. 1982), 189. 10 Timothée Trimm, Un Voyage au Paradis (Paris: Au Paradis des Enfants, 1874), 19, 22. 11 Louvre catalogue d’étrennes, 1910. 12 Miller, The Bon Marché, 169. 13 Printemps catalogue d’étrennes, 1910. 14 Jules Claretie, “Philosophy du Jouet,” L’Art et L’Enfant 9, no. 53 (March–April 1914): 60. 15 Trimm, Un Voyage au Paradis, 19, 22. This age stratification in childhood emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. See Daniel Thomas Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 98–100. 16 André Parmentier, Les Jeux et les Jouets: Leur histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1912), 63. For an overview of toys during this period (and later), see also the catalog Des Jouets et les hommes (Paris: Grand Palais, 2011). 17 Jules Claretie, “Les Jouets modernes,” Les Jouets et jeux anciens 2, no. 12 (April–May 1907): 141–142. 18 Ministère du Commerce, de l’Industrie, Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900: Rapports du jury international (Paris: Imprimere Nationale, 1901), 43. 19 Journal des Debats, December 27, 1907, Coupures de Press, BHVP, Actualités: Série 120 (Jouets, Cadeaux, Etrennes). 20 Claude Duneton, ed., Au Plaisir des jouets: 150 ans de catalogues (Paris: Editions Hoëbeke, 2005), 52. 21 Frédéric Marchand, L’Histoire des jouets Martin (Paris: Editions l’Automobiliste, 1987). 22 Ministère du Commerce, Exposition Universelle, 58–59. 23 Duneton, Au Plaisir des jouets, 34. 24 Mick Duprat, Les Jouets Renault (Paris: Rétroviseur, 1994), 6–8. 25 Le Soleil, December 22, 1900, Coupures de Press, BHVP, Actualités: Série 120 (Jouets, Cadeaux, Etrennes). 26 Claretie, “Philosophy du Jouet,” 64. 27 Ministère du Commerce, Exposition Universelle, 30. 28 Claretie, Les Jouets: Histoire—Fabrication, 286, 290. 29 Le Figaro, December 29, 1893, Coupures de Press, BHVP, Actualités: Série 120 (Jouets, Cadeaux, Etrennes). 30 Le Journal, December 18, 1896, Coupures de Press, BHVP, Actualités: Série 120 (Jouets, Cadeaux, Etrennes).

86

Childhood by Design

31 Le Temps, December 12, 1900, December 31, 1904, Coupures de Press, BHVP, Actualités: Série 120 (Jouets, Cadeaux, Etrennes). 32 Le Temps, December 12, 1900, Coupures de Press, BHVP, Actualités: Série 120 (Jouets, Cadeaux, Etrennes). 33 Journal des Debats, December 27, 1907, Coupures de Press, BHVP, Actualités: Série 120 (Jouets, Cadeaux, Etrennes). 34 Valérie Feuillet, Quelques Années de ma vie, 3rd edition (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1894), 61. 35 Zélie Martin, Correspondance familiale (fragments), 1863–1877 (Paris: Office Central de Lisieux, 1958), 45, 211. 36 Journal de Marie Lenéru, ed. Fernande Dauriac (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1945), 18. 37 Ibid., 20–21. 38 [Comtesse de Broglie], Comment j’ai vu 1900 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1975), 30, 63. 39 Francis Jammes, De l’âge divin à l’âge ingrat (Mémoires) (Paris: Plon, 1921), 230–231. 40 Edmond Douay and Ferdinand Teinturier, Les Mères et les enfants (Brussels: A. Larcroix, 1867), 122. 41 Ministère du Commerce, Exposition Universelle, 7. 42 Claretie, Les Jouets: Histoire—Fabrication, 223. 43 Frédéric Queyrat, Les Jeux des enfants: Etude sur l’imagination créatrice chez l’enfant (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1905), 1, 81, 143, 154. 44 Marcel Braunschvig, L’Art et l’enfant: Essai sur l’Education esthétique (Paris: Henri Didier, 1907), 206. 45 Gérard d’Houville, L’Art et l’Enfant, 7 (1911): 98–99. 46 Claretie, Les Jouets: Histoire—Fabrication, 245–246. 47 Léo Claretie, “Les Droits de l’enfance à la beauté,” L’Art et l’Enfant 5, no. 25 (May– June 1909): 11. There was a similar movement in other European countries, especially in Germany: see Hamlin, Work and Play, chap. 4, and Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood. 48 On decorative arts reform in France, see Rossella Froissart Pezone, L’Art dans Tout: Les arts décoratifs en France et l’utopie d’un Art nouveau (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004); Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1989), Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, and Williams, Dream Worlds. 49 L’Art et l’Enfant 4, no. 21 (September–October 1908): 63. 50 Léo Claretie, L’Art et l’Enfant 5, no. 25 (May–June 1909): 8.

Mass Consumption and Its Critics

87

51 Arsène Alexandre, “L’Art et le jouet à Galliera,” L’Art et l’Enfant 9, no. 50 (September–October 1913): 16. 52 Quoted in L’Art et L’Enfant 6, no. 31 (May–June 1910): 26. Unlike critics and toy designers associated with the Vienna Secession, however, the French critics did not develop an aesthetic based explicitly on children’s artwork, preferring to mediate toy design through the historical sensibility of adults. See Megan Brandow-Faller, “‘An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist’ Artistic Toys and ‘Art for the Child’ at the Kunstschau 1908,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 20, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 195–222. 53 Annie Renonciat, “Quatre murs à la page,” in Livres d’enfants, livres d’images, ed. Ségoléne Le Men (Les Dossiers du Musée d’Orsay, no. 35, 1989), 33–34. 54 Drôles de jouets! André Hellé ou l’art de l’enfance (Collection Musée du Jouet de Poissy, 2012). 55 Musée Galliera, L’Art pour l’Enfance, press clippings. 56 Musée Galliera, Exposition de l’Art pour l’Enfance, exhibition catalog (Paris, 1913). 57 Ibid., 11–12, 47, 50. 58 Musée Galliera, L’Art pour l’Enfance, press clippings. 59 Ibid. 60 Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, 219. 61 Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France, 170. 62 Claretie, “Philosophy du Jouet,” 63. 63 Alexandre, “L’Art et le jouet à Galliera,” 17. 64 “L’Industrie du Jouet,” Le Petit Journal, December 16, 1905. 65 Trimm, Un Voyage Au Paradis, 54–55. 66 Mme de Sainte-Marie, L’Education d’une poupée ou la politesse enseignée sous formes de scènes enfantines (Paris: Amédée Bédelet, 1852), 20–21, 25. 67 La Reine des Poupées: Histoires de petites filles racontées par les poupées parlantes (Paris: Amédée Bédelet, 1864), 20–21. 68 “L’Industrie du Jouet.” 69 Léo Claretie, “Les Droits de l’enfance à la beauté [suite et fin],” L’Art et L’Enfant 5, no. 27 (September–October 1909): 64. 70 Claretie, Les Jouets: Histoire—Fabrication, 179. 71 Henri René D’Allemagne, Histoire des Jouets (Paris: Hachette, 1901), 15–16. 72 Claretie, “Les Droits de l’enfance à la beauté [suite et fin],” 64. 73 Léo Claretie, “Les jouets allemands,” L’Art et l’Enfant 6, no. 35 (January–February 1911): 122. 74 Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France, 52ff.

4

Building Kids: LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity Colin Fanning

One of the most popular toys of the past century, LEGO bricks have long been associated with a triumphant narrative of invention and creativity. As scholars who study the material culture of childhood have shown, the purportedly inherent connection between children and creativity was in part constructed by postwar toy manufacturers, educators, psychologists, and parents who sought to direct children’s play towards productive ends.1 Building toys like LEGO, with their associations of both instructive rationality and free-form expression, provide a particularly interesting site of inquiry for teasing out how these adult aspirations have been reflected in design for children. The mid-twentieth-century field of toy design and production into which LEGO entered was an increasingly global milieu, with major international companies—and the economies of scale they could realize through mass production—tending to dominate smaller producers.2 In this competitive environment, design was perceived as a crucial factor in driving toy sales, and toy-makers’ approaches existed on a broad spectrum between tradition and novelty.3 LEGO’s early products built on formal precedents established by earlier playthings, but as the Danish company grew from a purveyor of mostly traditional wooden toys into a sophisticated global corporation over the second half of the twentieth century, it was continually forced to adapt to new market conditions and new ideas about play. By materializing and commodifying notions of individuality and originality—concepts with particular urgency amid postwar Western anxieties about communism—LEGO tethered the abstract quality of creativity to the concrete act of playful building. This essay explores how LEGO has given physical and visual form to the value of creativity through the design of its products and marketing ephemera, as well

90

Childhood by Design

as how its approach has changed over the decades—at times leaving the toys sitting uneasily against the company’s stated ideals. Additionally, examining evidence of how children’s play with the toy complicates marketing narratives, and how the company has penetrated cultural spaces outside the children’s playroom, adds important nuance to the pioneer discourse embedded in received views of LEGO’s history. Ultimately, I aim to show that the aura of creativity surrounding this icon of modern childhood was not intrinsic to the objects and the play scripts they offered, but rather shaped by the company and consumers alike in response to larger cultural and economic shifts over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

LEGO in context: Postwar play and the discourse of “good toys” The massive multinational corporation known today as LEGO had rather humbler beginnings in the rural community of Billund, Denmark. Ole Kirk Christiansen, the company’s founder, started a carpentry shop there in 1916, building millwork for houses and making simple furniture. During the Great Depression, the entrepreneur focused on producing smaller household goods and, as a by-product of these other objects, wooden toys. By 1934, Christiansen had decided to shift his business entirely to toy production, renaming the company LEGO (a contraction of the Danish phrase for “play well,” leg godt).4 The toys from this period drew upon conventional forms like pull-along animals and vehicles, fitting neatly within the paradigm of the Scandinavian wooden toy maker. LEGO’s genesis as a carpentry and construction business, the kinds of wares it sold, and even its periodic factory fires tie the company to the long tradition of wooden toys in Scandinavia, which emphasized craftsmanship and continuity rather than the boundless innovation that would later characterize the company’s self-image.5 The LEGO origin story, offered to consumers today in various formats including the official website, company-sponsored books, and even a digitally animated short film, is a case study in the selectivity of corporate history-telling.6 While the Christiansen family and the company are romanticized as design innovators in restless pursuit of high-quality toys, LEGO’s first plastic bricks— introduced in 1949—had their genesis in an act of imitation. When Christiansen had purchased a plastic molding machine from a British machine-tool company

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

91

in 1946, he received manufacturer’s samples of a product sold by the British company Kiddicraft. These “Self-Locking Bricks” had been designed by Hilary Page, the company’s founder and a child psychologist who studied the role of play in children’s development. After slightly altering Page’s design, Christiansen began producing and selling the building bricks.7 Page’s design had its own precedents in earlier architectural building toys with similar stud-and-socket mechanisms, like the pressed-paper Belgian “Batima” (1905), or the rubber British “Minibrix” (1935).8 As architectural historian Alice Friedman has written, manufacturers and parents intended toys of this type “not simply to teach dexterity and design skills through play, but to mould the behavior, aspirations, and desires of future citizens and consumers.”9 Page echoed this belief in the benefits of construction play in his 1953 book Playtime in the First Five Years. While he saw physical and mental “occupation” as the chief concern of playthings, he argued that imagination and the child’s interiority were also important: “Preparation for the adult world is daily enhanced, as the child learns many of its laws and lessons through the process of imaginative play. No less important, however, is the embracing refuge offered by playland from the frustration and distresses of reality.”10 Page’s bricks—and LEGO’s copies—fit closely what Birgitta Almqvist has noted as the hallmarks of twentieth-century educational toys: “plain in structure, texture, form, and color, and gender-neutral to suit girls as well as boys,” more focused on providing a vehicle for children to learn manual coordination and purportedly rational principles of building than open-ended creative expression.11 Their modularity also, crucially, allowed for the selling of small supplemental sets—a marketing mechanism established in the late nineteenth century by the German firm Richter’s, producer of the AnkerSteinbaukasten (Anchor Stone Blocks).12 Though they drew on these well-established conventions, LEGO’s “Automatic Binding Bricks” were far from a commercial success in the early years of their production, accounting for only 7 percent of sales by 1953.13 In 1955, Christiansen’s son Godtfred began to rethink the company’s product lines, aiming to rationalize the manufacturing and distribution of its offerings. Taking advantage of their modularity, Godtfred composed a new conceptual framework for the bricks, a sort of “master narrative” that would guide both selling of the bricks and, ostensibly, their use. This was the beginning of the LEGO “System i Leg”—the “System of Play”—which repositioned existing individual sets within a cohesive “Town Plan” conceit, with buildings in a generically modern or functionalist idiom arranged on a street-grid play mat.14

92

Childhood by Design

In an active postwar discussion of new ideas for school, playground, and urban design, there was a broad consensus among educators, child psychologists, and ambitious middle-class parents that “wholesome” playthings were the key to fostering a child’s skills and personality. The result was a widespread preoccupation in postwar Europe with so-called “good toys,” tied closely to a discourse of regeneration and reform that focused on things designed for children. Reinforcing the idea of a vulnerable child in need of parental guidance and protection, good toys were positioned in opposition to what many saw as the needless novelty, realism, or chaotic and violent associations of cheaper mass-market toys.15 While the prescriptive notion of the “good” or “real” toy typically described objects made in wood, emphasizing tradition and refined craftsmanship, LEGO consciously situated the plastic bricks in this discourse. The material rendered the bricks durable, hygienic, and relatively efficient to produce in mass quantities, although plastic household goods received a somewhat ambivalent reception in mid-century Europe.16 A figure as prominent as Roland Barthes took up the subject of materiality in toys, specifically attacking plastic as “a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not nature … at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch.”17 In this light, LEGO’s early marketing reveals an attempt to domesticate the bricks’ potentially unfamiliar materiality through comforting imagery, simultaneously promoting the benefits of playful building. One 1960 advertisement in a Danish magazine, for instance, read in translation: “It’s a pleasure to see children playing with LEGO—LEGO play is quiet and stimulating. Children learn to grapple with major tasks and solve them together.”18 The ad depicts a young boy and girl playing on the floor with the Town Plan, while a mother knitting in a stylish modern wood-framed chair looks on. In the late 1950s and 1960s, LEGO achieved growing success abroad while it cultivated a sense of wholesome Scandinavian identity through its designs. The company had been expanding gradually into new markets—first within Europe, with a major 1956 breakthrough into Germany—then to North America in the early 1960s through a licensing arrangement with Samsonite, debuting at the 1962 New York Toy Fair with a scaled-up version of the Town Plan.19 Until LEGO itself took over North American distribution in 1972, Samsonite tended to emphasize the elemental nature of block play and the wider representational potential of the abstract bricks (Figure 4.1). This placed LEGO on a similar footing with other creative playthings being sold to a discerning middle class

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

93

Figure 4.1 LEGO/Shwayder Bros. advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1962. Image courtesy of Jim Hughes. LEGO is a trademark of the LEGO Group of Companies. © 2018 The LEGO Group. Image used by permission.

in the United States, where, as design historian Amy Ogata has shown, design and education were specifically tied to the notion of creativity as a bastion of democratic values and an engine of scientific competitiveness amid larger Cold War tensions.20

94

Childhood by Design

Creative toys occupied a prominent place in the discourse of not only childhood education and psychology, but creative professions as well. In an article on architectural toys in the April 1966 issue of Progressive Architecture, Ellen Perry asked, “what impact are they likely to have on tomorrow’s creators and consumers of architecture? … Is creativity in these matters being sufficiently developed in the important and impressionable years, no matter what the future occupation of the child?”21 Perry, while skeptical of many manufacturers’ claims, nevertheless operates from the premise that toys should inform a child’s education and capacity for creativity, highlighting the fraught responsibilities of design for childhood in the postwar period. Pulling from the principles of the Modernist movement and prizing more abstract and open-ended building toys—as LEGO was categorized in the article’s brief catalog of contemporary toys—Perry writes: “Too many toys are the product of a designer whose reined-in imagination is harnessed to the pursuit of a literalness that will always outrun him. The last thing a child needs in a toy is utter realism”—a criticism aimed at mass-market construction toys that represented specific, often historicizing building styles.22 Perhaps the most explicit link between LEGO and this wider postwar discourse on “good toys” was a company policy Christiansen instituted in 1962, ten principles of play intended as a guiding philosophy: Unlimited play potential For girls, for boys Fun for every age Year-round play Healthful, quiet play Long hours of play Development, imagination, creativity The more LEGO, the greater its value Extra sets available Quality in every detail23

While the principles foreground the child’s play experience, couched in optimistic, universalizing language, they also reveal the underlying rationale for the brick’s system-based marketing, making a convenient linkage between the play value of the toy and the amount a consumer buys. While the company thus adopted the values of creativity and imagination as an explicit corporate code, allowing LEGO to promote the bricks as “peaceful” or constructive alternatives to other toys, it also collapsed them into a profit-building framework that set the stage for later design developments.

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

95

Systems within systems: Narrative play and the visuality of desire As the company expanded into new markets and as the product line began to grow more diverse, LEGO moved away from the strict emphasis on didactic value in its design and marketing and the construct of creativity as a tangible benefit, readily available for purchase, rose to the fore. Variously inflected by notions of children’s independence, individual expression, and narrative play, the LEGO System took on a new, colorful expansiveness in the last quarter of the twentieth century. One of the major changes in the LEGO product line to reflect this was the company’s introduction of “play themes” in 1978. Conceived as a “system within a system,” the play themes were the idea of Godtfred Kirk Christiansen’s son Kjeld, grandson of Ole, whose own childhood was intimately connected with the bricks. The new themed sets had step-by-step illustrated building instructions and were drawn from genres familiar to children’s literature and toys—castles and knights, pirates, westerns, science fiction, and so on (Figure 4.2). Simultaneously, the company introduced LEGO “minifigures,” which provided children with miniature avatars for their play.24

Figure 4.2 “Castle” set, 1978. Photo used with permission. © 2018 The LEGO Group. All information is collected and interpreted by the author and does not represent the opinion of the LEGO Group.

96

Childhood by Design

Some scholars have seen LEGO’s adoption of broader subject matter in the theme era as an important shift in emphasis from construction play to narrative play, where the bricks became mobile objects like race cars and spaceships rather than “static” architectural constructions.25 The fantasy settings were also an explicit attempt to respond to growing competition from the themed playsets of the German Playmobil toys (sold internationally from 1975) and the influence of merchandise associated with children’s television programs, both of which contributed to the powerful presence of genre-inspired, narrative-driven toys in consumers’ homes.26 By combining the challenge of a construction toy with expanded possibilities for role-play, LEGO hoped to retain its associations with tradition while remaining relevant in a changing market.27 This shift played out materially in the design of LEGO sets and marketing ephemera. Rather than offering wholesome imagery of children engaged in quiet play, company designers now presented the toys themselves as the actors and agents of playtime; packaging and catalogs showed buildings, vehicles, and minifigures in tableaux of frozen action. The products underwent a palpable change, with architectural forms becoming more open in the manner of a dollhouse, providing new spaces and props to guide play with the minifigures. An increasing variety of component types and colors expanded the material palette of the System, offering LEGO designers and consumers alike a greater degree of choice and representational specificity.28 This new visual and material richness across media created the impression of a cohesive LEGO “universe,” promising endless fun— while moving away from the abstract modularity so prized in the discourse of toy design in the immediate postwar moment. This major turn in LEGO design is an example of what cultural historian Gary Cross has seen as a savvy move by manufacturers to focus on children’s desires rather than on prescriptive parental ideas about play, signaling the growing commercial importance of children’s fantasy and inner lives.29 This was echoed by Olaf Damm, a LEGO employee in the 1970s and 1980s who appointed himself the company’s “philosopher.” He argued that, “We can tend to take toys so seriously that we can forget that play must be fun. … Children’s play and grown-ups’ work are very different.”30 American journalist Henry Wiencek, writing in 1987, even called the bricks “the raw material for a child’s imagination to act upon … a creative material on par with clay, pen and pencil, papier mache [sic], and wood.”31 In keeping with this heroic sense of creative expression, some advertisements dispensed with the themes and instead presented a vision of individualistic, imaginative, but also egalitarian building. The now-famous

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

97

“What it is/Is beautiful” ad from 1981 showed a red-headed girl proudly holding a multicolored, abstract, somewhat awkward construction—at odds with the sophisticated theming of the company’s other products.32 An essentializing view of the child as an innocent, playful, and inventive figure drove many design decisions for products, packaging, and advertising materials as LEGO’s marketing mechanisms became increasingly polished. As communications scholar Stephen Kline has argued, LEGO’s stratification of its product line—differentiating along subject matter as well as age, with the 1979 DUPLO line aimed at toddlers or the 1977 engineering-focused “Technic” series for older builders—provided a means of capturing a wider audience and achieving “brand loyalty” among children from a young age.33 But LEGO managed largely to escape the adult anxiety that often accompanied such corporate targeting of impressionable young consumers by continuing to tout the bricks as “good toys,” reassuring parents who shared the long-running belief that self-directed, constructive play was essential for children’s development. In 1988, LEGO’s marketing team developed the “Lego Maniac,” a character who appeared in television advertisements in the early 1990s (usually as a white adolescent boy, variously named Jack or Zack) and, later, as a blond-haired cartoon figure in print media.34 As an avatar for the company’s message of creative invention and kitted out with signifiers of contemporary youth culture (e.g., sneakers and an advertising jingle written as a rap), the Maniac recast LEGO play as a kind of rebellious, almost aggressive act.35 Historian Lisa Jacobson has pointed out how the figure of the raucous “boy inventor”—cast as technologically gifted and more knowledgeable than his old-fashioned parents—has shaped the discourse of making and selling products to young boys, particularly in the mid-twentieth century.36 The Maniac fits within this longer tradition, but LEGO’s rhetoric de-emphasizes the autodidactic and “improving” ethos of the boy inventor in favor of a visceral appeal to action-packed, chaotic fun (itself another frequent mode of appeal to boy consumers). Though it may have been pragmatic given competition with profitable television tie-in toys, LEGO’s shift in tone is notable for a company that historically offered relatively highbrow appeals to middle-class consumers. The LEGO Maniac was a prominent figure in other print ephemera generated by the company in the 1990s and early 2000s. In the United States, the company published LEGO Mania Magazine between 1994 and 2002, which included features written in the Maniac’s voice, placed the character into illustrated comics as a protagonist, and mobilized him as a mouthpiece to promote new products.

98

Childhood by Design

Children’s “clubs” and attendant media have a long history as marketing tools, with the aim of creating a “kid’s world” of consumption relatively free from adult surveillance; corporate efforts in the 1920s and 1930s focused on radio as a medium for reaching child audiences directly.37 Many toy manufacturers adopted printed newsletters and other ephemera with a similar strategy in mind; thus, the late 1950s saw the publication of various official or semi-official LEGO periodicals in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States, where Brick Kicks (1987–1990) was superseded by LEGO Mania Magazine.38 As part of the larger material and visual culture surrounding the toys, these magazines illustrate an interesting collision of fan culture and official marketing. LEGO Mania Magazine solicited children to submit photographs of their own creations for inclusion in regular features titled “Cool Creations” or “Mania Madness.” The magazine thus represents a valuable—if imperfect—archive of children’s actual play with LEGO, and provides one possible route into better understanding how children have worked within or against the products’ design scripts.39 One of the leitmotifs of scholarship on toys and the material culture of childhood more broadly is the difficulty of accessing the experiences of the actual children who lived with and used the objects under study. Writing the cultural history of LEGO is subject to the same challenges, despite its ubiquity

Figure 4.3 “Mania Madness” feature, January/February 1999 LEGO Mania Magazine. LEGO is a trademark of the LEGO Group of Companies. © 2018 The LEGO Group. Image used by permission.

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

99

in contemporary childhood. LEGO itself has conducted significant research with children as part of product testing, but the results are proprietary, closely held, and put to instrumental rather than scholarly ends.40 A number of childdevelopment studies have attempted to evaluate how the company’s claims play out under scientific inquiry, but as Seth Giddings has explored, this process is subject to some inherent challenges of scale and methodology.41 In examining children’s constructions reproduced in LEGO Mania Magazine, then, a picture emerges that complicates the received view of themed or licensed sets as overly prescriptive (Figure 4.3).42 While some children clearly took building cues from the LEGO themes—including the color schemes and structural logics of the company-designed sets—a majority of the submissions published in the magazine diverged from these aesthetic guidelines. In a rough quantitative analysis of the 1995 and 1996 volumes of LEGO Mania Magazine (twelve issues in total), only about one-third of published submissions directly mimicked the design language of existing LEGO products; another third represented buildings or objects of familiar types in existing products (castles, race cars, etc.), but demonstrated looser, more independent expressions of form, color, and the “purpose” of specialized components like wheels, propellers, or windows. A final third had no direct cognates with LEGO products: these included submissions like self-portraits, representations of popular-culture characters, or elaborate, largescale architectural constructions.43 While LEGO, of course, acted as gatekeeper for the selection of the published photographs, it is nevertheless striking that while the company’s products hewed closely to the rules of the “system,” there is evidence that many of its consumers continued building happily outside and beyond the company’s play narratives and step-by-step instructions. LEGO Mania Magazine provides an object lesson in how the company has attempted to capture and commodify the organic creativity of children’s LEGO play. These “vernacular” creations were positioned within a dense graphic layout alongside slick product images to create a kind of visual feedback loop of desire. Including child-produced content along with puzzles, comics, and contests allowed the company to direct marketing appeals to children in the guise of entertainment. Moreover, by putting children’s constructions on display for an audience of their peers, the magazine imbued the process of brick-building with a tacit social value beyond the official narratives of self-directed exploration or intellectual development. LEGO thus staked a claim as the material platform for children’s expression, defending the company’s position as a source of childhood creativity and instrumentalizing this abstract notion as a tangible asset.

100

Childhood by Design

Beyond the playroom: Licensed designs, cultural politics, and adult play By the turn of the millennium, LEGO was firmly positioned as a ubiquitous part of middle-class childhood in both Europe and North America. However, as it began to expand into new fields like theme parks, apparel, and video game design, the company faced criticism that it was losing sight of its core appeal.44 LEGO had introduced its first, highly successful licensed product line, “Star Wars,” in 1999, but also produced sets with fewer, larger components and less complexity in the building experience to appeal to children less familiar or comfortable with construction toys.45 These shifts in design and the company’s expanding links to other intellectual properties—including major titles like Harry Potter (licensed by LEGO in 2001) and Lord of the Rings (2012)—created a kind of slippage between LEGO’s continued narrative of creativity and the perceived triteness of these products. This problematic rift between what consumers expected of LEGO and their evaluation of the new offerings is often cited as a key factor in the company’s 2003 financial crisis. LEGO subsequently underwent a series of massive changes in leadership and internal organization, much-covered then and since as the business press marveled (and continues to marvel) at the nearruin and subsequent rebound of the company, holding it up as a model for “creative” business practice.46 On the level of design, the company’s products and marketing in recent years allude to the complexity of defining creativity in children’s playthings today. Attempting to shed its poorly conceived efforts of the early 2000s, post-crisis LEGO initially refocused on the “City” theme, a descendant of the 1950s Town Plan.47 Even more recently, the company has expanded beyond these tropes and grafted the notion of creative building onto a new competitive bent in its themed products. With buildable action figures, exoticized settings, and corollary suites of licensed merchandise, “Bionicle” (2001) and “Ninjago” (2011) include conflict-driven storylines supplemented by comic books and online games, and encourage children to compete by collecting sets and “battling” each other. Sociologist Juliet Schor points out that LEGO’s associations with wholesome construction play continued to work in its favor despite the dark and violent character of recent products.48 Newer products like these illustrate a growing tendency for LEGO to situate its physical toys within an immersive backstory, tying them to a rich, companydesigned narrative rather than the somewhat subtler genre cues of the earlier

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

101

play themes; anecdotal evidence seems to support the eager reception of these narratives by children.49 The recent “Dimensions” line (2015) underscores this idea even further, connecting the physical toys with sophisticated online play that takes advantage of the “Internet of Things” and a digital economy of continual micro-payments.50 After its generally unsuccessful early forays into digital media, LEGO has invested heavily in the development of licensed video games and the physical-digital hybrid of Dimensions, indicating a desire to design play experiences to accommodate children’s increasingly tech-driven lives. Theories about the “mediatization” of LEGO into formats beyond construction toys (and the corollary business challenges) have accordingly grown into an understanding of its bridging between categories—material and virtual, proprietary and licensed—as a transmedial phenomenon, in which licensed products create mutually reinforcing associations with both LEGO and the popular cultural franchise in question.51 But while Dimensions brings together characters from across the company’s product lines in a playful cross-genre melting pot, the necessarily heavily scripted games sit at a remove from the ideal of open-ended creative play that continues to dominate LEGO marketing. The company’s shift into the digital realm, as well as the critical reception of recent products, affords an opportunity to further consider this distance between LEGO’s affectation of universality and realities of the market. Most of the new products since the company’s early-2000s “crisis” have been largely targeted towards an audience of boys (as epitomized by the LEGO Maniac), but in 2011 LEGO released the “Friends” line, explicitly aimed at girl consumers. Critics have derided the girl-coded pastel color schemes, the redesigned minifigures— produced at a larger scale than earlier figures, with slim, highly feminized bodies and facial features—and the apparent focus on home life, shopping, and beauty as sexist tropes that undermine the company’s stated ideals.52 LEGO in turn has vigorously defended the sets’ design and commercial success, claiming to have designed them after several years of research and testing with girl builders.53 Alongside greater public scrutiny of LEGO’s relationship to notions of gender, the company has also been subject to increasing study and criticisms of its representations of race. Media scholar Derek Johnson points out that licensed minifigures (which had to represent real people, including racial signifiers like skin tone) upended the company’s treatment of its yellow-skinned minifigures as ostensibly universal and non-racial. However, designers had racially coded the figures in earlier genre sets by other means, often representing indigenous peoples (Native Americans, generic “islanders,” swarthy pirates) through tropes

102

Childhood by Design

of the exotic or primitive other—undermining LEGO’s claims to a “pre-racial” corporate identity.54 Ongoing debates about the politics of representation in LEGO reveal both how convinced many consumers remain by the company’s evergreen ambitions of universality and, ultimately, the inherent limitations of that ideal. The gradual shifts in LEGO’s approach to design reveal a company adapting to what they see as a changing child—a somewhat elusive, digitally-savvy consumer—foregrounding children themselves as consumers and important economic agents.55 The result has been a growing fragmentation of the product line into ever more diverse and representationally specific sub-series. But despite the licensing-heavy offerings and critiques of its design decisions, LEGO seems largely to have maintained its credibility with a broad public as a purveyor of toys that foster and materialize children’s imaginations. Examining some of the ways in which LEGO has moved into spaces beyond children’s culture can illuminate the durability of this image. Acting outside the official marketing discourse of the company, adults have formed their own play traditions with the bricks, both reflecting and playfully distorting the conventions of the LEGO System.56 LEGO’s relationship to this community has grown in the past decades from relative obliviousness to a selective embrace. As the company has become more open to the ideas and “on-the-ground” expertise

Figure 4.4 “Architecture Studio” set, 2013. LEGO is a trademark of the LEGO Group of Companies. © 2018 The LEGO Group. Image used by permission.

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

103

of its adult fans, it has capitalized on the goodwill and creativity of its adult devotees, extending its design and marketing beyond the sphere of children and childhood.57 For example, LEGO’s “Architecture Series” of sets (launched in 2008) were the result of a direct collaboration with Chicago architect Adam Reed Tucker. Tucker initially caught LEGO’s notice with his impressive skyscraper constructions, and he pitched the company an idea for a series of sets reproducing architectural icons in miniature. LEGO created a small pilot run, and the product line was an immediate success.58 The restrained design of the packaging implies a more “sophisticated” audience, and the sets are priced significantly higher than similarly-sized products aimed at kids. More recently, the 2013 “Architecture Studio” (Figure 4.4) paid obvious homage to a failed 1963 “Scale Model” line aimed at design professionals.59 The sleek, all-white set was intended as a kind of modeling tool and included a book with form-making exercises and profiles of contemporary architecture studios.60 Taking advantage of adults’ greater spending power, LEGO’s efforts like these profitably tap into childhood nostalgia and align with the creative cache of the architecture and design professions. The creativity of adult fans of LEGO (“AFOLs”) and children alike is increasingly visible in the age of social media, encompassing communityorganized conventions, countless stop-motion “brick films” on YouTube, massive collective constructions, and participatory art installations.61 Amid what media scholar David Buckingham calls the “reduced scope for innovation” of nonlicensed content that many toy manufacturers face in a largely media-driven commercial landscape, LEGO’s embrace of its customers’ creativity is another opportunity to reassert the company’s public image of universal inventiveness.62 By broadcasting its interest in how its fans build, LEGO simultaneously celebrates, directs, and profits from its most devoted and vocal consumers.

Conclusion Perhaps nowhere has LEGO’s firm footing in popular culture and the pervasive mythos of creativity it has built around itself been more evident than in the 2014 film The LEGO Movie. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the film centers on a core lesson of creative expression through building, arguing that adhering only to “what’s on the box” is self-limiting and antithetical to the spirit of the bricks. Both a popular and critical success, The LEGO Movie was essentially

104

Childhood by Design

a feature-length toy commercial that managed to provide an engaging story and enough winking references to other pop-culture phenomena to entertain adult viewers as well as kids.63 That this filmic message should come from a company whose financial interests require its customers to buy products based precisely on what’s on the box is an essential irony of The LEGO Movie, but perhaps it also suggests that the dichotomy between educative construction play and the more narrative genre-driven toys of the company’s recent past is not so stark as many commentators posit. As design historian Judy Attfield has argued, there is “little point in only casting [toys] as producers of specific effects … Toys cannot fully determine actions or thoughts, they are themselves the focus of play—a dynamic activity used to rehearse, interpret and try out new meanings.”64 In reflecting on the company’s long history, it appears that LEGO’s shifting design language has similarly allowed it to try out new meanings, blurring categories typically imposed on children’s playthings. While the ideal of creativity can prove amorphous and is always rooted in deeper questions about the nature of childhood, LEGO has built its ubiquity and beloved status in the material culture of modern childhood on the back of this enduring value. In 2013, LEGO announced that it had commissioned a new “experience center” and museum for its headquarters in Billund from prominent Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. The “LEGO House” facility is planned to incorporate exhibits on the company’s history, play areas, and other apparatus of contemporary cultural institutions (café, gift shop, roof terraces). In press coverage about the LEGO House, company representatives and Ingels stress that the museum will be a concrete manifestation of the company’s values, “systematic creativity” chief among them.65 In more pragmatic terms, the museum will also include a bombproofed vault in its core to house an archive of every LEGO set. Perhaps fittingly, this shelter—which Ingels describes as the “holiest of holies”66 for LEGO and its visitors—protects not people but things, the material record of the company’s ambitious efforts to shape and sell children’s play: creativity crystallized in the form of plastic bricks.

Acknowledgments This essay builds on research I first presented as a paper titled “Building Kids: Design, Creativity, and LEGO” at the symposium “Toys and Childhood: Playing with Design,” Bard Graduate Center, New York, September 2014. My deepest

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

105

thanks to Amy F. Ogata for the invitation to that symposium, and for her mentorship during my years of work on LEGO and its place in the material culture of childhood. I also thank Alexander Roederer for his insightful comments on this essay.

Notes 1 For example, Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, eds., Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 (New York: Museum of Modern Art: 2012). 2 Gary Cross and Gregory Smits, “Japan, the U.S. and the Globalization of Children’s Consumer Culture,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 4, Globalization and Childhood (2005): 873–890 (p.877–878); Kenneth D. Brown, “Design in the British Toy Industry since 1945,” Journal of Design History 11, no. 4 (1998): 323–333. 3 Indeed, insufficient interest in design could foretell disaster; Kenneth D. Brown, “The Collapse of the British Toy Industry, 1979–1984,” The Economic History Review 46, no. 3 (1993): 592–606. 4 “LEGO History Timeline: 1932–1939,” https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/legogroup/the_lego_history/1930 (accessed December 14, 2016); and Henry Wiencek, The World of LEGO Toys (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 35–44. 5 For tradition and craftsmanship in Scandinavian toy-making, see Amy F. Ogata and Susan Weber, “Introduction,” in Swedish Wooden Toys (New York: Bard Graduate Center; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 7–21. 6 Representative examples include LEGO Group, The Ultimate LEGO Book (New York: DK Publishing and LEGO Group, 1999); Daniel Lipkowitz, The LEGO Book (New York: DK Publishing, 2009); or LEGO Club TV, “The LEGO® Story,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdDU_BBJW9Y (accessed December 10, 2016). 7 Disclosed in a suit from competitor Tyco, with a 1988 decision in the UK House of Lords that LEGO could not maintain exclusive rights to the brick design. See “LEGO-Myten der Snublede,” Børsen Nyhedsmagasin, June 5, 1987, 12–17. Official histories omit Kiddicraft entirely; even unofficial ones tend to dance around the subject. Jim Hughes, “Brick Fetish” (http://brickfetish.com/ (accessed November 30, 2016)) is the most comprehensive, including a detailed treatment of Page and Kiddicraft; this history is also relayed briefly in Sarah Herman, A Million Little Bricks: The Unofficial Illustrated History of the LEGO Phenomenon (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012) and Brenda and Robert Vale, Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 181.

106

Childhood by Design

8 Architecture Potentielle: Jeux de Construction de la Collection du CCA (Montreal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture, 1991), 18; Brian Salter, Building Toys (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2011), 29–32. 9 Alice T. Friedman, Maisons de Rêve, Maisons Jouets (Montreal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture, 1995), 7. 10 Hilary Fisher Page, Playtime in the First Five Years (London: Allen & Unwin, 1953), 16. 11 Birgitta Almqvist, “Educational Toys, Creative Toys,” in Toys, Play, and Child Development, ed. Jeffrey H. Goldstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 50. 12 See, e.g., David D. Hamlin, Work and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007) for one of the most comprehensive English-language treatments of Richter’s. 13 Hughes, “Brick Fetish.” 14 Another heroic anecdote about Godtfred’s timely conversation with a toy buyer that sparked the System is much-reproduced in LEGO lore; e.g., LEGO Group, Ultimate LEGO Book, 12–13. 15 Amy F. Ogata, “Good Toys,” in Century of the Child, 171–173. See also Ogata, Designing the Creative Child, chapter 3. 16 On cautious consumer attitudes towards plastic, see Penny Sparke, ed., The Plastics Age: From Modernity to Post-Modernity (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1990). 17 Roland Barthes, “Toys,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 54. 18 “Det er en fornøjelse at se børnene lege med LEGO—for LEGO-legen er rolig og udviklende. Børnene lærer at give sig i kast med store opgaver og løse dem i fællesskab.” Advertisement reproduced in Jim Hughes, “Brick Fetish,” http:// brickfetish.com/ads/dk/dk_1960_a.html (accessed November 30, 2016). Translation by the author. 19 “Lego System by Samsonite Unveiled at This Month’s Show,” Playthings, March 1962, 482. See also “LEGO History Timeline,” https://www.lego.com/en-us/ aboutus/lego-group/the_lego_history (accessed December 14, 2016). 20 Ogata, Designing the Creative Child, 35–36. 21 Ellen Perry, “The Child at Play in the World of Form,” Progressive Architecture 47 (April 1966), 191. 22 Ibid., 198. 23 These principles are much-reproduced in both company literature and external commentary; see, e.g., Wiencek, World of LEGO Toys, 48. 24 Nevin Martell, Standing Small: A Celebration of 30 Years of the LEGO Minifigure (New York: DK Publishing, 2009).

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

107

25 Maaike Lauwaert, The Place of Play: Toys and Digital Cultures (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 59–60. 26 Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 202. 27 Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Parents & Children in Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 71. 28 See, e.g, LEGO Group, Ultimate LEGO Book, 18–19. Interestingly, the wide number of components would later be cast as both symptom and cause of the company’s overreach during its financial troubles in the early 2000s. 29 Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 220. 30 Quoted in Wiencek, World of LEGO Toys, 82. 31 Ibid., 7. 32 This advertisement would later become a rallying point for those who opposed LEGO’s increasingly gender-specific toys in the 2000s. For an illustrative example of how this discourse played out in internet commentary, see Jessica Samakow, “LEGO Ad from 1981 Should Be Required Reading for Everyone Who Makes, Buys or Sells Toys,” The Huffington Post, January 17, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2014/01/17/lego-ad-1981_n_4617704.html (accessed November 15, 2016). 33 Kline, Out of the Garden, 158. 34 Lipkowitz, The LEGO Book, 24. 35 In keeping with the avoidance of appeals to rationality identified in Juliet B. Schor, Born To Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004), 105. 36 Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); see chapter 3, “Heroes of the New Consumer Age: Imagining Boy Consumers,” 93–126. 37 Jacobson, Raising Consumers, especially 206–214. 38 More recently the company has streamlined different publications into the multilanguage LEGO Club Magazine (or simply LEGO Magazine). The most substantive archive of defunct periodicals is the fan-assembled “Miniland Online,” http://www. miniland.nl/LEGOclub/lego%20magazine%20lezen.htm (accessed December 14, 2016). 39 In keeping with the idea of packaging, ephemera, and children’s assemblages as primary texts, see Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood (London: Routledge, 2002), 83–84. 40 David C. Robertson with Bill Breen, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry (New York: Crown Business, 2013), 140–144.

108

Childhood by Design

41 See Seth Giddings, “Bright Bricks, Dark Play: On the Impossibility of Studying LEGO,” in LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2014), 241–267. 42 A representative opinion can be found in Kline, Out of the Garden, 159. 43 These issues archived at “Miniland Online.” 44 James Delingpole, “When Lego lost its head—and how this toy story got its happy ending,” Daily Mail, December 18, 2009, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/ moslive/article-1234465/When-Lego-lost-head–toy-story-got-happy-ending. html#ixzz4Sy1doPII (accessed November 30, 2016). 45 A detailed design history of one of the Star Wars sets can be found in Mark J. P. Wolf, “Adapting the Death Star into LEGO: The Case of LEGO Set #10188,” in LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2014), 15–39. 46 E.g., Jonathan Ringen, “How LEGO Became the Apple of Toys,” Fast Company, January 8, 2015, https://www.fastcompany.com/3040223/when-it-clicks-it-clicks (accessed November 30, 2016). 47 Robertson, Brick by Brick, 125–127. 48 Schor, Born To Buy, 96–97. See also Lori Landay, “Myth Blocks: The Ninjago and Chima Themes” in LEGO Studies, ed. Wolf, 55–80. 49 Landay, “Myth Blocks,” 62. 50 LEGO Group, “Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, TT Games and the LEGO Group announce LEGO® Dimensions,” press release, April 9, 2015, https:// www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news-room/2015/april/lego-dimensions (accessed November 15, 2016). 51 Stig Hjarvard, “From Bricks to Bytes: The Mediatization of a Global Toy Industry,” in European Culture and the Media, ed. Ib Bondebjerg and Peter Golding (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2004), 43–63; Wolf, ed., LEGO Studies. 52 An especially articulate argument can be found in Anita Sarkeesian, “LEGO & Gender Part 1: LEGO Friends,” Feminist Frequency, January 30, 2011, http:// www.feministfrequency.com/2012/01/lego-gender-part-1-lego-friends/ (accessed November 10, 2016). See also Rebecca W. Black, Bill Tomlinson, and Ksenia Korobkova, “Play and Identity in Gendered LEGO Franchises,” International Journal of Play 5, no. 1 (2016): 64–76 and Derek Johnson, “Chicks with Bricks: Building Creativity across Industrial Design Cultures and Gendered Construction Play,” in LEGO Studies, ed. Wolf, 81–104. 53 LEGO Group, “LEGO Group commentary on attracting more girls to construction play,” press release, January 12, 2012, https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/ news-room/2012/january/lego-group-commentary-on-attracting-more-girls-toconstruction-play (accessed November 15, 2016).

LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity

109

54 Derek Johnson, “Figuring Identity: Media Licensing and the Racialization of LEGO Bodies,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2014): 307–325. 55 Robertson, Brick by Brick, 275–277. 56 See John Baichtal and Joe Meno, The Cult of LEGO (San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2011). 57 Robertson, Brick by Brick, chapter 7, “Fostering Open Innovation,” 179–214. 58 LEGO group, “History of LEGO Architecture,” https://www.lego.com/en-us/ architecture/explore/architecture-history (accessed November 15, 2016). 59 Jim Hughes, “Brick Fetish: Modulex,” http://www.brickfetish.com/timeline/1963. html (accessed November 30, 2016). 60 Aspirations met with some skepticism: Oliver Wainwright, “Could Lego Architecture Studio actually be useful for architects?” The Guardian, August 6, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/06/lego-architecturestudio-could-it-be-useful (accessed December 10, 2016). 61 Baichtal and Meno, Cult of LEGO. 62 David Buckingham, The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011), 95. 63 An archetypal reviewer reaction of pleasant astonishment (coupled with awareness of the underlying product-placement issues) in Susan Wloszczyna, “Reviews: The LEGO Movie,” Roger Ebert, February 7, 2014, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ the-lego-movie-2014 (accessed December 10, 2016). 64 Judy Attfield, “Barbie and Action Man: Adult Toys for Girls and Boys, 1959–93,” in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester, UK and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 88. 65 LEGO Group, “The right look for a LEGO House,” press release, June 4, 2013, https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news-room/2013/june/the-right-look-for-alego-house (accessed December 10, 2016). 66 Amy Frearson, “‘Lego proportions are the golden ratio of architecture,’ says Bjarke Ingels,” Dezeen, August 20, 2014, https://www.dezeen.com/2014/08/20/legogolden-ration-of-architecture-big-lego-house-denmark-bjarke-ingels-interview/ (accessed December 10, 2016).

Part Two

Child’s Play? Avant-Garde and Reform Toy Design

5

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking: Walter Crane, Flora’s Feast, and the Possibilities of Children’s Literature Andrea Korda

Routledge’s New Sixpenny Toy Books for children, published from 1866 to 1876, feature pictures of sumptuous interiors peppered with the decorative objects favored by Victorian aesthetes, as those who prized art and beauty above industrialization came to be known.1 Walter Crane, the illustrator of these opulent pictures, was a painter, designer, and illustrator known for his commitment to the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic Movements as well as his socialist politics. Along with many of his contemporaries, William Morris among them, Crane believed that industrial capitalism degraded both art and humanity through its emphasis on utility, efficiency, and profit, and that art—that is, handcrafted, thoughtful, and beautiful art—could provide an antidote. For Crane and his fellow aesthetes, picture books for children had a special role to play in teaching children to value beauty over utility and efficiency.2 Actress and aesthete Ellen Terry, for example, explained that her children “were allowed no rubbishy picture-books, but from the first Japanese prints and fans lined their nursery walls, and Walter Crane was their classic.”3 Yet this belief that picture books would transmit aesthetic principles to children raises the question of whether the artist was successful. Did the books actually produce budding Aesthetes? The question at hand alludes to what literary scholar Jacqueline Rose has called the “impossibility” of children’s fiction. According to Rose, there is no interaction between the adult writer of children’s literature and the child reader; “the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but … neither of them enter the space in between.”4 Children’s books, then, are always primarily

114

Childhood by Design

for and about adults. Rose’s critique translates easily to Crane’s toy books, which are clearly informed by Crane’s Aesthetic desires and politics. Children remain absent, corresponding to Rose’s contention that “children’s fiction sets up the child as an outsider to its own process.”5 Scholars in childhood studies have responded to Rose’s critique regarding the absence of the child in children’s literature by resuscitating historical children as active and knowing subjects. For example, cultural historian Robin Bernstein has proposed that in order to discover “the possibility of children’s literature,” we must pay attention to the child’s active reception of children’s literature.6 As I examined Crane’s later picture books, those that came after the toy books for Routledge, it appeared as though Crane himself was searching for ways to make children’s fiction “possible,” just like today’s scholars, by involving children as active participants in both the production and reception of his picture books. The books I have in mind are those Crane wrote and illustrated himself from the 1870s into the early twentieth century, in which he moved beyond offering beautiful and imaginative pictures, as he had with the Routledge toy books. With these later books, he developed strategies to guide his readers towards thinking imaginatively themselves. One example, which I examine in detail here, is Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers, published by Cassell and Company. Although the book’s title page announces its publication date as 1889, reviews of the book suggest that it appeared in print at the end of 1888, in time for the Christmas gift-giving season.7 Flora’s Feast lies between the world of adults and children. Cassell and Co. advertised it with both their “New Books for Children” and their “Fine Art Volumes”;8 one critic commented that “it may perhaps be less appreciated by children than by ‘grown-ups’”;9 and Crane once stated that it was “not a child’s book proper,” even though he grouped it together with his other children’s books.10 In the text to follow, I argue that even if Crane did not intend it as such, Flora’s Feast provides a model for the possibility of children’s literature. First, using methods of iconographic and contextual analysis conventional to art history, I unpack the symbolism of the book and its ideological meanings, and show how they relate to Crane’s politics. But this approach ignores the perspective of the child reader, offering instead an adult reading of an adult-authored book, and therefore reinforces Rose’s point about the impossibility of children’s fiction. Next, I consider possibilities for interpretation that the book itself suggests by attending to the text–image relationships within Flora’s Feast, and by contextualizing the book within historical scholarship on imaginative play. The

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking

115

results return a sense of possibility to children’s fiction by transforming the book from a historical artifact waiting to be explained into a script to be read and performed. Finally, by considering the book in the context of Crane’s family life, I will demonstrate that the book was not just an adult-authored script for children to follow, but that it also acts as evidence of a particular set of performances enacted by actual, historical children: Beatrice, Lionel, and Lancelot Crane.

The iconographic (and impossible) meanings of Flora’s Feast Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers originated in a picture book Crane created for his own children about Queen Flora waking the flowers in her garden after winter.11 In the version published by Cassell and Company, each of the forty pages combines words and illustrations, all drawn by Crane and reproduced by chromolithography. The text reads as a playful list of the various flowers rising from their long sleep, while the pictures portray each flower in personified form, adorned in fancy dress (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). The theme of personified flowers gave Crane the opportunity to create elaborate costumes, using— in his words—“petals and stamens, etc., as details or adjuncts to a fanciful costume.”12 Flora’s Feast takes part in a longer tradition of stories about personified flowers, including Flora’s Gala (1808), Louisa May Alcott’s Flower Fables (1855), The Alphabet of Flowers for Good Children (1859), and Fairybelle and Legends of Flowers (1869), as well as Cicely Mary Barker’s series Flower Fairies, which first appeared in 1923 and continues to be published today.13 Crane’s version of this theme proved popular, and Flora’s Feast was followed by Crane’s Queen Summer or the Tourney of the Lily and the Rose in 1891, A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden in 1899, A Flower Wedding, Described by Two Wallflowers in 1905, and Flowers from Shakespeare’s Garden in 1906. Like the toy books Crane illustrated for Routledge, Aesthetic taste dominates Flora’s Feast, but the emphasis of the latter is on dress rather than décor. The costumes resemble the type of dress adopted by Aesthetes at the time, known as “Aesthetic Dress” or “Artistic Dress.” Aesthetic dress originated in efforts to reform the protocols of fashionable dress by rejecting crinoline, bustles, and rigid corsets in favor of lighter materials and simplified forms that followed the outlines of the body.14 Crane was actively involved in these efforts through his participation in the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union in the 1890s, even writing an article “On

116

Childhood by Design

Figure 5.1 Walter Crane, “Here stately lilies …,” in Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1889). Courtesy Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

Figure 5.2 Walter Crane, “Here Lords and Ladies …,” in Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1889). Courtesy Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

the Progress of Taste in Dress in Relation to Art Education” for the Union’s shortlived journal, Aglaia. In the article, Crane advocates for a reformed style of dress that will “be at once healthy and artistic” by respecting the human figure without “ignor[ing] its lines,” “contradict[ing] its proportions,” or “misrepresent[ing] its character.”15 These concerns are evident in Flora’s Feast, where the figures wear softly flowing costumes, revealing the shape of un-corseted bodies beneath. The styles are unmistakably Aesthetic, especially given the book’s appearance in 1888 when Aesthetic dress had already circulated through popular culture, both through its adaptation in mainstream fashion and in the form of satirical displays in Punch and in Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera of 1881.16 One of the Aesthetic dresses Crane illustrated for the Aglaia article in 1894 (Figure 5.3) replicates the costume of the “stately lilies” in Flora’s Feast (Figure 5.1), where lines crisscross the chest and material drapes straight

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking

117

Figure 5.3 Walter Crane, “Types of Artistic Dress,” in Ideals in Art: Papers Theoretical Practical Critical (London: George Bell & Sons, 1905). © The British Library Board W2/7373.

down creating narrow folds reminiscent of a column’s fluting—a style that, in Crane’s words, is “natural, simple, beautiful and suitable.”17 The lilies are classical in appearance, while the one on the right is adorned with a Watteau plait falling down her back, another sure sign of Aesthetic dress. They are missing the medieval-inspired puffed sleeves of much Aesthetic dress, a feature that dates back to its earliest incarnations in the circles of the

118

Childhood by Design

mid-century Pre-Raphaelites, but these can be seen in the costume of the “blushing Rose” three pages earlier. Other figures in Flora’s Feast are more decorative, such as the “blazing Sunflower,” noteworthy due to the sunflower’s prominence in Aesthetic imagery. One exception to Flora’s Feast’s elaborate display of Aesthetic fashion appears in the costume of the chrysanthemums, where pinched waists, corsets, and full skirts return. The text describes the chrysanthemums as “stiff with gold,” which is fitting considering that their name derives from the Greek word for gold and their tightly packed petals give the flowers a stiff appearance. However, the phrase “stiff with gold” also implies a negative judgment since it alludes to the stiff fashions rejected by Aesthetes and pictured in the illustration, while also suggesting that their costumes may be influenced by material wealth and commerce, the “great deities” of modern life that Crane condemned as harmful to art and humanity.18 The stiff chrysanthemums introduce a disruption to the parade of Aesthetic figures, suggesting that the story’s symbolism may hold additional meanings. When viewed through the lens of Crane’s political allegiances, the narrative of Flora’s Feast takes on further complexity due to its resemblance to the story of Sleeping Beauty. As described by Morna O’Neill and Andrea Wolk-Ranger, Aesthetes adopted the story of Sleeping Beauty as an allegory for the modern industrial world, with the character of Sleeping Beauty representing the abstract quality of beauty.19 The story offered hope since it suggested that beauty had not been wholly eradicated by the effects of commerce and industry, but was merely dormant and could be resuscitated with some effort and care. This theme was made explicit in a theatrical presentation entitled Beauty’s Awakening, a Masque of Winter and of Spring, organized by Crane along with his colleagues in the Art Workers’ Guild in 1899, a decade after Flora’s Feast appeared in print. The overarching narrative of Beauty’s Awakening is almost identical to Flora’s Feast. Winter comes to an end and a re-awakening occurs, but it is Fayremonde, the Spirit of All Things Beautiful, that has been sleeping through the winter, rather than Flora. In Fayremonde’s absence, the demons of commerce and industry, given appropriate names such as Philistinus, Ignoramus, and Slumdum, torment the city of London. Beauty finally triumphs when Fayremonde is awoken with a kiss, and at that point five couples emerge, each representing one of the senses.20 The published version of the masque includes an illustration of the couples’ costumes (Figure 5.4). Crane designed the costumes and made the illustration,

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking

119

Figure 5.4 Walter Crane, “Dance of the Five Senses,” in Beauty’s Awakening, a Masque of Winter and of Spring (London: The Studio, 1899). Courtesy University of Alberta Libraries.

so it is not surprising that they resemble both his ideas for Aesthetic dress and the characters of Flora’s Feast. The female figure representing touch resembles the rose of Flora’s Feast; smell wears the crisscrossed design that is similar to the dress of one of the lilies along with a Watteau plait falling from her shoulders; taste wears a similar style to Queen Flora, with fabric knotted over the shoulders and Watteau plait at the back; and sight wears a peacock version of the sunflower costume, with the bodice and fan made up of peacock feathers instead of sunflowers and more feathers cascading down her back and decorating her dress. Their male counterparts wear tunics and leggings that reflect the Aesthetic taste for historical dress and Crane’s prescriptions for male fashion, which rejected “tubes of black cloth” in favor of increased ornament.21 With this later masque in mind, it is easy to read the “Masque of Flowers” of Flora’s Feast in terms of a similar awakening. After their long sleep, the flowers begin to arrive in a procession of beautiful costume, looking like an army of Aesthetes prepared to take back the garden from the demons of commerce and industry. This iconographic reading of the book emphasizes connections between Crane’s children’s books and his other artistic and political activities, revealing ideological meanings that may not have been evident to the youthful readers of Flora’s Feast, or even to its adult readers. Perhaps some of these meanings lay just beneath the surface of the story, even for Crane, who did not work on the more heavy-handed Beauty’s Awakening for another ten years. As a result, this reading attests to the potential impossibility of children’s fiction by excluding possibilities that might emerge from a child’s encounter with the text.

120

Childhood by Design

Performing Flora’s Feast and the possibilities of imaginative looking An alternative reading of Flora’s Feast emerges when the reader relies only on interpretive possibilities readily accessible within the space of the page, that space which stands “in between” the writer and reader. In an article subtitled “The Possibility of Children’s Literature,” Bernstein approaches children’s books as scripts to be read and performed by readers. The resulting performances take the form of interpretive play, as when children act out a book’s narrative with their dolls, and offer a way for the child reader to reenact and even revise the text.22 This model restores both the child’s agency and the possibility of children’s literature, since it is through the child’s active interpretive play that children become authors and makers of stories. Flora’s Feast, along with Crane’s other stories featuring personified figures, invite this type of interpretive play through their interchange between text and image, prompting readers to enact the story themselves and guiding them to become active producers of meaning. Throughout Flora’s Feast, the pictures do not just illustrate the text, and the text does not just describe the pictures. Rather, the words and the images act as two separate but equal signs, placed side by side and sharing similar meaning, yet having different appearances and associations. The task of the reader is to accommodate one to the other, traversing the gap between the pictures and the words to figure out how the words describing, for example, “the stately lilies” or “Lords and Ladies,” give rise to an imaginative persona or, conversely, how a particular costume relates to the poetic descriptions in the text.23 Take the illustration of the lords-and-ladies, for example, a flower with an arrow-shaped yellow-green leaf that wraps around a dark purple spadix, from which red berries grow in the Fall (Figure 5.2). Crane’s text refers to the “shaking spear,” indicating the spadix emerging from the centre of the flower, and “ridinghood,” referring to the yellow-green sheath in which it is wrapped, and which is often described as a kind of hood protecting the spadix.24 In itself the textual description is unremarkable, but the illustration gives the reader much to unpack. Their clothing resembles the yellow-green sheath of the flower, wrapping around their bodies, heads, arms, and feet. The pointed hood of the flower is replicated in the pointy hoods of their clothing, the drooping forms of the armholes, and the more tightly-wrapped openings for their hands, as well as in the hat and shoes of the male figure and the leaf perched on the female’s hand, which resembles

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking

121

a bird. Faces, arms, and hands stand in for the spadix in most cases, though the male figure’s hat and shoes are a closer approximation of the flower, complete with spadix. The male figure also holds a spear that is essentially an enlarged version of the flower, giving concrete evidence for the “shaking spear” of the text. To complete the picture, red berries hang from each of the figures’ belts. The effort to pick out characteristics of the flower and identify the inventive ways Crane transformed them into costumes produces pleasure and delight for readers, giving rise to a narrative about the artist’s skill and imaginative capabilities. Yet in order to access this pleasure and delight, readers must use their imaginations to make connections and forge meaning. The relationship between the words and images thus encourages the play of the imagination, as the reader takes imaginative leaps from word to image and back again. In this way, Flora’s Feast cultivates habits of playful and imaginative looking and reading, helping its readers develop active imaginations suitable to the Aesthetic objective of creating beautiful alternatives to the industrial world. This interpretation of Flora’s Feast suggests that the book instructed readers to use their imaginations, and thus crosses over the supposed divide between instruction and imagination that long informed scholarship on Victorian children’s literature.25 But far from introducing an anomaly within its time, Crane’s efforts to combine instruction and imagination, utility and play, reflects late nineteenth-century understandings of children’s play. In the context of a growing acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, philosophers and early psychologists wondered about the utility of play. After all, the thinking went, if nature selected play as a valuable activity worth preserving, then it must serve an important purpose. A dominant theory emerging around the turn of the century proposed that play was a means for children to practice tasks and behavior essential for survival. The notion that play prepared children for life crystallized in the writings of the German philosopher and psychologist Karl Groos, specifically in The Play of Animals (1896), but the general idea had already been circulating prior to Groos’s formulation.26 What made Groos’s work so memorable lay in his contention that “the very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play.”27 Groos argued that play allows both animals and children to experience “delight in the control we have over our bodies and over external objects,” and thereby provides a means for children to learn about their environment and their potential to intervene in that environment.28

122

Childhood by Design

In a subsequent study on The Play of Man (1899), Groos examined imaginative play and described precisely the kind of play practiced in Flora’s Feast, where the imagination “endows lifeless objects with our own spiritual capacities of desire, emotion, and temper.” Examples include transforming “a splinter into a doll’s milk-bottle, a few chips stuck up into men and trees, a cloud into the greatest variety of faces,” and, we can add to this list, the transformation of flowers into fashionable human beings.29 Groos believed that such playful illusions provided children with useful opportunities to exercise the imagination and, along with other turn-of-the-century psychologists and educators, emphasized the importance of the imagination for experimentation and development.30 For example, the English philosopher and psychologist James Sully described imagination as the process by which “images of memory … are worked up into a new imaginative product,” and emphasized the importance of imagination to “the discovery of facts and truths.”31 Similarly, the American educator Joseph Baldwin explained in 1887 that “imagination is our capability to purposely make new combinations” and that “imagination immeasurably increases human achievement and human happiness.”32 However, these authors distinguished between the untrained fancies of children and imaginative capacities resulting from education and cultivation. Groos stated that “a mere disconnected succession of fancies” could “hardly be called experimentation,” while Baldwin distinguished between fantasy and imagination, and found only the former fully developed in children.33 The Scottish psychologist Alexander Bain viewed imagination as the “power of conceiving” both impartially and completely, and described it as “a high effort of the mind”; in contrast, “the snatches of fairyland engrained by the emotions of the marvellous are but the faintest approaches to such a power.”34 For these educators and psychologists, the child’s inclinations towards playful fantasy would eventually be tempered by experience, but could also be cultivated and trained in order to prepare children, in Sully’s words, “for the serious intellectual work of later years.”35 Though Crane shared these educationalists’ views on the importance of the imagination, his writings and his work in art and design suggest that he preferred the untrained imaginative capacities of children.36 This explains Crane’s affinity for illustrating children’s books, which he described as providing the modern illustrator with “perhaps the only outlet for unrestricted flights of fancy.”37 Crane placed a high value on such unrestricted fancies, writing that, “let loose from ordinary restraints, [the imagination] finds a world of its own,” and that “a spirit

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking

123

of playful gravity … sometimes reaches further than the weightiest purpose and most solid reasoning.”38 Here, playful imagination proves useful not only as preparation for later life, but as a valuable tool in its own right. Crane believed that children’s “fresh direct vision” and “quickly stimulated imagination” gave them an advantage over adults, providing them with the so-called innocent eye that Modernist artists and art critics frequently ascribed to children.39 Yet, for Crane, innocence was not valued for its potential to achieve a heightened realism or a deepened spiritual state, as it was by other Modernist artists and critics.40 Rather, the appeal of the child’s innocence lay in a supposed inexperience with the demands of industrial capitalism, which worked to contain the inefficiencies of imaginative play. For Crane, children’s unfettered imaginations provided the model for a potential avant-garde that could introduce playful experimentation, open up new possibilities, and even create new worlds. Current scholarship on children’s imaginative play continues to propose its utility and value, and helps elaborate Crane’s position. In her 2009 book The Philosophical Baby, psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik echoes Crane’s notion of the imagination finding “a world of its own” when she explains that play allows children to “consider different ways the world might be.”41 Gopnik interprets children’s unique capacity for pretend play as an important part of their function in the world, comparing the division between childhood and adulthood to a division between research and production. In other words, it is the child’s imaginative play that generates new ideas and possible worlds, while adults “have to figure out whether we want to move into one of those possible worlds, and how to drag all our furniture in there too.”42 Gopnik shares Groos’s emphasis on the evolutionary function of play, and like Crane, she views imaginative play as a means of creating alternative worlds; children are not just little people to be trained into adulthood, but also act as a potential avant-garde of society. This notion of children as society’s avant-garde may help explain why Flora’s Feast was “not a child’s book proper,” after all. Crane may have considered the book’s lessons in imaginative looking more important for his adult readers than for children, since the adults must decide, in Gopnik’s terms, whether to adopt imaginative alternatives and how to get there. Flora’s Feast instructs these adult readers in the child’s avant-garde, Aesthetic way of seeing, characterized by imaginative playfulness. Yet, at the same time, Flora’s Feast may have been a children’s book in a sense that Rose would have approved, in that it reversed the typical relationship between adult as “author, maker, giver” and child as “reader,

124

Childhood by Design

product, receiver.” That is, instead of imposing adult ideals on children, the book seeks to impose an imaginative, and childlike, way of seeing on adults.

The child as author, maker, giver Crane’s remark that Flora’s Feast is not a child’s book appears within a larger discussion of his books for children, where he explains that his own three children “had a special set of books for their own home consumption quite independently of the published ones, and in one or two instances, such as ‘Legends for Lionel,’ these have since been given to the world, and in other cases, such as ‘Flora’s Feast’ (though not a child’s book proper), have furnished the suggestions after elaborated.”43 This passage tells us in definite terms that children—individual, specific children—were the inspiration for Flora’s Feast. Furthermore, it opens up the very likely possibility that the original book formed part of the Crane family’s imaginative play, either giving rise to family play as the script to be enacted or recording the play of the Crane children in the form of an original picture book. Some of these special books for Crane’s children are now in library collections, and provide further evidence of the link between the play enacted in the Crane family home and Crane’s published books. For example, extant books made for Crane’s eldest daughter Beatrice in 1879 include personified figures, fairies, and garden settings. One book also features motifs that later formed the basis for Crane’s books on “the three R’s,” published in 1885 and 1886.44 Furthermore, the rich history of children’s books featuring personified flowers, described earlier, suggests that the game of bringing flowers to life and interpreting their characteristics as human attributes or fashionable accessories was not a far-fetched activity for Victorian children. With this in mind, it is tempting to imagine that Flora’s Feast was based on the Crane children’s imaginative play or that it may have been a collaboration between children and father. If this is the case, then the book offers traces of the subjectivity, agency, and tastes of three actual, historical children, aged fifteen, twelve, and eight at the time of the book’s publication.45 Returning to Crane’s autobiography for evidence of this hypothesis, I rediscovered that Crane had collaborated with his daughter Beatrice around the time that Flora’s Feast appeared in print. Crane recounts how Beatrice “in her childhood showed considerable taste for writing verse,” and how Oscar Wilde,

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking

125

editor of Woman’s World and Little Folks, admired her poem entitled “Blush Roses” and “wanted it for the magazine, where it duly appeared, accompanied with a design of my own.”46 The poem appeared in Woman’s World in February 1888, less than a year before Flora’s Feast appeared in print (Figure 5.5). The poem describes how a group of roses literally blush when a cupid “kneel[s] down beside them” and tells them “a whisp’ring tale.” In the end, “the blush it still doth linger. That’s why they’re called Blush roses.”47 Though the poem shares in the logic of Flora’s Feast by treating a flower in personified form, Crane’s illustration for Beatrice’s poem only includes straightforward depictions of roses. Given that this was Beatrice’s first publication, it seems likely that Crane would have wanted his daughter’s imaginative capabilities to come to the fore. He does not attract unnecessary attention by telling part of the story through his picture, but instead allows Beatrice’s words to make meaning on their own. The poem is signed with Beatrice’s name, while Crane’s signature initials are included discretely in the bottom left-hand corner. Even more telling are Beatrice Crane’s poems on each month of the year, also illustrated by her father. Published monthly in Little Folks in 1889 from January until July and then as a complete set in The Little Folks Diary and Notebook for 1891 and as a stand-alone children’s book, each poem and picture describes one month in the guise of a female figure.48 Flowers appear throughout the poems and pictures so that, for example, June “brings a wealth of roses sweet, white, yellow, rosy-red, they’re falling to her feet,” while July “brings with her tall lilies both orange & pure white.” As with Flora’s Feast, the reader is led through seasonal changes in flowers, but within the illustrations flowers remain flowers and people remain people; they are pictured side-by-side rather than imaginatively intertwined. It is unclear whether father or daughter entertained the notion of personified flowers first. In one published version of the series, a preface explains that “these verses were written by Beatrice Crane when quite a child,” suggesting that the poems could have predated Flora’s Feast.49 But even if Beatrice was the first of the two to imagine a world of personified flowers, her father had been experimenting with the wider theme of personified figures since before her birth, and wrote and illustrated a book about the months of the year attending a party in 1871.50 The commonalities between their work, and the lack of clarity regarding which came first, suggest that there was no clear or complete division of authorship between these stories; rather, the stories and their pictures originated in imaginative play between father and child.

126

Childhood by Design

Figure 5.5 Beatrice Crane, “Legend of the Blush Roses,” in Woman’s World (February 1888): 177. Courtesy Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

At the outset of this essay, I suggested that Crane was trying to find a “possible” children’s literature, one that spoke with children rather than at them. By drawing on the play of his own children, Crane eliminated the space between

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking

127

himself as author and his children as readers, instead placing his children on the same side of the equation as the adult author. Now the reader to be spoken at, across the space of the book, is the adult reader. Crane may have imagined that the book affected his eventual readers differently, maintaining and exercising the habits of imaginative play in children and young adults, while restoring them or cultivating them anew in adults. As I read to my own child, this idea returns to me when her picture books have the effect of disrupting my own habits of efficient and industrious reading, replacing them with a more playful and imaginative approach to looking and reading.

Acknowledgments Special thanks go to Megan Brandow-Faller, whose questions and comments helped shape this essay. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer of this essay, Ann Bermingham, Paula Marentette, Christina Smylitopoulos, Dani VanDusen, Janet Wesselius and Adelaide Martin for their help, suggestions and ideas.

Notes 1

2

For examples of Aesthetic interiors, see the Leighton House Museum, particularly the Arab Hall (1877–1881); James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room (1876–1877), currently installed in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and Walter Crane’s frontispiece for Clarence Cook’s The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1878). See also Lionel Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement (London: Phaidon Press, 1996); Lynn Federle Orr and Stephen Calloway, eds., The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900 (London: V & A Publications, 2012); and Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Walter Crane, “Notes on My Own Books for Children,” The Imprint (17 February 1913): 85; Andrea Korda, “Learning from ‘Good Pictures’: Walter Crane’s Picture Books and Visual Literacy,” Word & Image 32, no. 4 (2016): 327–339; and Amy F. Ogata, “Henry Van de Velde’s Bloemenwerf: English Books and Belgian Art Nouveau,” in The Built Surface: Architecture and the Pictorial Arts from Romanticism to the Twenty-First Century, Vol. 2, ed. Karen Koehler and Christy Anderson (London: Ashgate Press, 2002), 73–90.

128

Childhood by Design

3 Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life: Recollections and Reflections (New York: The McClure Company, 1908), 87. Japanese prints were a significant influence on Crane’s illustrations for the Routledge Toy Books, as he describes in Walter Crane, Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New (London: George Bell and Sons, 1972), 128. 4 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 1–2. 5 Ibid., 2. 6 Robin Bernstein, “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature,” PMLA 126, no. 1 (2011): 160–169. 7 “Christmas Books,” Pall Mall Gazette (November 29, 1888): 5; “Literary Notes,” The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent (December 20, 1888): 6; and the Cassell & Co. advertisement in The Standard (December 13, 1888): 4. 8 See advertisements in The Standard (December 13, 1888): 4 and (December 21, 1888): 4; and in The Fishing Gazette (December 21, 1889): 390, (December 13, 1890): 336, (December 17, 1892): 514, and (December 16, 1893): 503. 9 “Christmas Books,” Pall Mall Gazette (November 29, 1888): 5. Another critic wrote that the book “will certainly be admired by young and old,” in “Literary Notes,” The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent (December 20, 1888): 6. 10 Crane, “Notes on My Own Books for Children,” 85. 11 Ibid. 12 Walter Crane, “Work of Walter Crane,” Easter Art Annual (1898): 10. 13 The books named here are in the Osborne Collection of Early Children Books at the Toronto Public Library. Cicely Mary Barker’s series of Flower Fairies included eight books. The books are currently published by Penguin, and new merchandise appears regularly. For more information, see www.flowerfairies.com. 14 For information on Aesthetic dress and dress reform, see Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), 103–134; Stella Mary Newton, Health, Art and Reason: Dress Reformers of the 19th Century (London: Cox & Wyman Ltd, 1974); Kimberly Wahl, Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2013); and Mary Eliza Haweis, The Art of Beauty (London: Chatto & Windus, 1878). 15 Walter Crane, “On the Progress of Taste in Dress in Relation to Art Education,” reprinted in Ideals in Art: Papers Theoretical Practical Critical (London: George Bell & Sons, 1905), 178. 16 Wahl, Dressed as in a Painting, 102–140; and Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement, 124–125. 17 Crane, “On the Progress of Taste in Dress in Relation to Art Education,” 180. This style of dress reappears throughout Crane’s work, including paintings

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking

18 19

20 21 22 23

24

25

26

129

and political posters. See Crane’s oil painting Freedom (1885) and his “The Strong Man: A Cartoon for Labour Day,” Justice (May 1, 1897). These and other examples are reproduced in Morna O’Neill, Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875–1890 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 97, 140. Walter Crane, “Art and Industry,” in The Claims of Decorative Art (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1892), 172. O’Neill, Walter Crane, 159–164, and Andrea Rager, “‘Smite this Sleeping World Awake’: Edward Burne-Jones and The Legend of the Briar Rose,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 438–450. Art Workers’ Guild, Beauty’s Awakening, a Masque of Winter and of Spring (London: The Studio, 1899). Crane, “On the Progress of Taste in Dress in Relation to Art Education,” 186. Bernstein, “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race,” 163. On the “readerly gap,” see Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles, Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling (London: Laurence King, 2012), 75. Also see my “Learning from ‘Good Pictures,’” 333–334. The publisher’s note included in the Dover edition of Flora’s Feast (2002) reports that Crane depended on Rev. Hilderic Friend’s Flowers and Flower Lore (London: W. Swan Sonnenscheim & Co., 1884). Friend illustrates Lords and Ladies on page 442. F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1932); Anne H. Lundin, “Victorian Horizons: The Reception of Children’s Books in England and America, 1880–1900,” The Library Quarterly 64, no. 1 (January 1994): 30–59; Ronald Reichertz, The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll’s Uses of Earlier Children’s Literature (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); Geoffrey Summerfield, “The Making of The Home Treasury,” Children’s Literature 8 (1980): 35–52; and Andrea Immel’s critique in “Children’s Books and School-Books,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, ed. Michael F. Suarex, S. J. Michael and L. Turner (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 736–749. Karl Groos, The Play of Animals, trans. Elizabeth Baldwin (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898). The book was published in London by Chapman & Hall. Groos’s American editor wrote: “this general conception of play has been set forth by other writers; but Professor Groos works it out in this book in a way which attaches his name permanently to it” (v). For example, in 1880, James Freeman Clarke explained that “by play [all young creatures] develop their faculties, quicken their senses, acquire alacrity of perception, rapidity of movement, power of attack and defense,” and went on to explain how “the plays of children make a very important part of their education.” See “Education by Means of Amusement,” in

130

27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

Childhood by Design Self-Culture: Physical, Intellectual, Moral and Spiritual (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1880; reprinted 1882), 381, 383. Groos, The Play of Animals, xx. Ibid., 290. Groos, The Play of Man (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901), 135. Ibid., 138, 377. James Sully, The Teacher’s Handbook of Psychology (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1886), 212, 217. Joseph Baldwin, Elementary Psychology and Education (New York: D. Appleton, 1887), 142–143; Arthur Cromwell, Practical Child Study (Chicago: W. M. Welch & Company, 1895), 74. Groos, Play of Man, 188 and Baldwin, Elementary Psychology and Education, 142. Alexander Bain, Education as a Science (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1879), 128. Sully, The Teacher’s Handbook of Psychology, 229, 224. See also Bain, Education as a Science, 128. Crane would certainly have known about developments in thinking around evolution and play. Crane wrote in his reminiscences about meeting Professor Huxley, who was an advocate of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Herbert Spencer, who Crane calls “the great evolutionist philosopher,” and is also known for his theory of play. See Crane’s An Artist’s Reminiscences (London: Methuen & Company, 1907), 192–193. Crane, Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New, 130. Crane, “Work of Walter Crane,” 5. Ibid. Crane did allow that a few “happy [adults] … remain children in these respects through life.” Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 71–72. Ibid., 72. Crane, “Notes on My Own Books for Children,” 85. Walter Crane, Beatrice Crane Her Book (The 2nd), June 1st 1879 (Toronto: Toronto Public Library, 1983); Walter Crane, Beatrice in Fairy-Land, 1879, from the Houghton Library at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Crane’s books on “the three R’s” include Slateandpencil-Vania (1885), Little Queen Anne and Her Majesty’s Letters (1886) and Pothooks & Perseverance (1886), all published by Marcus Ward & Co. I estimated the children’s ages based on their years of birth, given in Alan Crawford, “Crane, Walter (1845–1915),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford

Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking

46 47

48

49 50

131

University Press, 2004); online edn, January 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com. login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/view/article/32616 (accessed February 11, 2017). Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences, 192. Beatrice Crane, “Legend of the Blush Roses,” Woman’s World 1 (February 1888): 177. In his reminiscences, Crane incorrectly states that the poem was published in Little Folks. Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences, 195. Walter Crane, The Little Folks Diary & Note Book for 1891 (London: Cassell & Co., 1891); Beatrice Crane and Walter Crane, The Procession of the Months (Wisbeach: R.H. Bath, n.d.), unpaginated. Some libraries date the latter book to 1906, others to 1908. Crane and Crane, The Procession of the Months, unpaginated. Walter Crane, King Luckieboy’s Party (London: Routledge, 1871).

6

The Unexpected Victory of Character-Puppen: Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender in Imperial Germany Bryan Ganaway

The intersection of consumer culture and childhood seems worryingly apposite in our century. In a culture where children are “born to buy,” sociologist Juliet Schor warns that growing commercialization is undermining the well-being of children. Similarly, sociologist Leo Bogart writes that advertising aimed at youth threatens to destroy American culture in a sea of crudity.1 Facebook, Bratz Dolls, and Pinypons have apparently won. As a father of two young girls I am also concerned about the commodification of youth, but as a historian I realize that this is not a new development. Adults have debated consumer culture’s impact on childhood for over a century. Indeed, a number of scholars believe that childhood as a field is so interesting precisely because it allows us to see how adults have remade it to meet changing cultural values.2 According to this interpretation, Bratz Dolls only win if we want them to. In this essay I argue that toys can be read as objects of material culture around which adults and children assign meaning. Consumer culture is complicated and can yield liberating or restrictive outcomes for both children and adults. The toys function as nodes on a network around which humans argue about cultural values. Indeed, following John Gillis, I would define consumer culture primarily as a sociological process of personal self-fashioning that revolves around purchased objects rather than as an economic system that links consumer, producers, and sellers via a market. The advantage of this approach is that it allows us to become archaeologists of the modern world. If we understand not only how toys are made, but how people played with them, we may be able to construct a genealogy of childhood values. This may help us ensure that consumer culture functions as a positive force in our children’s lives.

134

Childhood by Design

To test this thesis I would like to examine one specific case from Imperial Germany (1871–1918): dolls. Today we no longer remember the Kaiserreich (German Empire) as the land of toys, but by 1900 companies located there controlled 60 percent of the world market. This astonishing figure paled against their domination (95 percent) of domestic consumption. In 1890, Germany exported 27.8 million Marks of toys and 40 million Marks five years later. By 1901 this figure reached 53 million Marks, in 1906 70.5 million Marks, and in 1911 90.1 million Marks. On the eve of the First World War, the Reich accounted for 125 million out of 230 million Marks of world toy production. Great Britain and the United States represented by far the largest export region, accounting for 60 million Marks, even higher than domestic sales. France, Argentina, Russia, and Japan provided another 10 million Marks of total revenue. Dolls represented by far the most common toy produced in Germany, accounting for one-third of the nearly one hundred million Mark sales figure after 1910.3 After 1900 the most common of these toys, dolls, became the locus of a fight over female middle-class identity. Factory owners, entrepreneurs, and childhood experts tended to envision the ideal woman as a proficient domestic manager. A second alternative ideal championed by social reformers and maternal feminists saw women as nurturing, artistically creative mothers possessing particular cultural skills unavailable to men. Such maternal feminists represented an important part of the feminist movement in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain after 1900.4 Artists such as Käthe Kruse and a number of compatriots used dolls to make the case that women deserved a voice in the public sphere, and perhaps even the vote, because they performed the most important function in the nation: raising future citizens. This hope of maternal feminists seemed plausible because the Reich already possessed universal manhood suffrage for federal elections. The history and consequences of this debate, played out in the press and the department stores, is one of the most instructive examples of how an archaeology of material culture can help us understand historical changes in values relating to childhood. Each side of Imperial Germany’s doll debate presented consumers with a distinct aesthetic ideal. Male entrepreneurs and factory owners conceptualized dolls around the idea of verisimilitude and manufactured standardized forms designed to be as life-like as possible. The technological mastery through which the dolls were manufactured reflected the progressive spirit of the era which assumed that men could use their intellect to identify problems and solutions that would improve the human condition. This Enlightenment-inspired model

Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender

135

appealed to nineteenth-century consumers, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals steeped in models of progress. By contrast, female entrepreneurs and artists countered this paradigm by using the doll to introduce another aesthetic into the market: individuation and simplicity. Female artists’ alternative or so-called “reform” dolls eschewed uniformity in favor of diverse possibility. Whereas factory dolls were realistically and elaborately detailed, the artistic versions remained more abstract so that children could imagine the doll in a more creative fashion. This more individualized model displaced the aesthetic of verisimilitude, but not necessarily all of the values associated with it. My case study of character dolls in Imperial Germany confirms the findings of recent scholarship on dolls and girlhood, particularly the groundbreaking work of Miriam Forman-Brunell. According to Forman-Brunell, dolls functioned as an artifact around which critical debates about motherhood and childhood played out. “One the one hand,” Forman-Brunell wrote, “businessmen created dolls they marketed as symbols of an idealized feminine domesticity; on the other, women dollmakers manufactured toys that embodied more malleable notions of girlhood and boyhood … businesswomen re-appropriated dolls to suit their social agenda.”5 The situation in Wilhelmine Germany was strikingly analogous and invites a similar reading. In the American context, entrepreneurs like Martha Chase and Rose O’Neill sold dolls challenging the cult of female domesticity, positing an alternative model championing women as maternalistic reformers and nurturers. Similarly, in the consumer culture of Imperial Germany, the simple and individualized dolls of Kruse and Marion Kaulitz provided an attractive alternative to highly-elaborate mechanical dolls with closing eyes, movable limbs, and real hair. As my case study suggests, consumer culture helped to carve out a space for German mothers as cultural creators and caregivers with unique skills unavailable to men.6 One intriguing implication of this insight is that consumer culture represented one of the prime means for disseminating a maternal feminist vision in Central Europe around 1900. Feminist scholars refer to this brand of feminist idealism as relational feminism, or the idea that women’s rights and particular qualities as wives and mothers could exist relative to men in a separate, distinct sphere. Advocacy of maternal feminism often overlapped with interest in the doctrines of scientific motherhood, or the idea that empirical, scientific training rather than sentiment provided the most enlightened means of raising children, as well as the notion of social housekeeping, or the idea that women’s capacity as nurturing mothers justified their activism in a variety of progressive social

136

Childhood by Design

causes related to children and the family. In the context of these progressive ideas centering on women’s particular qualities as mothers, female entrepreneurs in Wilhelmine Germany used the market to challenge the dominant doll aesthetic of verisimilitude.7

Dolls and doll reform In the second half of the nineteenth century, dolls came to be almost exclusively associated with girls. In an age increasingly influenced by biological notions of gender, it made perfect sense to many educated people that boys and girls had evolved into different social roles. This development erased more openended ideas related to doll play, some of which dated back to the early modern period.8 Most male entrepreneurs assumed that dolls trained girls to become good domestic managers. By 1900 a number of books appeared arguing that “the home is and remains woman’s world … it is never too early to teach girls their true calling [Beruf].”9 The use of the German Beruf suggested a Godgiven calling as well as intellectual and spiritual suitability for motherhood that elevated women’s status as heads of households. But a number of artists, reporters, pedagogues, and intellectuals balked at this development and offered more generalized dolls open to multiple interpretations in an effort to recast women’s roles in modern society. Since nearly every family in Germany that could afford it purchased dolls, millions of German girls, along with their parents, confronted a dilemma when buying this commodity. They had the pleasure of purchasing a toy but also faced the problem of buying (into) social identities. The debate about women’s place in modern society raged every bit as hotly in miniature as it did in real life. Despite the fact that male toy producers operated from a position of hegemonic dominance, consumer culture permitted the entrance of subversive discourses.10 A perusal of doll advertisements aimed at consumers illuminates how doll play underpinned the notion that women helped society most as domestic managers. Newspaper ads for department stores, toy companies, and specialty shops laid out dolls in an orderly and rational fashion. Indeed, girls (or the adult purchasers consuming on their behalf) no longer had the option of buying a “simple” doll but chose from clothed dolls, dolls with movable joints, dolls made out of leather, stuffed dolls, doll heads (sometimes made out of lead), and all manner of accessories.11 Generally, an accurately miniaturized doll fashionably

Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender

137

dressed was set-off against an organized pricelist dividing them into clothed and unclothed, movable or rigid, wood, porcelain, or plastic. Prices ranged from less than 50 Pfennigs to over 95 Marks. Although those on the expensive side had “the most elegant design” and thus remained rare, parents could buy a 32-centimeter unclothed baby doll with movable limbs and closing eyes for only 85 Pfennigs at the Passage-Kaufhaus in Berlin. For another 85 Pfennigs one could get real hair with barrettes and a shirt.12 Regardless of what doll the consumer bought, advertisements listed or showed numerous accessories in the form of clothing, personal hygiene objects, and even doll toys. Girls received the miniature and then had the opportunity to ask for new things intended for it, reinforcing the notion of doll-motherhood (or that they were mothers providing for their doll baby). Sometimes these complicated miniatures broke, necessitating a category of doll-doctors who advertised in major newspapers with promises to fix broken limbs or decapitated figurines.13 Much like real women mothering their children, doll mothers took their toys to the doctor to make them well. Is there evidence that girls played with dolls in the way that male entrepreneurs hoped and societal gender ideals prescribed? As one might suspect, the answer is yes. However, there is also plenty of autobiographical evidence pointing in the opposite direction. While working in the long nineteenth century precludes my use of ethnographies, personal memoirs remain useful and instructive. Hailing from a middle-class Stuttgart family, writer Tony Schumacher recalled an episode when her Uncle Louis took her to the Grosschen Toy Store to buy a doll. Pointing at the rows of stacked dolls, Schumacher’s uncle asked her to “choose.” Schumacher stood blank-faced and ended up picking the “silliest [and most stylized carnival] one available and taking it home to my aunt.” Her older female relative smiled at the toy, let her play with it for a little while, and then took her back to the store to return it and instead bought a life-like porcelain doll. Schumacher wrote she felt ridiculous for buying a doll without educational potential, but learned her lesson that doll play was supposed to prepare girls practically as domestic managers.14 Fanny Lewald recalled having store-bought dolls as de rigueur for girls. Lewald, a member of a middle-class Jewish family in Königsberg, recalled that at first her dolls did not arouse “much more than curiosity.” Remarkably, she took one of her dolls apart to see what it was made out of, enraging her mother. Lewald quickly realized that adults only wanted her to play with dolls in certain ways.15 A major social science survey conducted by psychologist G. Stanley Hall and pedagogue Alexander Caswell Ellis for the journal Pedagogical Seminary in 1896

138

Childhood by Design

supports similar tendencies as the autobiographical material cited above. Ellis and Hall polled 845 mostly female children and found that a surprising number mutilated their dolls or took out their anger on them. Fifty-four girls described their dolls as cold, another forty-six as jealous, forty-five as bad, thirty-eight as angry and thirty-six as naughty. Such attitudes justified playing with them in ways never intended by producers such as leaving them in the window until they melted, cutting off legs, pulling out hair, or taking them outside and burying them. One six-year-old hated dolls and said, “they are all girls, they just keep their mouth shut [and don’t do anything].” This remarkable and indeed distressing insight suggests that a kindergartener had already learned that women had less social value than males. Some girls punished these naughty dolls. Others starved dolls or shook them for, “not standing properly,” “talking back,” and “being sassy.” One ten-year-old girl punished dolls by ripping their legs off. A six-yearold girl beat her dolls every time she wet herself, and the researchers drew the obvious conclusion that this was a response to getting beaten by her parents.16 Needless to say, this was not the kind of play producers, parents, and pedagogues wanted to see. In the American context, such rebellious forms of doll play caused much anguish to researchers who feared that, far from learning to be nurturing mothers, girls learned to be cruel. Germans also worried that technological dolls might be inadvertently undermining future national strength by failing to properly cultivate girls as domestic managers. A small circle of artists and critics including Hans Boesch, Marion Kaulitz, Paul Hildebrandt, and Käthe Kruse would not have been surprised by the findings of Hall and Ellis’s study. Invoking the discourse of maternalist feminism, these reformers argued that producers of technically-precise dolls did not understand girls’ needs and went in search of new meanings for dolls, motherhood, and girlhood. This activism does not mean they rejected motherhood as an appropriate female role; rather, they saw motherhood as an activity requiring more creativity and imagination. In particular, the female makers of alternative dolls hoped to use the toy to carve out a new space for women as cultural producers. In a society already trained to purchase dolls on a regular basis, the route of consumer culture presented a viable alternative to legislation in disseminating new ideas about women’s role in a middle-class society. Supporters of these Character-Puppen, or “character” dolls, so-called because of their individualized faces, suggested that women could be creators and cultivators of children and good businesspersons in ways male producers never imagined.

Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender

139

Starting as early as 1904, Munich artist Marion Kaulitz began to experiment with simple, cloth dolls, inspired by contemporary toy exhibitions, like that held at the Bavarian Trade Museum in 1904, as well as the principles of quality and simplicity integral to the German Werkbund movement. Kaulitz handcrafted stuffed dolls with no moving joints and painted heads (with no hair or closing eyes), as well as male and female dolls clothed in regional costume. She received positive critical acclaim not limited to avant-garde circles. A number of articles about her dolls appeared in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung as early as 1909 and were featured in the Wiener Werkstätte postcard series, in addition to being distributed at the Werkstätte’s Vienna sales outlet.17 Released in 1910 to promote sale of Kaulitz dolls, the postcards (designed by illustrator Josef Divéky) depicted male and female dolls with individualized faces, variously attired in play clothing like rompers and vernacular costumes.18 Kaulitz’s success in such avant-garde circles paved the way for more mainstream acceptance. A major display at the Hermann Tietz Department Store in Berlin during the 1908 Christmas season also served to bring her designs to the attention of consumers. Many educated people found her call for reform dolls compelling, based on the premise that the doll should demonstrate simplicity and naturalness just like real children. The artist maintained that all children, but especially girls, possessed a nascent creativity that had to be delicately cultivated through a new type of doll less dependent on animated mechanical features and visual realism. In contrast to the elaborate naturalistic details characteristic of mainstream doll production, Kaulitz’s figurines had large, papier-mâché heads, thick limbs without joints, and basic clothing (Figure 6.1). Consumers easily recognized them as dolls, but they did not call to mind the kind of specific, true-to-life images of factory-made versions. Most importantly for marketing purposes, however, each doll had a distinct face designed by Munich Secession artist Paul Vogelsänger. This aesthetic shift from verisimilitude to individuation attracted consumers.19 Kaulitz’s figurines suggested that all girls could play in their own ways and perhaps define themselves along axes that had to do with creativity and individuality rather than domesticity. The creative possibilities of Kaulitz’s dolls struck a chord with a small number of educated upper-middle-class women in Imperial Germany. All she required to disseminate the new discourse on character dolls to a wider public was a suitable consumer venue. A reporter for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, Hartl Mitius, visited Kaulitz and reported that her character dolls embodied the artist’s alternative values and lifestyle. “Her atelier [in Schwabing by Munich]

140

Childhood by Design

Figure 6.1 Marion Kaulitz Character Dolls, c. 1910–1911. In Westermanns Monatshefte, Volume 111/II (Dec 1911), 616.

would have charmed any group of children [or adults] with the joy of artistic discovery … thank God that somebody has finally given these exact fashion dolls the boot,” Mitius wrote. She recorded that many of her fellow mothers were sick of giving children expensive, technological toys that had to be delicately handled and cared for. Citing her own daughter as an example, Mitius wrote that girls wanted dolls to be a “companion,” not a dependent, and that it did not matter what they looked like. Indeed, the simpler and sturdier, the better she continued. Purchasing such dolls marked her out as a new kind of modern woman. Instead of functioning as a domestic manager, the article proceeded to detail how Kaulitz worked independently in her own domestic sphere of creative disorder as she developed her art.20 Kaulitz’s primary goal was to explore the artistic and cultural possibilities of the doll rather than to market a commodity. The first artist to earnestly take up that problem was Käthe Kruse (1883–1968), who represents a particularly interesting case study because she existed outside norms of middle-class feminine respectability for much of her life. Indeed, both Kruse’s dolls and personal history directly challenged the notion that middle-class women should function as domestic managers. Proving that women could be more than mothers and housewives, Kruse started a workshop in 1910 and ran a reform doll company

Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender

141

in operation until the 1960s. Born Käthe Simon in Breslau as the illegitimate daughter of a civil servant and cleaning lady, the artist struggled to achieve social acceptance and remembered being unhappy as a child. Young Käthe decided to become a stage actress, a profession that had a questionable reputation in the Kaiserreich. She enjoyed enough success to move to Berlin where she met and married sculptor Max Kruse, thirty years her senior. As a considerably older man, Max Kruse dominated his wife’s personal and professional life, a situation which she reluctantly accepted in exchange for the gains in social respectability brought by their marriage. Throughout the marriage, Kruse ridiculed her artistic endeavors. She later took issue with this treatment in her memoirs, in which she admitted that it was precisely her husband’s condescension for her artistic ambitions that motivated her to make reform dolls.21 Reflecting on the origins of the character-doll movement, Kruse stated that she felt disgusted with male-designed, factory-made dolls. During a family vacation in Italy (1908–1909), when, however, Max remained in Berlin to work, Kruse’s daughter Sophie asked for a doll that would be like a “real child.” Kruse immediately wrote her husband to purchase and send a doll from the capital but the sculptor wrote back saying, “No, I will not buy you a doll. I find them terrible. How can one awake motherly feelings with a hard, cold stuffed doll. Make one yourself. A better chance to develop yourself artistically you will not find.” Kruse took a washrag and filled it with sand. She tied knots in all four corners to serve as arms and legs. Finally, she sewed a potato into the top of the rag to serve as a head, into which she carved features. Her daughter was “ecstatic … and loved the doll with religious fervor.” Kruse ruminated on young Sophie’s (who was then five years old) fascination with the doll she named Oskar. She came to the conclusion her daughter simply wanted “something to carry around” and that the doll awakened the child’s “protective motherly instincts.” When Kruse reflected on this episode in her memoir she presented it as almost Hegelian. It was the moment when she realized that the master (her husband) was a man of straw and that she had as much creative instinct as him. Not unaware of the arts and crafts movement, the Berlin Secession and its valorization of decorative arts and handcraft, Kruse saw the dolls as an opportunity to assert herself independently of the artistic control of her husband.22 In designing and making her character dolls, Kruse articulated a new vision of a doll which would nurture maternalist feelings, not provide a technical education for running a kitchen. Kruse felt that women were best suited to doll design precisely because they—in their conventional roles as wives and mothers— understood nurturing in a way men did not. She wrote, “I knew exactly what a

142

Childhood by Design

doll had to be … a union of the primitive and the natural.” Convinced that dolls had deep emotional as opposed to technological meaning, Kruse argued they should be “something to love … that awakes love” in a child. Only a woman, but particularly a mother, could make dolls, in her opinion. Therefore, doll-making had to be part of a feminine sphere from which men would be ejected. Kruse stated that handcraft represented, “a principal she had never given up and never would … only the hand [as opposed to a machine] can show what the heart is feeling.”23 Clearly, Kruse did not reject motherhood as a prime occupation for women but redesigned its scope, suggesting that women possessed artistic skills equal to men. Women, “have the ability … to make connections with other people … and this makes them especially suited to the calling of business,” Kruse claimed. Women made “good listeners … and had better instincts” regarding what boys and girls wanted and needed because of their positions as mothers.24 Like Kaulitz, Kruse dolls had individualized faces and simple bodies and were successively designed to represent younger and younger children until some represented infants.

Figure 6.2 Käthe Kruse Character Doll, c. 1924. In Der Universal-SpielwarenKatalog, Vol. I (Hamburg: Hess, 1924).

Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender

143

The best way to understand the Kruse dolls in Figure 6.2, dressed in idealized versions of folk costume, is to imagine them in relation to late nineteenthcentury factory-made dolls with plastic bodies, real human hair, movable joints, eyes that closed, and numerous accessories. Kruse and many toy purchasers (primarily mothers) felt that these commercial toys drained the soul out of play by eliminating much of the space for imagination. Kruse’s dolls struck a nerve precisely because they were made of cloth, their gender was indeterminate, and their individualized, childlike faces. They were softer where factory-made dolls were hard, generic where the latter were specific, open where the mainstream versions were closed. For many consumers, the handmade signaled cultivation (Bildung) in a way that proved irresistible. As the advertisement stated, the dolls were almost unbreakable and could be washed repeatedly. The doll could be clothed as a boy or a girl, it could be utilized indoors or outdoors, and it brought with it only a minimal series of social assumptions. It was one thing to rethink the ideal form of the doll in theory; it was quite another to sell them as an entrepreneur. An American buyer ordered 150 character dolls to be delivered in November 1911 in time for the Christmas season. At this point, Kruse had no help and no material. She had to buy everything herself and soon “dolls legs, arms, bottoms, and pieces” chaotically covered every piece of furniture in the apartment. She recalled that a number of salesmen representing large toy firms stopped in to see her as a disorganized female spectacle flailing around the living room. These salesmen contrasted the organized, rational production of dolls in factories with the disorder they saw in Kruse’s Berlin apartment. Kruse recorded that Max would step down from the attic in the evening and head for the largest chair; before sitting down he would throw any dolls or parts onto the floor and then brutally critique his wife’s work as pointless while proceeding to demand dinner. Even if this story is apocryphal, it is telling insofar as Kruse fitted her reform dolls into a struggle against uncomprehending and small-minded masculine hegemony that poisoned male efforts to make effective toys. In Kruse’s autobiography, Max appears too as a metaphor for Imperial Germany’s deeply misogynist society, standing in the way of women’s attempts to develop themselves and improve society.25 Kruse’s redefinition of dolls and womanhood resonated with middle-class women in much the same way as Kaulitz’s several years previously. Anna Plothow of the Frauen-Rundschau for the Berliner Tageblatt wrote that “both artists and laypeople stepped back in wonder at these dolls.”26 Kruse recorded that Berlin matrons who had previously avoided her at all costs for being socially suspect

144

Childhood by Design

now eagerly climbed the three flights of stairs to her apartment. Once there, they wanted to buy dolls “such as those they had seen at the exhibition.” After the high society women, a few curious and slightly distressed factory owners stopped by full of questions. Kruse recalled them looking at her with steely eyes and asking, “What kind of doll is this that is making such a stir? How are they made? Who makes them? Can we make them? Or are they already patented?” She depicted male entrepreneurs as idiots to whom no one in their right mind would entrust the vital task of making toys for children.27 Even industry periodicals found themselves forced to engage with Kruse, although they disparaged her as a dilettante.28 However, showing the production site to a few members of Imperial Germany’s “one percent” was not a business strategy. It was the mass exhibition, the ultimate symbol of nineteenth-century consumer culture, that launched Kruse and her reform dolls into the mainstream. A massive exhibit attended by hundreds of thousands of people in the capital served to keep women’s roles and toys in the spotlight. The “Woman’s Life and Calling” (Die Frau im Leben und Beruf) exhibit held from February to March 1912 in Berlin proclaimed that “women’s work can no longer only be valued when it takes place under the instruction of a man.”29 Organized by Hedwig Heyl, a leader of Germany’s moderate middle-class women’s movement, and attended by the Empress, the Reich’s few female professors and Gertrude Bäumer, the leader of the Federation of German Women’s Associations, the exhibition proclaimed women as important cultural producers working in a distinctly feminine sphere. The list of celebrity attendees included the Queens of Romania and Bulgaria, numerous German princesses, duchesses, and noblewomen. Couples visiting from the political and military elite included the Bethmann Hollwegs, the von Tirpirtz’s, the Delbrücks, the Rathenaus, the Sydows, and von Bülows. The exhibit expressly demanded more rights for women but in a non-revolutionary way that stressed women’s particularly feminine qualities as wives and mothers. The organizers argued that “by our own account it is time to show how women in the home, in agriculture and in childcare have raised their efforts to the level of Beruf … and are now engaged in furthering national well-being [Volkswohlfahrt].” While seeking attention and recognition for women’s roles, this exhibition represented a celebration of middle-class values, not a protest of Germany’s political system.30 The exhibition’s model playroom contained numerous artistic toys. The program stated that “through her work in the house and the Kinderstube the woman naturally forms a close relationship with the play habits of children.”

Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender

145

Not surprisingly, “the artistically sensitive woman has therefore brought lots of wonderful things to the child’s world … including the dolls of Marion Kaulitz and Käthe Kruse.”31 The sympathetic reportage of the Berliner Morgenpost argued that “women lovingly ennobled culture” and that their contribution could not be expressed purely rationally or through machines. They were “the creators and educators of new generations in the home” and as such deserved the titles of “citizeness” and “servers of the common good.”32 Even though actual reform toys never occupied more than a sliver of the market, the ideas animating them at least circulated widely among middle-class circles.33 This positive press coverage changed the market but not in the way Kruse hoped. A number of shrewd businesspeople found ways to mass-produce character dolls yet market them to consumers as artistic, non-technological toys. Sophisticated elements within the toy industry understood that reform dolls offered a new chance to make money by reinventing the doll aesthetic but retaining traditional notions of girlhood and domesticity tethered to nineteenthcentury dolls. In other words, they created a hybrid between aesthetic reform and gendered conventions. This demonstrates the remarkable ability of consumer culture to permit subversive discourses and then subsume them rapidly back into the mainstream: so much so that established producers eventually assimilated Käthe Kruse’s dolls into their production range completely. Neither Kruse nor Kaulitz patented their designs, which left the door open to more adventurous factory producers. In 1909 a toy trade journal, Rundschau über Spielwaren, published an article dealing with doll development in its first issue saying, “Today the doll, which has undergone a metamorphosis in a short period of time, has become a little piece of art.” Far from feeling threatened by reform dolls, the Rundschau saw them as simply the latest stage in the ongoing development of this toy promising new markets and more money. In an international situation where exports could decline due to increasing raw material prices, labor conflict or recession, “the German doll industry maintains its dominant position [based on constant innovation] and assured there would be no land in the world where German dolls could not be bought.”34 Eric Wulf, a Berlin reporter who covered industry, recognized that factory production of character dolls offered manufacturers a lucrative opportunity to subsume Kruse and Kaulitz’s challenge to female domesticity into the existing discourse of verisimilitude. The result was that “somewhere between half and three quarters of all dolls sold in Germany are made up of ‘improved’ baby character dolls with closing eyes, real hair, and mouths that smiled. The rest consist of the old-style

146

Childhood by Design

technological dolls. [The old dolls] won both directly and indirectly. It is clear that women want beautiful dolls … as do the children.” According to the journal, German consumers liked some of the attributes attached to reform dolls, such as individual faces, but still favored the closing eyes and movable joints of the conventional models.35 Kruse sold the patent for her dolls to a Thuringian company Kämmer & Reinhardt for a very small sum. While she used the money to outfit a workshop, the company began mass-producing character dolls but adding hair and eyes that opened and closed. This apparent pandering to mainstream commercial tastes infuriated Kruse, who wanted nothing to do with mass-production and opposed alterations to her original design.36 Yet, having signed away legal control of production to Kämmer & Reinhardt, the artist had no say in the matter. She found herself limited to selling to American customers, while the established German firm introduced the hybrid character dolls to the domestic market. One trade journal, the Rundschau wrote that “in spite of all these new ideas [from Kruse and Kaulitz] reform dolls would have gone unnoticed within the industry if not for Kämmer & Reinhardt—we must recognize the service they have done us—who used their practical and technical experience to give these new ideas [commercial] value.” Initially, the company tried to sell “six-week-old” character babies with simple faces and individualized names like Hans, Grete, Peter, and Marie, but without success. The firm kept the individualized names and baby form for the doll but returned to porcelain heads with real hair and eyes that closed.37 What we see, then, is that a close study of toys as objects of material culture show more complexity than Leo Bogart suspected. Children do not necessarily play with dolls the way that adults imagine, thus providing a space for subversive voices and values to enter the marketplace. While this insight comes from Imperial Germany over one hundred years ago, such findings complement contemporary scholarship on our own society in ways that are both surprising and revealing. Elizabeth Chin’s ethnography of 1990s-era African-American children in New Haven found that her subjects had a remarkably sophisticated understanding of their disadvantaged socio-economic status. The study yielded revealing consumer tendencies of her subjects: namely, that they took white dolls and manually modified them in ways that marked them as racially black. On the one hand, such practices can be interpreted as a method through which the young reified the category of race, but Chin believes such modifications more likely reflect an attempt to claim an independent social voice via consumer culture. Similarly, in

Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender

147

her work on multi-ethnic Barbie, literary scholar Ann duCille has highlighted how the civil-rights movement, in combination with a growing middle-class black audience, created a ready market to which manufacturers responded. One of the most remarkable examples of this phenomenon was Shindana Toys, based in South Central Los Angeles in the 1960s. Shindana’s ethnically diverse dolls aimed at African-American consumers not only sought to capture part of the marketplace. Rather, the entrepreneurs running the firm wanted to advance the national discourse on race and raise black consciousness by providing dolls with African names and supposedly authentic features. As duCille and others have noted, the success of this alternative market prompted Mattel to market a black Barbie, Shani, in the early 1990s. Ann duCille is deeply skeptical of mainstream toy producers’ racially-inclusive rhetoric, but like character dolls in the Kaiserreich, Shindana’s challenge moved the marketplace. Not underestimating the ability of large manufacturers to assimilate and domesticate challenges to their products, as well as the value systems such products embodied, a study of the material and consumer culture of childhood may allow us as citizens to understand how we can most effectively argue for the kinds of toys we want for our girls and boys.38

Notes 1 Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004); Leo Bogart, Over the Edge: How the Pursuit of Youth by Marketers and the Media has Changed American Culture (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005). 2 John R. Gillis, A World of the Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Daniel Thomas Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 3 Rudolf Anschütz, Die Spielwaren-Produktionsstätten der Erde (Sonneberg: Gräbe & Hetzer, 1913), 8, 15, 19, 24, 26–27; Gertrud Meyer, Die Spielwarenindustrie im sächsischen Erzbegirge, Inaugural Dissertation (Leipzig: A Deichert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1911), 6–9; Karl Reible, Die deutsche Spielwarenindustrie, ihre Entwicklung und ihr gegenwärtiger Stand, Inaugural Dissertation (Nuremberg: Eric Spandel, 1925), 37–40; “Die Metallspielwaren-Industrie in Deutschland,” Deutsche Spielwarenzeitung, no. 10, (May 1 1914): 7–13.

148 4

5

6 7

8

Childhood by Design Deborah Dwork, War is Good for Babies and other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898–1918 (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987); Alisa Kraus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Barbara Freven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1894–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), 38–39; Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933 (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1976), Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Frauen suchen ihre Gechichte: Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Karen Hausen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983); Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s, ed. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (London: Routledge, 1991); Christophe Sachse, Mütterlichkeit als Beruf: Sozialarbeit, Sozialreform und Frauenbewegung 1871–1929 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); Sonya Michel and Seth Koven, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 1076–1108. Miriam Forman-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 1–5; Forman-Brunell, “The Politics of Doll Play in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Small Worlds: Children & Adolescents in America, 1850–1950, ed. Elliot West and Paula Petrik (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 107–109. Sabine Reinelt, Käthe Kruse: Leben und Werk (Weingarten: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1984), 40–42. Bob Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1993), 58; Freven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 38–39; Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933; Frauen suchen ihre Gechichte: Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert; Maternity and Gender Policies; Sachse, Mütterlichkeit als Beruf. Steven Ozment, Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe (Camdridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 68–73; Karl Gröber, Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit: Eine Geschichte des Spielzeuges (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1928), 33; Max von Boehn, Dolls and Puppets (London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1932), 112–117, 121–122; Paul Hildebrandt, Das Spielzeug im Leben des Kindes (Berlin: G. Söhlke, 1904), 324–327, 335–337; Karl Gröber & Juliane Metzger, Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit (Hamburg: Marion v. Schroeder Verlag, 1965), 55–56; Karl Ewald Frizsch

Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender

9

10

11 12

13

14 15

16 17

18

19

149

and Manfred Bachmann, Deutsches Spielzeug (Hamburg: Marion v. Schroeder Verlag, 1965), 68–70; Fritz Hoeber, “Alte Puppen,” Deutsche Spielwarenzeitung no. 16 (August 1, 1913): 5–9; Georg Lehnert, “Aus alten Puppenstuben,” Velhagen & Klassings Monatshefte XVI, no.I (1901/1902): 401–411; “Von dem Spielwarenmuseum in Sonneberg,” Wegweiser für die Spielwarenindustrie no. 596 (1911): 8648–8656. Hans Boesch, “Die Puppen-Häuser in Germanischen Museum,” Kind und Kunst I, no. 8 (May 1905): 257–261. Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Die Kindheit: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main Insel Verlag, 1979), 195–197; Weber-Kellermann, Die deutsche Familie (Frankfurt am Main Insel Verlag, 1974). Clare Crowston has shown how French seamstresses “fabricated” clothes and metaphorically “fabricated” an identity for themselves as producers taking control of fashion and defining it as exclusively feminine, i.e. removing men from the equation. In the process they carved out a feminine sphere in a deeply misogynist society. Something very similar happened over a century later with dolls in Germany. See Clare Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Berliner Morgenpost (November 29, 1908). See Die Kölnische Zeitung ( December, 4, 12, 18, 1895); Münchener neueste Nachrichten (December 8, 1886): 8 (December 12, 1895): 1, (December 16, 1895); Berliner Morgenpost (November 29, 1908). Münchener neueste Nachrichten (December 8, 1886): 8; See the 1900 advertisement Die Puppe from Firma Liebig reproduced in Elke Dröscher, Die grosse Puppenwelt (Dortmund: Hardenberg Verlag, 1983), 136, 138. Tony Schumacher, Was ich als Kind erlebt (Stuttgart: Levy & Müller, 1901), 230; quoted in Weber-Kellermann, Die Kindheit, 196–197. Fanny Lewald, Im Vaterhause, Band I (Berlin: O. Janke, 1861), 75 quoted in Deutsche Kindheiten: Autobiographische Zeugnisse 1700–1900, ed. Irene HardachPinke and Gerd Hardach (Frankfurt am Main Athenäum Verlag, 1978), 301–302. A. Caswell Ellis and G. Stanley Hall, “A Study of Dolls,” The Pedagogical Seminary IV, (1896–1897): 137, 146–147, 148–149. Hartl Mitius, “Münchner Künstlerpuppen,” Illustrirte Zeitung no. 3444 (July 1, 1909): 43; “Illustrirte Rundschau,” Velhagen & Klasings Monatshefte XXV, no. 1 (December 1910): 637–640. Traude Hansen, Die Postkarten der Wiener Werkstätte: Verzeichnis der Künstler und Katalog ihrer Arbeiten (München: Verlag Schneider-Henn, 1982): 23, 155–156; Werner J. Schweiger, Meisterwerke der Wiener Werkstätte: Kunst und Handwerk (Wien: Verlag Christian Brandstaetter, 1990): 71–74. Boehn, Dolls and Puppets, 181–183; Dröscher, Die grosse Puppenwelt, 174–176.

150

Childhood by Design

20 Mitius, “Münchner Künstlerpuppen,” 43. 21 Max Kruse always told friends that she was enamored of him like a father, but she wrote in her memoirs that “he didn’t impress me” when they first met. See Käthe Kruse, Ich und meine Puppen (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herderbücherei, 1982): 11–21, 31–53; Reinelt, Käthe Kruse: Leben und Werk, 15–25; Boehn, Dolls and Puppets, 184–186; Dröscher, Die grosse Puppenwelt, 174–176. 22 Kruse, Ich und Meine Puppen, 81–83. 23 Ibid., 107–109, 128. 24 Kruse, Wie das so kam, 1956 quoted in Reinelt, Käthe Kruse: Leben und Werk, 42–43; Kruse, Ich und meine Puppen, 124. 25 Kruse, Ich und Meine Puppen, 114–117; Reinelt, Käthe Kruse: Leben und Werk, 48–50. 26 Anna Plothow, “Was lehrte uns die Spielzeugausstellung bei Tietz,” Berliner Tageblatt—Frauen Rundschau no. 561 (November 4, 1910). 27 Kruse, Ich und Meine Puppen, 111–113. 28 “Dilettanten Puppen,” Wegweiser für die Spielwarenindustrie, no. 650 (January 28, 1914): 28. The Rundschau über Spielwaren recorded several years later that “in 1909 the Munich Trade Exhibition exploded like a bomb in the peaceful idyll of this sector of the industry” but the economic impact remained limited. See “Aus der Puppenwelt,” Rundschau über Spielwaren no. 98 (May 20, 1912): 1397. 29 “Die Frau und ihr Können,” Berliner Morgenpost, Erste Beilage 55 (February 24, 1912). 30 Ausstellung die Frau in Haus und Beruf: Unter dem allerhöchsten Protektorat ihrer Majestät der Kaiserin u. Königin (Berlin: Rudolf Mosse, 1912), 3–8. 31 Ibid., 38. 32 “Die Frau im Haus und Beruf: Zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung,” Berliner Morgenpost 55 (February 25, 1912); “Die Frauenausstellung am Zoo,” Berliner Morgenpost, Erste Beilage 55 (February 25, 1912); “Berliner Neuigkeiten: Die Kaiserin in der FrauenAusstellung,” Berliner Morgenpost, Erste Beilage 83 (March 24, 1912). 33 “Das Kind: Eine Ausstellung für unsere Kleinen am Zoo,” Berliner Morgenpost, Erste Beilage, 99 (April 12, 1913). 34 “Die Entwicklung der Puppe,” Rundschau über Spielwaren no. 1 (September 1, 1909): 4–5; “Die Kaulitz-Puppen,” Deutsche Spielwarenzeitung no. 4 (February 10, 1912): 13–15; “Käthe Kruse Puppen,” Deutsche Spielwarenzeitung no. 23 (November 15, 1912): 7. 35 Erich Wulf, “Wandlungen der Puppen: Der neue Typ—von der Kunstlerpuppe zur gemässigten Charakterpuppe—Das Baby,” Berliner Tageblatt (January 25, 1914) reproduced in Dröscher, Die grosse Puppenwelt, 58–59. 36 Reinelt, Käthe Kruse: Leben und Werk, 48–49; Dröscher, Die Grosse Puppenwelt, 174–176.

Dolls, Aesthetics, and Gender

151

37 “Aus der Puppenwelt,” 1397. Something similar happened to Steiff dolls. A Berlin director animated them in a movie, reinserting them into the technological theme of the ethic of play without altering their physical form. See “Steiff-Puppen als Kino Film (ein neuartige Reklame),” Rundschau über Spielwaren no. 96 (May 1, 1912): 1369. 38 Elizabeth Chin, “Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry” American Anthropologist 101, no. 2 (June 1999): 305–321; Ann DuCille, “Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (London: Routledge, 2003), 337–348; Ann DuCille, “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (1994): 46–68.

7

Work Becomes Play: Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning in the Bauhaus Legacy Michelle Millar Fisher

Toy production formed a core part of early Bauhaus philosophies and practices, as well as an under-researched connection between object and ethos—and between materiality and culture—in the substantial literature on this influential early twentieth-century German art and design school. Along with the weaving workshop, toys and children’s furniture were a major source of income for the school in its early years and, unlike textiles, designed by both women and men. Student Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s wooden Bauspiel Schiff (play construction ship) toy and prototype Kinderzimmer (nursery) were created as part of the Bauhaus model exhibition home Haus am Horn in 1923. Other Bauhäusler such as Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl, and Josef Hartwig also made successful toy designs, and many—including numerous male Bauhäusler, though retrospective histories have marginalized such work within their oeuvres—designed for and with their own children. Play was not something Bauhaus minds circumscribed within the realm of childhood. Far from simply a practical response to the school’s precarious finances in its early years or a sideline to art and design work in other media, these objects formed an integral part of the Bauhäuslers’ well-documented fascination with the spiritual, artistic, pedagogical, and wholly adult possibilities of play. The generative potential of ludic experience was central to Bauhaus life: a widely shared philosophical approach that underpinned the legendary festivities and playful activities in which students and faculty participated. Focusing on the rich but often overlooked genealogy of toy design and its psychic reverberations at the Bauhaus, it is my intention here to interweave material and philosophical consideration of this work to position such objects as part of a post-First World War avant-garde co-option of childhood as a site for creativity. This lens

154

Childhood by Design

offers a temporary release from the perception of the Bauhaus as a project of Modernism, a definition based upon a triumph or failure of perceived utopian goals. Instead, it offers the creative potential of a historical reconsideration, an abstract “unlearning” of canonical art history based on understudied Bauhaus objects designed for play that could be instructive in a variety of fields related to material culture and childhood. Focus on toy production at the Bauhaus has been eclipsed in scholarly literature, with work in other media—especially painting, photography, furniture, and architecture—taking precedence. Afforded little in-depth analysis, few links have been made between toys that were exhibited, mass-produced, or patented and those that were intended for limited local or familial audiences at the school. As scholar Christine Mehring stated in her essay for the catalog accompanying the Museum of Modern Art’s 2009 exhibition on the school, it is a narrative that for all intents and purposes “remain[s] relegated to history’s wastebin.”1 Yet Bauhaus toy production—in both its public and more personal forms—should be recognized as fundamentally part and parcel of core Bauhaus philosophies and practices rather than, as is more often the case, as solely for the realm of children or as novel, frivolous, and secondary. There have been three notable exhibitions—Toys and the Modernist Tradition at the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal (1994); Kunst, Ein Kinderspiel at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2004); and Century of the Child: Growing By Design 1900–2000 at MoMA (2012)—that sought to tie select Bauhaus toy production to the wider canon of design for children and Modernist thinking. However, as none were Bauhaus-specific, there is still great opportunity for further investigation. Max Hollein, curator at the Schirn Kunsthalle, echoed Mehring when he described his project as “almost a white spot on the map until now.”2 The critical landscape of Bauhaus toy design—distinct from that of furniture design for children at the school and beyond—is indeed limited. Even Mehring’s excellent essay concludes discussion of Siedhoff-Buscher’s early experimental toy ship—a multi-block primary-hued wooden building game encouraging both didactic learning and free play (Figure 7.1)—by mentioning only in passing “the many other Bauhaus students and teachers who dabbled in toy design.”3 Such language hardly dispels the prevailing attitude of toy design as a curious side project, but never one that could indicate more than the sum total of its parts. More recent literature has explored the dynamic relationship between Modernist architecture and design and construction toys, and recent practice has inherited and augmented some of this history.4 Both the Massachusetts

Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning

155

Institute of Technology Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten program (including designers Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum’s musical microcontroller Makey Makey) and Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction department (most significantly, the work of designer Golan Levin) embrace and complicate modern legacies of learning by doing, toy design, and parent–child collaboration in their work. Perhaps most important for this paper, the 2009 volume Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, edited by Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, has significantly reconsidered the material culture of the Bauhaus. This collection of essays frames the school and its legacy as “akin to a palimpsest, having been repeatedly and at times strategically erased and rewritten,” indicating how and why in earlier histories the narrative of toy production may have been overshadowed, and leading the charge for contemporary scholarship to interrogate such deliberate elisions.5 At the birth of the Bauhaus in 1919, Germany—like the rest of Europe—was steeped in the aftermath of the First World War and marked by recent loss and memories of conflict. Family hierarchies shifted greatly in the preceding decade, and the hopeful emphasis placed on the next generation and corresponding importance accorded their education was profound. In his retrospective social history of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), historian Detlev Peukert acknowledged postwar poverty and inflation and, simultaneously, patterns of family life and childrearing changing for the better. He underlined the growing role of the family in everyday life, as numbers of children in the family fell and leisure activities were centered more on the family, many workingclass children now received greater care and attention from their parents, and more expense could be devoted to education and training.6

Indeed, the Reich Youth Welfare Law of 1922 declared in its first article that “every German child has the right to an upbringing that will ensure physical, intellectual, and social fitness.”7 Meanwhile, this pan-European focus on the creative child had already begun to blossom in the early decades of the twentieth century. In his 1988 lecture titled The Romantic Child, art historian Robert Rosenblum traced childhood as a site of creativity, regeneration, and social preoccupation from the contemporary children’s illustrator and author Maurice Sendak to earlier roots. Rosenblum cast his narrative arc back to the paintings of Philip Otto Runge at the turn of the nineteenth century and the educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as espoused in his 1762 novel Emile, an account of a fictitious boy’s idealized

156

Childhood by Design

Figure 7.1 Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, Bauspiel “Schiff ” (“Ship” building toy), 1923. 21 pieces, painted wood, length of largest piece: 10 1⅜16 in (25.5 cm). Die Neue Sammlung—The International Design Museum, Munich.

Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning

157

education from birth to twenty, wherein he “learns by doing” rather than through reading books. Both Rousseau and Runge helped set the stage for the contentious Kindergarten movement that exploded after the publication of Friedrich Froebel’s The Education of Man in 1826. Froebel trained in early education in a variety of settings in Germany and Switzerland before founding the Child Nurture and Activity Institute in Blankenburg, Prussia, in 1837, which was later named the Kindergarten or “garden of children” by the keen horticulturalist. Planting and nurturing flora was but one of the foundational activities in Froebel’s early years curriculum that focused on self-directed individual and collective play facilitated through such “occupations,” or interactions with his set of “gifts”— wood and textile playthings in primary geometric shapes often recognized as some of the first educational toys. Froebel’s avowal that early childhood was a key site of social reform was enthusiastically received in some corners, yet perceived by others—in large part due to the association of his nephew’s more leftist education-focused publications—as a socialist and atheist threat; the Prussian government proscribed kindergartens between 1851 and 1860.8 At the same time as the historical place of the child in society was contested and reframed, shifting irrevocably, avant-garde artists stood up to claim a piece of this new territory, too. Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky and German artist Franz Marc included children’s art in their almanac of source materials and essays, Der Blaue Reiter (1912), a self-conscious turn to nature and the “primitive.” In their 1915 “Manifesto on the Reconstruction of the Universe,” the Futurists proposed a “futurist toy” to incite pugnacious play, equipping children for a war that would overthrow social order.9 Runge’s gentler approach informed the postwar Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) generation whose spirits had been shaped by the realities of raw human experience and combat. Among others, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, director of the Dresden Art Museum, connected Runge to tendencies in modern German art and design that saw childhood as a protected and regenerative site. This was a moment in which artists were not simply contemplating but actively engaging, in Schmidt’s formulation, “the unlimited gigantic imagination of the irrational, fairy-tale logic” as a pure source for experimentation and creation and for cathartic expression and emotion.10 In this children’s world, toys, games, and play did not serve the Futurist purpose of socializing the young for the horrors of the world ahead but as models through which to reintegrate traumatized individuals at all stages into a society adjusting to peace and profoundly altered lives. For artists, painting might be predicated on the naiveté or untainted mind of childhood as a utopian stage to regress

158

Childhood by Design

to, while—as design historian Amy F. Ogata has suggested—for designers and architects, “toys, furniture, houses and schools were material opportunities for building and perfecting a new world.”11 In both their professional practice and personal endeavors, many Bauhäusler proved central to the formation of this paradigm of pedagogically-inflected play. Walter Gropius, first director of the Bauhaus, 1919–1928, characterized his students and masters at the inception of the school as “small, secret, secluded leagues,” the inheritors of Rosenblum’s historical trajectory—one that they would significantly recalibrate for the contemporary moment in pursuit of Gropius’s “new, great world idea.”12 Germinal master of the Vorkurs (meaning the preliminary foundation course), Bauhaus professor Johannes Itten emphasized his program as a process of “unlearning”: the attainment of a postwar tabula rasa intended to foster in the artist “a [childlike] state of innocence beyond the corruption of culture.”13 Itten’s adherence to Mazdaznanism, a neo-Zoroastrian belief system that encouraged veganism and meditation, heavily influenced the Vorkurs curriculum the painter developed. The course, centering on mind–body connection during mark-making, material experimentation, and abstraction, became a required rite of passage for all students. Student Gunta Stölzl recalled Itten’s teachings when she wrote in her diary in 1919 that Drawing is not replicating what we see, but instead letting flow through the entire body that which we feel through external stimulus (as well as through purely internal stimulus, of course). It then comes out again as something that is definitely one’s own, some artistic creation or, more simply, pulsating life. When we draw a circle, the emotion of the circle has to vibrate throughout the entire body.14

Itten’s maxim “play becomes party—party becomes work—work becomes play” thus functioned as part of the fundamental genesis of Bauhaus philosophy. Indeed, the notion of play was important enough to make it into the founding documents of the Bauhaus. Gropius’s 1919 Bauhaus manifesto—in which he set out his desire for the school to unify the arts under a guild-like system of masters, journeymen, and apprentices, who venerated craft and worked joyfully— directly references the parties, social gatherings, and fetes that he envisioned in service of social bonds, creative exploration, and production. He envisioned “encouragement of friendly relations between masters and students outside of work; therefore plays, lectures, poetry, music, fancy-dress parties. Establishment of a cheerful ceremonial at these gatherings.”15

Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning

159

Figure 7.2 Bauhaus Kite Festival, September 25, 1921, Ilse Fehling (left) and Nicol Wassilieff (right), 1921. Image courtesy Bauhaus Archiv Berlin.

Although they were initiated in order to stage interactions between the school and the local community, such celebrations quickly became family gatherings for the Bauhaus, given the antipathy and sometimes downright animosity of Weimar residents due to the parties’ high-spirited eccentricity. The fests generated their own set of toys, as shown in a photograph of the Fall Drachenfest (kite festival), where students made and flew their own kites (Figure 7.2). Graphic artist Lothar Schreyer described: “one sunny autumn day on a small hill above Weimar we let the kites fly up, true works of art, fragile and large, birds, fishes, abstract shapes, trembling on their long strings, almost disappearing in the blue of the sky.”16 In these early years of the school, Gropius and his masters acted as parental figures who—mirroring broader domestic and generational behavioral shifts— facilitated and encircled the nurture and growth of their student-children, nourishing them in the pursuit of experience, expression, and emotion. Like any other community, ritual celebrations punctuated the year. Aside from the kite festival, there was a lantern party, a summer solstice celebration, and a Christmas gathering, the latter recalled by weaving workshop master Stölzl as “indescribably beautiful … a Festival of Love” at which Gropius

160

Childhood by Design

read the Christmas story, disbursed presents to all, and served everyone their food.17 These fetes did not simply co-opt childhood, nor merely embed familial structures in the working relationships of the school. Bauhaus festivities, too, were designs produced collectively in line with Gropius’s founding principles: the pursuit of creativity and unbridled expression within clearly articulated parameters. Johan Huizinga underlined this relationship between feast, play, and social boundaries in his 1933 treatise on the philosophy of human play, Homo Ludens, as being “very close. Both proclaim a standstill to ordinary life … both combine strict rule with genuine freedom.”18 It was in this environment that the fabrication of toys, both in the Bauhaus workshop and in the privacy of the home or studio, was couched in a benevolent clan ethos regimented by workshop and rhythm and a deep fascination with the potential for the state of childhood as a site for hopeful, newfound, and authentic creativity. Part of the collective energy of the masters and students in the early days of the Bauhaus was directed towards making sure the school stayed open. Indeed, many of the students were too poor to afford basic tuition, for whom Gropius arranged for free meals and clothing donations.19 Stölzl described making toys to sell at the Christmas market in Weimar in 1919 as a communal affair: Everyone started doing “crafts”: decorations, toys, stuffed animals, dolls made of paper or wood … painted very brightly … so, for the first time we presented our work to the Weimar public in a very cheerful way, and we were quite successful … At the end, we gave them our berets because there was nothing left to sell.20

Such seasonal craft fairs were, most certainly, exercises in fundraising given the school’s extremely precarious financial state from the beginning of its Weimar years through its move to Dessau in 1925. The school’s economic situation was entirely reliant on the state in the initial years of its operation, which coincided with, among other events, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the imposition of war reparations. This resulted in steep inflation, with students suffering “such poverty and destitution … [that] many were barely able to pay for their tuition.”21 The heyday of toy design at the Bauhaus in terms of prototypes for sale aligned with the historical moment from 1919 to 1925, the school’s Weimar period. Toy prototypes were heavily promoted during the early years of the Weimar Bauhaus, in part to keep the school afloat financially, although they also complemented Gropius’s initial veneration of craft principles, which was shifted after 1923 to a concentration on industrial production.22 Alongside designing a nursery

Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning

161

space for a baby, Siedhoff-Buscher’s Bauspiel Schiff was created as part of the playroom, her contribution (in conjunction with fellow student Erich Brendel) to the Bauhaus model home exhibition Haus am Horn in 1923. The toy consists of twenty-two pieces, designed to interlock and store in a container, which when unpacked can be arranged in multiple configurations. Although it is unlikely that the Schiff ever encountered the open waters, a Ringl + Pit (the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (Ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (Pit) who studied with Bauhaus photographer instructor Walter Peterhans) photograph shows one of the photographers in the bath with a later Siedhoff-Buscher design for a paper toy boat, Segelboot (1927). Both Schiff and Segelboot were prototypes that became economically successful, the former through the Bauhaus and the latter through independent publishers after the designer left the Bauhaus in 1926. Siedhoff-Buscher’s designs were universally intended for public consumption, and all bear the Bauhaus mark of simplified, multipurpose, unornamented forms decorated with primary colors. The ship uses red, blue, and yellow primary colors in conjunction with green and white, a confluence of primary forms and primary colors termed by curator Ellen Lupton “the Bauhaus ABC’s” and an homage to painting master Kandinsky’s famous 1923 student questionnaire, a pseudo-scientific inquiry into the relationship of color, form, and composition circulated to students and faculty. Student Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack designed a spinning top in 1924 that similarly married play and Vorkurs pedagogy, illustrating that, far from constituting a “side-project,” toy design must be seen here as part of an interdisciplinary practice. His tops came with extra colored discs that could be slipped over each other to change the colors when spun. Each color combination is unique, dependent on the flick of the user’s wrist for speed. The toy thus literally transposes the painting class color wheels he created in 1922 and 1923, and presumably aided the experimentation in “reflected light compositions” he pursued in 1924 and 1925, paintings which he described as being in motion, and changing in shape and tempo (language informed by his contemporaneous encounter with the medium of film).23 There was a flurry of prototype production between 1922 and 1925, evidenced by product catalogs and exhibitions intended for a public audience. In response to a request from Gropius for marketable objects during a Bauhaus meeting on September 18, 1922, stone and wood master Hartwig recorded in his notes that he suggested that the woodcarving workshop produce, among other things, toys, dolls, and marionettes. By 1925, the Bauhaus product catalog offered such wares, including student Eberhard Schrammen’s twirling marionette hobbyhorse,

162

Childhood by Design

Siedhoff-Buscher’s Bauspiel Schiff and her untitled “construction figures,” and Hirschfeld-Mack’s spinning tops, alongside Siedhoff-Buscher’s Haus am Horn nursery furniture and children’s tables and chairs made by Marcel Breuer. It was at this stage in the school’s evolution that Gropius—acting in line with his revised Bauhaus manifesto of 1923—explicitly tied design principles at the school to technology and to the design of strict standard types for industry. The school was in no way equipped for factory production on-site, nor had a clear method for producing prototypes to be made off-site. By the fall and winter of 1924, both the pottery and weaving workshops were struggling to keep up with the demand for samples and production, in large part because they did not have money to pay students to work on commissions, and so toys were pushed even further to the fore in the hope that distributors and salesmen would pick them up for external manufacture.24 Yet most toy prototypes were not taken on by an outside manufacturer and instead were painstakingly produced by hand at the Bauhaus.25 A chess set made by Hartwig—intended as a game set for adults but typically studied with the rest of the toys—was handcrafted piece by piece. Both the spinning tops and Siedhoff-Buscher’s Schiff were returned by salesmen who complained about their subdued colors and the lack of explanatory instructions (it was agreed that the toys could be made brighter). Richter & Co., who represented the Bauhaus as distributors in Switzerland, complained about the cost of some of the toys and reported that “their customers were mystified as to what they are supposed to do with Siedhoff-Buscher’s building blocks … why, asks Richter, had they not been sent a diagram?”26 As in Itten’s maxim, party and play, it would seem— as well as personal taste and the hand of the artist, slower than the machine— superseded business sense. The emphasis on free and abstract play for young, creative minds was more important. Even though Itten’s early training as a Froebelian kindergarten teacher is often invoked as a way of suggesting didactic intent in his foundational course, so much of which underscored Bauhaus toy production, these toys often fell short of the expectations of distributors and the general public. Bauspiel Schiff was distributed by the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Verlag from 1926 to 1931 and was included in an exhibition in Jena in 1924 celebrating “Froebel Day.” Yet, in the early years of the Bauhaus, their designers (including Siedhoff-Buscher) adopted a resolutely anti-pedagogical stance when describing their toys.27 Following the move to Dessau in 1926, after which Gropius explicitly prioritized the industrial production of standard types rather than emphasizing

Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning

163

the individual experimentation characteristic of the school’s early years, toy design all but ceased in the workshops. Cost, in terms of time and materials, was problematic, as was the perception of a handmade toy as a craft object in the new climate. Put simply, toys no longer fit with the prevailing design philosophies of the school. Indeed, Siedhoff-Buscher, at the suggestion of Gropius (who was ultimately dismissive of her work for children), independently took her paper construction kits Khrane and Segelboot (1927) to publisher Otto Maier Ravensburg, finding the environment for her designs no longer favorable at Dessau. It was around this time she left the Bauhaus for good, as did HirschfeldMack. Instead of toys, there was a proliferation of standardized furniture designs for children from 1926 on, including Katt Both’s Kinderzimmerschrank (1927), Breuer’s Kinderbett (1927), and further designs for children’s play and sleeping spaces. These designs were modular, standardized wooden constructions that, like much furniture produced at this period at the Bauhaus, expressed tension between handmade origins and unrealized ambitions for mass industrial production. Both artists’ closets for a child’s room are a natural extension of Siedhoff-Buscher’s units for the Haus am Horn, painted in varying shades of blue and white. Breuer’s child’s crib, manufactured in the Bauhaus carpentry workshop after his design, is stark white and perforated with round drill holes at regular intervals—a perfect mirror of the regular white planes of Gropius’s Weissenhofsiedlung house for which it was created. Given the above teleology, it is clear that the public, profitable design of toys at the Bauhaus occurred most significantly between 1919 and 1925 as a symptom of the rather idiosyncratic business model at the school that, at least early on, saw toy production as one of the most marketable avenues of workshop production. Toys also mark a conscious connection to the material and spiritual culture of childhood more broadly prevalent at the time, and the interlinking of these two ideas by Bauhaus artists was no accident. When the school moved to Dessau, the focus shifted from toy design to, at least as far as developing new products for children, the arena of children’s furniture. This makes sense in the wider context of design currents at the school as, in 1926 and 1927, student projects were to a great extent focused on developing furniture to populate Gropius’s new, professionalized building rather than a family-oriented model home like the Haus am Horn or the abstract unlearning of Itten’s course (the master left in 1923 amid controversy over his approach). Additionally, the financial state of the school had become much more stable after the move from Weimar through generous funding provided by the city of

164

Childhood by Design

Dessau. However, many of the toys already developed remained in production through the Bauhaus until the early 1930s. Paralleling the flurry of toy design at the Bauhaus for public consumption in the early 1920s, there was a comparable flood of puppet and doll design for private use at the school during the same time period. As an extension of both the early Bauhaus feasts and the design of toys, the puppets and their theater offered significant potential for choreographed, imaginative, and playful encounters.28 Hirschfeld-Mack produced a pedagogical dollhouse in 1924 with movable planes and detachable sides that resemble set and stage designs used in the Bauhaus theater department, which also pays homage to a life-size domicile, Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder-Schräder Haus of 1923–1924, a contemporary who designed toys and furniture for children. In 1923, Schlemmer directed a marionette play, Die Abenteuer des kleinen Buckligen (The Adventures of the Little Hunchback) with puppet figures made and manipulated by Kurt Schmidt and Toni Hergt.29 Student Karl Peter Rohl made three hand puppets (the court usher, the doctor, and Death) in 1920, and painting master Paul Klee preceded them all by making eight puppets for his son Felix’s ninth birthday in 1916. While still a master at the school, Klee had amassed over fifty puppets by 1925, including a self-portrait puppet. It should be noted that, like Kandinsky, Klee studied and copied children’s art, including that of his son.30 Lyonel Feininger, one of the significant first masters at the Bauhaus, who was invited by Gropius in 1919 to serve as head of the printmaking workshop, created whole worlds both inside his home and studio and outside in nature. Feininger had a lifelong fixation with making model boats beginning as a child growing up in New York, and it was considered so much a part of his character that Alfred H. Barr, Jr. mentioned it in the eulogy he gave at Feininger’s funeral in 1956.31 Feininger also designed pre-war wooden trains and the magnificent, sprawling landscape termed City at the End of the World (sketches begun in 1911 and carving completed in 1952) and populated with colorful wooden figurines. Although figures like Feininger saw this practice as an inseparable part of their expressive identity, their experimentation with toy making has been conspicuously and continually marginalized from their oeuvre. To some degree, this is because their designs were often for a private audience: their families (Figure 7.3). However, where design history has highlighted the school’s toy production, more palatable to Bauhaus masters and twentieth-century historians alike as “women’s work,” it has usually done so in the case of female Bauhäusler. Within this Bauhaus oeuvre of puppet-making, Siedhoff-Buscher’s design for a theatrical space within her Kinderzimmer children’s play environment

Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning

165

Figure 7.3 Eberhard Schrammen, Gerd Schrammen with Play Horse “Hansi” made of colored painted wood, c. 1947, silver gelatin paper. Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

significantly ties play in a room designed specifically for children to play bound intimately to the range of puppets and dolls created by her fellow artists. The Kinderzimmer theater also mirrored artistic production within the Bauhaus

166

Childhood by Design

theater workshop, a lynchpin of the school and the professional home of her husband, Walter Siedhoff. Siedhoff-Buscher made a toy theater, the standalone Puppentheatre (Doll Theater) inspired in its formal aesthetic by De Stijl, in 1923: the same year as her interior for Haus am Horn. The room design itself has been assessed in some detail in two monographs on Siedhoff-Buscher, but the texts do not offer evidence of any reception of these designs outside the limited confines of the exhibition nor describe whether they were produced en masse, or what it was like to play within this space. The essential notion was that children could have a room of their own where an adult could keep a watchful eye without invading the actual space of the play area. SiedhoffBuscher stated, Children should wherever possible have a room in which they can do what they want, in which they are in control. Everything within belongs to them. Their imaginations shape it. No external hindrances disturb them … everything accommodates them. The forms correspond to their size. The practical goals don’t hinder their possibility to play.32

The Kinderzimmer was the second largest room in the model house in terms of floor area, accessible from the mother’s bedroom on one end (where the crib was positioned) and the dining/kitchen area on the other (so mother could keep a watchful eye while taking care of domestic duties). The furniture was intended to be affordable and practical, containing adjustable elements to accommodate growing children while allowing children to create their own playscape through easily movable, interchangeable elements. Siedhoff-Buscher’s furniture used in the model home exhibition was sold in 1924 to the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who intended it for his first child Uta born that year.33 In a rare recorded instance of what it was like to actually use objects designed for children at the Bauhaus, Dieter Pevsner (in a 2009 interview conducted by the author) recalled in particular the storage cupboard with a cutout that functioned as a puppet theater: We had ten [furniture] pieces in all … the open shelf stood at ninety degrees to the theater so that, with the proscenium door open, the shelves formed a third side for the “stage” area. We had a number of glove puppets, with which we played among ourselves, and occasionally put on little shows for our parents. I loved to sit in the trolley, and my older brother sometimes pushed me around in it.34

Pevsner’s recollection of his childhood in a Bauhaus-designed playspace (Figure 7.4) allows us to draw the inference that Siedhoff-Buscher’s goal of

Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning

167

Figure 7.4 Page from Katalog der Muster (Catalog of designs), sales catalog of Bauhaus objects, layout by Herbert Bayer, showing child’s suite of cabinets including puppet theater designed by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher in 1923 for the Haus am Horn. Dessau: Bauhaus, 1925. Letterpress. 11¾ x 8¼ in (30 × 21 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jan Tschichold Collection, gift of Philip Johnson.

encouraging free play and creative performance in her intended user did succeed, at least in this limited instance. The Kinderzimmer theater thus allowed for children to play between the real, physical furniture and the fantastical realm of puppet make-believe, inviting adults into the space to act as attentive audiences for these hybrid narratives. Adult Bauhäusler were well acquainted with the relationships between human and puppet and between material and psychological worlds. In Schlemmer’s dance piece Baukastenspiel (Block Play, 1927), dancers performed with props that look exactly like the movable boxes that Siedhoff-Buscher intended as elements to be constructed with, played, or sat in—elements that describe time, space, and movement in much the same way as a performance.35 For Schlemmer, as for young children at play with puppets and dolls, the line between the puppet play and human play was blurred, animating excitements, anxieties, and the quotidian psychologies of the everyday.36 In her essay “The Bauhaus Theatre

168

Childhood by Design

of Human Dolls,” Juliet Koss framed the abstracted forms of Schlemmer’s dancers as embracing a rationalization and typification of the human form by using padding, masks, and gloves or puppet hands. In Koss’s formulation, for Schlemmer; for the child in the Kinderzimmer; and for Klee, Feininger, and their peers, puppets offered a resolute method of casting the world in terms they could control, enhance, and augment. For Bauhaus artists, recourse to the puppet blended “child’s play with serious adult activity, performances could serve both as entertainment and as psychological ventilation … the playfulness of the dolls made by Klee and others in this period suggests a determination to re-enchant the world.”37 While it is not my desire to re-cast Siedhoff-Buscher, Klee, Feininger, or any of the Bauhäusler as toy makers rather than as painters or designers, comparing the work of colleagues who created similar works of this nature is instructive. It suggests that producing this type of object was not uncommon at the Bauhaus; there was a discussion and exchange of these ideas and a common interest in the potential of certain forms, because we see them repeated many times in different iterations. It also suggests that—far from being a marginalized practice—toy design transcended the boundaries of child and adult, of private creation and public performance, and was an interdisciplinary practice that joined the woodcarving workshop, the theater workshop, and painters alike. It is possible to suggest that all these objects were being produced in connection with the broader notion of creative play outlined before, connected to design at the school from the earliest Bauhaus manifesto written by Gropius. Public and private design of toys at the Bauhaus played different yet overlapping roles. The public, serving an economic function as marketable designs for children, occurred in large part during the first five or six years of the school’s history; the private constituted an ongoing element of spiritual and pedagogical development and experimentation for Bauhäusler centered in notions of creative play. Tracing this history subverts the historical tendency to define the Bauhaus within the larger perception of the project of Modernism, a definition based upon a triumph or failure of perceived utopian goals. Instead, the uncomplicated interpretation of childhood as a site of untainted intuitiveness, emotion, and simple playfulness collides with the similarly stereotypical “critical discourse of intellectualism and rationalism that surrounds heroic modernist architecture.”38 It is in this crucible that spinning tops, puppet theaters, ships, and dolls highlight, in their handheld abstract forms, the interrelation of play,

Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning

169

power, and pedagogy inherent to toy production at the Bauhaus. They also suggest child’s play and the construction of childhood in relation to toy objects as a wholly serious and adult element of Bauhaus history.

Notes 1 Christine Mehring, “Alma Buscher,” in Berry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, eds., Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 149. 2 Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, “Art—A Child’s Play,” Press release (Frankfurt am Main: Schirn Kunsthalle, May 6, 2004). 3 Mehring, “Alma Buscher,” 150. 4 I am grateful to my colleague Megan Brandow-Faller for highlighting some of the following: Brenda and Robert Vale, Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013); Tamar Zinguer, Architecture in Play: Imitations of Modernism in Architectural Toys (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2015); Lucy Bullivant, ed., Kid Size: The Material World of Childhood (Milan: Skira Editore/ Vitra Design Museum, 1997); Eva Ottlinger, ed., Fidgety Philip! A Design History of Children’s Furniture (Vienna: Böhlau, 2006); and Toys and the Modernist Tradition/ Les Jouets et la Tradition Moderniste (Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 1993). 5 Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, eds., Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2. 6 Detlev Peukert, Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 92. 7 An outline of the major Reich Welfare Laws may be found in Ernst Behrend/Helen Stranz-Hurwitz, eds., Wohlfahrtsgesetze des Deutschen Reiches in Preussen (1919– 1923), 2 vols (Berlin, 1923–1925). 8 Joachim Liebschner, A Child’s Work: Freedom and Play in Froebel’s Educational Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1992). 9 Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1996), 41. 10 Robert Rosenblum, The Romantic Child: from Runge to Sendak (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 51. Rosenblum cites Paul Friedrich Schmidt’s essay “Philipp Otto Runge; sein Leben und sein Werk” (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1923). 11 Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 11.

170

Childhood by Design

12 Walter Gropius, Speech to Bauhaus Students, July 1919. Reprinted in Rose-Carol Washton Long, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995), 246–251. 13 Leah Dickerman, “Bauhaus Fundaments,” in Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, 17. 14 Gunta Stölzl, “Diary entry, Bauhaus Weimar, October 18, 1919.” http://www. guntastolzl.org/Works/Bauhaus-Weimar-1919-1925/Weimar-Photos/i-cHwHwFK (accessed March 10, 2017). 15 Walter Gropius, “Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar” (1919), reproduced in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1970), 52. 16 Lothar Schreyer, as quoted in Magdalena Droste and Bauhaus Archiv, Bauhaus 1919–1933 (Los Angeles, CA: Taschen, 2006), 120–121. 17 Droste and Bauhaus Archiv, Bauhaus 1919–1933, 38. 18 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (New York: Beacon Press, 1933), 21–22. 19 Droste and Bauhaus Archiv, Bauhaus 1919–1933, 37. 20 Gunta Stölzl and Monika Stadler, Gunta Stölzl: Bauhaus Master (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 54. 21 Droste and Bauhaus Archiv, Bauhaus 1919–1933, 38. See also Adrian Sudhalter and Dara Keise’s excellent “14 Years Bauhaus: A Chronicle,” in Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, 323–337. 22 As several other scholars have mentioned, Anna Rowland’s doctoral thesis The Bauhaus Workshops: Teaching, Production and Business Management (University of Cambridge, 1988), comprehensively surveys records from the three Bauhaus archives in Germany and is an invaluable resource in this regard. 23 See Hal Foster, “Exercises for Color Theory Courses,” in Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, 266–269 for a discussion of Hirschfeld-Mack’s color theory painting exercises as part of the foundation course at the Bauhaus. Another interesting example is Margaretha Reichardt’s wood, paint, and metal sculpture Exercise for preliminary course taught by Josef Albers (1926), completed in the Vorkurs and displayed at MoMA within the “toy” section of that exhibition. 24 See Rowland, The Bauhaus Workshops. 25 See Droste and Bauhaus Archiv, Bauhaus 1919–1933, 95. Heinz Nösselt designed a table for the chess set, complete with an area underneath to store chess pieces and, if there was any doubt about for whom it was designed, an area for an ashtray. 26 Richter correspondence (undated) as quoted by Anna Rowland in “Business Management at the Weimar Bauhaus,” Journal of Design History, 1, no. 3/4 (1988):

Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning

27

28 29

30 31

32

33 34

35

36

171

160. Not much has changed in terms of price since then. The MoMA Design Store sold replicas of the Schiff, chess set, and the spinning tops for exorbitant prices in conjunction with the 2009 exhibition. See Rowland, The Bauhaus Workshops, 12. There is undeniably a strong connection to early childhood education at the Bauhaus, but I wish to make clear that it goes beyond a superficial or facile correlation between Froebelian “Gifts” and Itten’s foundation course. Richard Bromfield, “The Use of Puppets in Play Therapy,” Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 12, no. 6 (1994): 435–444. “Schmidt created these marionettes for a modern adaptation of a tale from the Arabian Nights.” Quoted in wall text from the 2009 MoMA exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity. See Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). MoMA Archival resource. Lyonel Feininger AHB 3a.B. Eulogy given by Alfred Barr, January 17, 1950. On April 11, 1928, writing from Dessau to Alfred Barr, Jr., on the occasion of the inauguration of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Feininger signed off a friendly letter detailing exhibitions, travel, and loaned books with best wishes for the Easter holidays and the news that “I am busy building a new model yacht for the seaside.” Michael Siebenbrodt, ed., Alma Siedhoff-Buscher: A New World for Children (Weimar: Bauhaus-Museum and The Weimar Classics Foundation and Art Collections, 2004), 17. The furniture was moved to London in the early 1930s when the Pevsner family, now including Thomas (born 1926) and Dieter (born 1928), relocated to Hampstead. Email conversation with the author, October/November 2009. The three Pevsner children live within one hundred yards of each other in Hampstead, London, and agreed to swap memories of using Buscher’s furniture with each other and then email them via Dieter. I am grateful to Juliet Kinchin for giving me the contact details for Dieter Pevsner, and to Susie Harries, who shared with me chronological information about the Pevsner family and the date the furniture was moved to England. For excellent reconstructions of Schlemmer’s dances, see the video recording Voices of Dance: Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism, directed by Jeff Bush and performed by Celia Ipioto, Debra McCall, James Saslow, and Mel Gordon (New York: WNYC, 1985). Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 165. “The connections between play and dancing are so close that they hardly need illustrating. It is not that dancing has something of play in it or about it, rather that it is an integral part of play: the relationship is one of direct participation, almost of essential identity.”

172

Childhood by Design

37 Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” in Kathleen James-Chakraborty, ed., Bauhaus Culture From Weimar To The Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 96. Hans Hess wrote similarly of Feininger, “Everything that Feininger got in his hands would take on the same magic as his pictures also emanate. It is a child that which became an adult, displaying the world of adults as toys.” Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger (New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1961), 85. 38 Juliet Kinchin, “Hide and Seek: Remapping Modern Design and Childhood,” Century of the Child: Growing By Design, 1900–2000 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 16.

8

Simply Child’s Play? Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde in Socialist Czechoslovakia before 1968 Cathleen M. Giustino

This essay explores the history of adult-designed toys in Czechoslovakia during the first half of the Cold War, when the country belonged to the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc with its system of Communist Party rule and command economics.1 Evidence has been gathered from Tvar (Form), an official industrial-design journal in Czechoslovakia from 1948, the year of “Victorious February” when communist rule was established, until shortly after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. The following pages will show that toys in socialist Czechoslovakia were never totally under party-state control during the first half of the Cold War, not even during the grim late Stalinist period, thereby enabling pre-war avant-garde views about representation and reality to persist and giving designers and children behind the Iron Curtain possibilities, albeit limited, to be active participants in the making of toys and the construction of their meanings. Prior to the Second World War, folk-art traditions strongly influenced Czechoslovakia’s toy designers, including those belonging to Europe’s avantgarde.2 Folk toys, which resulted in part from an exploitative “putting-out” system and proto-industrial early mass-production, had stylized or reductivist features aiming to suggest reality, rather than precisely replicate outward physical appearances.3 They were mostly made of wood, commonly used in traditional crafts and associated with timelessness, endurance, and reassurance in times of rapid change.4 Czechoslovak avant-garde toy designers inspired by folk art were members of the Artěl Cooperative (founded in 1908) and the Czech Werkbund (Svaz českého díla; founded in 1914), two politically left-leaning non-governmental associations of Modernist visual artists who believed that

174

Childhood by Design

artfully-made everyday objects, including furnishings, clothing, and toys, could improve and empower society. Both groups freely continued their activities during the interwar period, briefly reappeared after the Second World War, and then were prohibited under communist rule.5 Two important avant-garde toy designers in interwar Czechoslovakia, whose work drew from folk art, were Minka Podhajská and Ladislav Sutnar. Before the First World War Podhajská studied with Adolf Böhm at the Viennese Women’s Academy and participated in the “Art for the Child” section of the 1908 Kunstschau Exhibition staged by the Klimt Group.6 Drawing from peasant traditions, she designed an array of colorfully painted wooden toys, most of them turned and some carved or sawed. Many were simplified representations of people like Podhajská´s long-legged Czech national gymnasts with their stiff-looking yet movable arms and her series of ball-headed figures representing “childhood misdeeds,” with suggestive and exaggerated physical features, including a long nose, big ears, and a bright red tongue. Others were animal figures, including stylized birds and her array of rectangle-shaped banks, or “money boxes,” each with the head of a different animal and sawed entirely with straight lines, giving them a cubist quality. Ladislav Sutnar is famous for contributions to graphic art and advertising in the United States after emigrating there in 1939. He is also well known for avant-garde playthings that he designed in interwar Czechoslovakia. Sutnar’s toys combined modern forms and experiences with traditional wooden materials and reductivism common to folk art. This can be seen in his trams, cars, and trucks, all painted with flat planes of color, and in his building set, called “Factory,” with its conical smokestacks, triangular roofs decorated with circles to suggest vents, and square blocks painted with rectangles to evoke windows and doors.7 Between the 1948 communist takeover and the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, news of show trials and purges reverberated throughout Czechoslovak society, socialist realism eclipsed abstract art and other forms of avant-garde cultural expression, and economic activity focused on the nationalization or state-takeover of industrial and agricultural property. During this extremely repressive late Stalinist period, Tvar published two issues devoted to children’s playthings. Both gave significant attention to practical skills needed for work in an industrialized society and the building of comradely collective spirit, thereby aiming to make toys material agents in party-state efforts to train boys and girls to grow up to be the “new” men and women of a brightly envisioned proletarian future.

Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde

175

Despite the heavy fist of the state during late Stalinism, the internalization of Communist Party ideology in the hearts and minds of Czechoslovak children through play with officially approved adult-designed toys was impossible to fully achieve. In material and visual terms, the playthings discussed and seen in Tvar during the early 1950s were not greatly different from playthings produced under capitalism, including folk toys that inspired the pre-war avantgarde. Furthermore, theorizing in Tvar about the transformative power of toys tended to be done with Soviet pedagogy imposed from above onto expectations about child’s play with little evidence of actual young people’s perceptions of or negotiations with toys. Finally, due to chronic economic challenges and shortages of consumer goods, few toys seen in Tvar were manufactured and available for purchase in the Eastern-Bloc country’s shops, thus limiting Czechoslovak children’s interactions with playthings intended to serve party-state goals. Ideas about toys as material agents for building communism in Czechoslovakia relaxed a bit between the time of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin and the Prague Spring’s violent end in 1968. Political prisoners returned home from horrible places, reform communist ideas gained ground, some unfettering of cultural expression from the constraints of socialist realism occurred, and economic planners gave more attention to light-industrial production, although goods for domestic consumers, including children’s playthings, remained wanting. In this era of relative liberalization, attention to work and collectivity remained present in the discourse about toys found in Tvar while, simultaneously, a verbal and visual language of fantasy and imagination grew more evident and explicit. This Thaw-era language shared continuities with pre-war avant-garde design, which was never fully extinguished during late Stalinism, and widened possibilities for Czechoslovak designers and children to negotiate in the making of toys and their meanings.8

Czechoslovak toys in the late Stalinist period In February 1948 the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, led by Klement Gottwald, a loyal follower of Stalin, took over the country. In the next five years, an extensive re-ordering of Czechoslovak politics, society, and culture occurred. Censorship, purges, show trials, prison, and cruel work camps severely cracked down on opposition to Communist Party rule and silenced independent expression. The takeover of industrial and agricultural property was completed

176

Childhood by Design

with thousands of once-private businesses, including factories and small workshops, seized from private owners and integrated into national enterprises under the command of party-state agencies. This Soviet-modeled economic transformation greatly affected all parts of Czechoslovak society, including toys. During the 1950s two of the largest national enterprises manufacturing toys in the country were Tofa Semily and Hamiro, both created after the war out of smaller confiscated toy businesses. Tofa Semily produced wooden toys, while Hamiro manufactured plush toys, sometimes stuffed with wood fibers, and dolls and hand-puppets made first of celluloid and then plastic. They remained important toy producers throughout the Cold War, although their products were often sold abroad in the West for hard currency rather than made available for Czechoslovak and other Eastern-Bloc consumers. In the early 1950s another national enterprise, Fatra Napajedla, produced rubber and later plastic toys. Because wood was the predominant material used in Czechoslovak toymaking before and after the Second World War, during late Stalinism toy manufacture was placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Forests and the Wood Industry (Ministerstvo lesů a dřevařského průmyslu), which also oversaw the production of furniture and pencils. In 1951 an Advisory Council for Toys (Poradní sbor pro hračky) was created within this Ministry to oversee the creation of officially approved children’s playthings. A team of experts in design, manufacture, distribution, and teaching sat on the Council. A year after its founding Jindřich Halabala, a furniture designer with avant-garde roots (he had studied with cubist architect and designer Pavel Janák), reported on the Council’s activities in the Tvar article, “The Significance and Activity of the Advisory Council for Toys” (Význam a činnost poradního sboru pro hračky). Halabala wrote that the Council reviewed all prototypes of toys proposed for production to ensure that they “suit all requirements that socialist society places on toys.” It emphasized that “the educational function of the toy is its basic and most important requirement.”9 Prototypes were judged for their consistency with official ideology and the economic and material advantages of manufacturing them. According to Halabala, new toys were placed “directly into children’s hands so that pedagogues could study their effects and children’s interests.”10 Educators publishing during the early 1950s in the official journal of preschool teachers, Předškolní výchova (Preschool Education), confirmed that schools were places where playthings were tested, but they also reported shortages of toys in schools and teachers’ reluctance to let children play with available toys due to worries about breakage. In addition, they provided evidence of a lack of systematic

Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde

177

observations about children’s interactions with toys, calling for more knowledge about how young people negotiated with playthings. One article in the preschool teachers’ journal was titled, “On the Question of New Toys in Kindergartens” (K otázce nových hraček na mateřských školách). After opening with a discussion of Soviet pedagogues, its author, V. Komárková, called on teachers to help gather information on children’s interactions with toys, including “whether children play with it individually or in a collective.”11 In Tvar Halabala reported that the Advisory Council rejected “toy sabers, short pistols, slingshots, and all toys that in some manner threatened safety” and “games that … cultivate selfishness and not sociability [družnost] and healthy competitiveness.” He proudly described how an Italian observer of the Council, Carlo Bonetti, compared toy production in Western capitalist countries and Czechoslovakia. Bonetti argued that because Western shop windows were filled with toy weapons, “capitalist manufacture did not understand the toy as a means of education, but as an ordinary article of sale.” In contrast, the work of the Advisory Council for Toys resulted in “toys that help to educate a child to become an upright and conscientious citizen.” Bonetti said this was evidence that Czechoslovakia was a country where “they are truly building something totally new—where they are creating the new man.”12 The Council was dissolved after Stalin’s death with no new single body replacing it. Halabala’s piece on the Advisory Council was not the first time that Tvar carried an article about adult-designed toys best suited to serve as agents for building communism. Earlier in 1950, not long before the Stalin-style show trial and deadly purge of Milada Horáková shook Czechoslovak society, Tvar devoted an entire issue to children’s playthings. One article in this special issue was by Jan Pistorius, an important Czechoslovak toy designer in the postwar years. In 1946 he became an employee at the Center of Folk and Artistic Manufacture (Ústředí lidové a umělecké výroby), called ÚLUV, a party-approved design studio where state-employed artists created prototypes for toys, as well as for household items, including furniture, rugs, glass, and ceramics.13 He worked under the direction of Vít Grus, another leading postwar Czechoslovak toy designer, whose wooden three-wheel motorcycle toy, with its cartoonish-looking goggled riders, was similar to a Swedish wooden toy from the 1940s.14 While at ÚLUV, Pistorius developed prototypes for toys, made mostly of wood, that could be disassembled and reassembled. He called them “technical puzzles [technické skládanky].” His realistic-looking creations were miniature versions of gas-powered vehicles, including a race car, a tractor, and an open-bed truck.15

178

Childhood by Design

In his article, “How I Make Toys” (Jak dělám hračky), Pistorius talked about why he designed “technical puzzle” vehicles. One less-than-clearly presented reason stemmed from reminiscences about his own favorite childhood plaything. He described this beloved object as “a pony hitched to an imagined wagon made from some box, or to a plow assembled from a spool of thread and an old bent spoon.” The other reason was his view, presented without any evidence for his claim, that, “Today’s children are very interested in contemporary events” and when given “toys that resemble the real world, they look forward to play even more.” Pistorius urged designers to have their toys tested in collectives, especially kindergartens, so as to learn “about strengths and deficiencies of construction and care of assembly.” He acknowledged that his complicated designs were expensive to mass produce, but optimistically anticipated that, due to the nationalization of industry, large-scale manufacture of them and other quality children’s playthings would take place. He concluded his article by writing, “We wish that every child will have our toys and we believe that this really will happen.”16 His wish was not fulfilled. In 1952, a year before Stalin’s death and subsequent changes in the Eastern Bloc, Tvar devoted another entire issue to toys. Two wooden toys, each representing older and newer grammars of playthings, appeared on its cover (Figure 8.1). One toy was a flat-bodied, unpolished horse composed of four sawed pieces, mounted on a rectangular base with wheels and painted with geometric decorations similar to folk-art Easter eggs. The other was a welldetailed, polished tractor by an unnamed designer. The tractor was made of at least a dozen parts, including rounded headlights surrounding a carefully cut grill and alongside views into the vehicle’s interior where engine parts could be seen. Both playthings depicted power used in agricultural labor, with the latter more realistic and more difficult-to-make toy representing technological advances that Communist Party rule was bringing to Czechoslovakia.17 Titles of articles in the 1952 special issue included “Toys and Hygiene,” “The Toy as an Artistic Work,” “The Toy and Manufacture,” “How the Consumer Sees Toys,” and “The Past of Our Toys.” In its first article, “On the Exhibition ‘Child and Toy’” (K výstavě ‘Dítě a hračka’), Václav Jaroš reviewed an exhibition of toy prototypes, further revealing official discourse on adult-designed toys in socialist Czechoslovakia during late Stalinism. The Advisory Council for Toys organized this show, in order to promote children’s playthings that were “suitable for socialist life.” The exhibition had “a whole array of new toys aimed towards

Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde

179

Figure 8.1 Front cover of Tvar’s 1952 Special Issue Devoted to Toys. Tvar Vol. 4 (1952). Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.

the education of a new generation for a new, improved life.” Jaroš, an employee of Prague’s local administration (the národní výbor), said the toys were “to help the growth of a proud and happy young person [člověk], educated in the

180

Childhood by Design

principles of active patriotism and proletarian internationalism.”18 Opinions of Soviet experts in pedagogy, not observations of children interacting with toys, informed his views on quality playthings. Using Anton S. Makarenko’s theory, he argued that “the education of future workers is manifested in play, for play forms the main occupation [zaměstnání] of children.” Drawing from E. A. Flerina, he emphasized the importance of toys and play for teaching collectivity, arguing that children learn to model “their behavior in agreement with the behaviors of their companions.” Socialist toys were different from capitalist toys, he also maintained. Capitalist toys were designed for “the greatest personal profit” and without consideration of their uses for the wider community; socialist toys were “above all, a means for the education of the new man.” The nationalization of industry would help make toys agents for “the education of the new man.”19 Such optimism and theorizing were largely for naught, though, since few of the toys discussed became available for children’s play. Another article in the 1952 special issue was “The Significance of Toys for the Education of Children” (Význam hraček při výchově dítěte). The author, Eva Kubiová, presented the official view of the function of play, namely preparing children for work. She wrote that the “task” of play and playthings is to “intellectually and physically fortify the child so that he correctly develops into a future worker of society.” Attention to play was especially important in the earliest stage of child development when children liked to play alone; this was when, “Care must be given that they do not become egocentric.” Images accompanying Kubiová’s text showed children playing with toys in school settings. The toys in the images were miniature versions of the machines and architecture of heavy industry. The captions accompanying most images emphasized comradely collectivity, a central value for the new socialist man. Some captions called these playthings “collective toys,” including one for a picture of a toy coal mine surrounded by children, mostly boys, intently studying something near a tower with a pulley and string visible inside it (Figure 8.2).20 Other captions said they were toys for “children’s collectives,” including one image of a solitary child, who was putting the finishing touch on a factory constructed from wooden blocks. No comments on children’s negotiations with toys were included. Kubiová indicated that she drew her theory from Soviet pedagogue Makarenko’s On the Upbringing of Young Children.21 Photos of party-approved playthings were dispersed throughout the 1952 special issue. Perusal of them shows conventional toys presented in new ideological packaging. Many were modern vehicles, including trains, airplanes,

Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde

181

Figure 8.2 Children playing with “Collective Toys.” Tvar Vol. 4 (1952): 295. Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.

and construction machinery, intended to prepare boys for work in heavy industry. Some were dolls designed to ready girls for work both inside and outside the home. Baby dolls were to teach girls to be mothers and caretakers of children. Dolls dressed in work clothes, including one with her cloth hands tucked into the pockets of her overalls and another holding a rake, were to encourage them to work in construction or on collective farms. The dolls had physical features intended to realistically replicate human appearances and keep adult-designed toys in line with the expectations of socialist realism. Facial features on their molded heads were fully detailed with proportions and contours of living children. Many of the stuffed animal toys also aimed to be realistic in appearance; they were not abstracted or anthropomorphized figures. Still, elements of abstraction and expressionism could be found in the 1952 special issue. They included folk-inspired toys, such as human figures with ballshaped heads, which resulted from the party-state’s tolerance for and use of folk traditions, held up as the heritage of ordinary working people exploited under the old social order. In the late Stalinist period, when socialist realism dominated cultural expression in Czechoslovakia, folk-inspired toys helped keep open some

182

Childhood by Design

possibilities for design and play that were not totally constrained by party-state ideology and power.22

Czechoslovak toys during the Thaw and reform communism Following the deaths of Stalin and Gottwald in March 1953, Antonín Novotný became General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, a position he held until early 1968 when Alexander Dubček, a reform communist and the leader of the Prague Spring, replaced him. In the autumn of 1953 Novotný began efforts to improve the living standard of Czechoslovak workers. The government raised wages and cut prices for manufactured goods in small shops. There was some increase in the availability of goods, as well. Novotný’s attention to bettering workers’ lives continued after Khrushchev’s February 1956 “Secret Speech” and the start of the Thaw. He helped create the Ministry of Consumer Industry (Ministerstvo spotřebního průmyslu) under the direction of Božena MachačováDostálová, one of the most powerful women in socialist Czechoslovakia. Among her goals was raising the living standard of Czechoslovak workers through increased manufacture of consumer goods available for purchase at home and, very importantly, capable of attracting hard-currency contracts with business interests outside the Eastern Bloc, including in the capitalist West. This is not to say that Czechoslovaks suddenly had a lot of consumer opportunities; they did not. Nonetheless, these changed economic priorities, along with the Thaw, contributed to some liberation of Czechoslovak toy design from Soviet-modeled socialist realism. No event better showed the partial loosening of socialist realism’s hold over Czechoslovak design during the late 1950s than the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. The pavilion that Czechoslovakia designed and built for EXPO 58 was judged to be the best pavilion at this international spectacle. Numerous industrial-design prototypes were displayed inside of it, some of which won top prizes. Designers with connections to Czechoslovakia’s pre-war avant-garde, now having greater opportunities for imaginative work due to the Thaw, created a number of these award-winning objects.23 One section of the Czechoslovak pavilion in Brussels, entitled “Children and Puppets,” gave great attention to toys. Tvar published a report by Miroslav Lhotský about the competition held to determine who would design this toy display and

Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde

183

what objects would be in it. Only wooden toys were selected, on the grounds that Czechoslovakia had “a good reputation” in this area. The competition winner was Viktor Fixl, professor of toy design at the Secondary School of Applied Arts (Střední uměleckoprůmyslová škola) in Prague and mentor to a generation of toy designers in socialist Czechoslovakia. His winning piece was “Didactic Model Train” (Didaktický vláček), a toy vehicle that could be assembled and reassembled in various combinations. It was an intricate ensemble of faceless turned wooden figures that fit into round holes (similar to Fisher-Price school buses from the 1960s) and stylized train tracks held in place with nuts and bolts on flat beds that had smoothly sanded, detachable wheels. Lhotský’s report on the competition results provided evidence of Thaw-era growing openness to individual creativity mixed with continued concern about teaching collectivity. It said Fixl’s train “satisfies not only the individual playfulness of children, but simultaneously urges collective cooperation [kolektivní spolupráce].”24 This winning rationale showed that, on the eve of the 1958 World’s Fair, Czechoslovak toy designers and official decision-making committees continued to aim for toys to serve as agents in building communism, but they were also loosening some ideological constraints on design and play. The “Toys and Puppets” section in the Czechoslovak Pavilion at EXPO 58 contained innovative displays that broke from exhibition practices of the early 1950s. For example, it included arrangements of curved tables set at various levels and covered with wooden playthings depicting, in miniature, a variety of scenes purportedly from everyday life in socialist Czechoslovakia. Viktor Fixl, Václav Kubát, and Vít Grus, among others, created these attractive ensembles. At the lowest level of the tables, wooden sunbathers, some of them scantily dressed, relaxed at a swimming facility equipped with colorful umbrellas and games. At the highest levels vehicles approached a hilltop castle and skiers took a lift to a snow-covered chalet. In between, fans sat in stadium rows watching soccer players, fire-fighters trained, farmers fed their animals, and urban dwellers waited for a tram. Markers of party ideology were absent from these scenes, something that the Politburo complained about, particularly disapproving of “nuns boarding a tram with children.”25 The entire set of toy scenes encouraged fantasy and imagination due both to the reductivist quality of the turned wooden figures with their round heads and simply painted faces, and to the fact that these charming portrayals of a socialist quotidian were quite different from the more meager, less colorful experiences of Czechoslovaks and others living behind the Iron Curtain during the first half of the Cold War.26

184

Childhood by Design

Two large trees also filled the bold “Toy and Puppets” exhibition in Brussels, one crafted from a white plaster-like material and the other made from what looked like real wood. The puppeteer, Jiří Trnka, designed these trees. A hole was left open in the trunk of the white tree. Inside it, visitors viewed a fantastical scene composed of puppets, including a fairy caressing a man with a donkey’s head, from Trnka’s puppet-film version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The second tree was the “Tree of Toys.” It had platforms cut into its wooden trunk and branches for the display of a variety of wooden toys, some of which were arranged to appear as if the tree itself was making playthings (Figure 8.3). The toys on display at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, while promoting creativity and imagination, were working playthings. They were to provide visitors to the spectacle, most of them from outside the Eastern Bloc, with favorable impressions of socialism and encourage them to buy Czechoslovak products. Very few Czechoslovaks were allowed to visit EXPO 58 and, even after the success of their pavilion, they had limited opportunities to purchase the toys on display back home. Despite Novotný’s efforts to make more consumer goods available, there continued to be a shortage of playthings that toy designers and others considered to be quality toys. In 1960 Fixl made an appeal about this matter to Czechoslovak mothers, publishing the article, “We Need New Toys for Our Children” (Potřebujeme pro své děti nové hračky), in Women and Fashion (Žena a moda), a monthly fashion magazine that also provided family advice. Fixl proposed that trade officials treat toys as cultural objects, rather than as sundry items. That way “toys could fulfill their very serious and demanding mission, the education of new man.”27 The decade following EXPO 58 was a time in Czechoslovak history of growing reform communist thought and further liberation of cultural expression from socialist realism. Evidence of this liberation, while still partial, included articles in Tvar on the interwar avant-garde in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, and on Western European designers.28 It also included a small number of articles discussing the active role of children in the making of toys. “Psychic liberation” and “fantastical wealth” were key elements of play, according to the first sentence of Jaroslav Hlaváček’s 1964 article “The Education of Toy Designers” (Výchova návrhářů hraček). It was in children’s hands and through their imaginations that objects became toys, including objects not intentionally designed to function as playthings like furniture or machines. Toy designers needed to recognize this power of children, Hlaváček argued. Echoing ideas from the pre-war avant-

Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde

185

Figure 8.3 “The Tree of Toys” in the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Tvar Vol. 10 (1959): 299. Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.

186

Childhood by Design

garde, he maintained that folk toys were valuable examples of how to design toys, because with their simplicity “they do not obstruct fantastical filling-in [nebrání fantasijnímu doplnění].” Toy designers and manufacturers needed to recognize that “The child wants toys to invite fantasy play.” Toys were not required to “imitate reality as loyally as possible” and “[n]ever did clear expressionist visual abbreviation, which folk art knew well, harm a toy.” Interestingly, Hlaváček did not fully break from party-state ideology, writing that “the toy is a great agent in the cultural revolution and an important element in the education of members of mature socialist and communist societies.”29 Immediately following Hlaváček’s piece was an article called “The Toy and Its Meaning” (Hračka a její význam). Naděžda Melniková-Papoušková, an expert on folk art, wrote it in response to an 1963 exhibition of toy prototypes that the Union of Czechoslovak Visual Artists (Svaz československých výtvarních umělců) held in Prague. The author wanted toys to be moral, as well as educational and aesthetic. She particularly opposed toy weapons, writing “It is illogical, if we talk about disarmament and we educate children about peace and then simultaneously support their brutal instincts [with water squirters in the shape of pistols].” She found the toy prototypes on display to be satisfactory. None were “military and aggressive” and, as a whole, they were made “with moderation and without bourgeois sugariness and lisping.” Melniková-Papoušková noted that the playthings in the exhibition would be difficult to find in Czechoslovak shops.30 Accompanying both Hlaváček and Melniková-Papoušková’s articles were images of the toys seen in the 1963 exhibition. Among them were new plastic toys designed by Libuše Niklová, an employee of Fatra Napajedla, a national enterprise specializing in products made of rubber and increasingly also plastic, largely valued for its hygienic and associated modern qualities. Niklová, a very innovative toy designer whose career blossomed during the 1960s, made plastic her special medium, giving her toys stylized, reductivist features similar to those in interwar avant-garde design. Her toys were popular with Czechoslovaks and also sold outside the Eastern Bloc for hard currency, although in both cases supply fell short of demand. In a 1965 report directors of Fatra Napajedla stated that resource challenges made it impossible for them “to offer goods promptly and in requested quantities” to domestic and foreign clients.31 Some of Niklová´s plastic playthings were her wide-eyed animal toys with their stretchable, bendable, accordian-pleated bodies. Among them were a black cat, white dog, yellow lion, purple donkey, and green crocodile, all made from

Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde

187

Figure 8.4 “Tomcat” designed by Libuše Niklová. Tvar Vol. 16 (1965): 275. Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.

chunky parts that could be put together and taken apart. When writing about the design of her accordian toys Niklová stated, “I was focused above all on children having the possibility to play with the toy in the most creative manner.” She wanted her toys to be “unlike other toys, set in motion by either a flywheel or a tiny key, where the child is a mere passive observer.”32 In order to encourage children to actively negotiate with her accordion toys, Niklová envisioned them being sold disassembled, designing special packaging in which unattached heads, legs, and torsos appeared in clear plastic bags stapled to colorful geometric renderings of the completed toy (Figure 8.4).

188

Childhood by Design

Niklová also designed inflatable plastic playthings, including floating water toys. Her son, the contemporary Czech artist Petr Nikl, was often the first person to test her floatables. Looking back, he recalled the materiality of the plastic toys, including how their flexibility allowed him to “feel contact with the volume of the water,” and the smell of “plastic and remnants of the previous breath” when blowing them up. Once when negotiating with his mother’s toys, he unsuccessfully attempted to make a sculpture from an inflatable plaything by pouring plaster into it.33 In preparation for participation in the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal, the Czechoslovak government held a competition to decide which toys would represent the country at this international event. Niklová won the competition with her fantastical toy vehicles drawn from the stories of Jules Verne, including the Nautilus submarine, the Albatross steamboat, and the Epouvante airship. In the end, however, these creations did not travel to Montreal and remained prototypes. Communist Party officials decided that plastic toys did not fit the tradition of wooden toys that foreigners associated with Czechoslovakia; they deemed that, “for the souvenir stall, where the collection was to be included, her toys emit little Czechness [malo dýchají češstvím].”34 Authorities were concerned that toys on display generate Western hard-currency revenues needed for building communism. Adult-designed toys in socialist Czechoslovakia, at least during the first half of the Cold War, never fully broke from capitalism and the Iron Curtain was not so dense as its famous name implied.

Conclusion: Two blue cows In 1964 the editors of Tvar published “On the Toy” (O hračce), one of the last articles on children’s playthings to appear in its pages. Its author was Jiří Kroha, a celebrated architect active in both the interwar avant-garde and the young Czechoslovak party-state during late Stalinism. In this piece Kroha described his two favorite childhood toys providing some insight, filtered through adult memory, into children’s active participation in the making of toys and the construction of their meanings. These were his beloved “two blue cows,” which were self-fashioned or child-made toys. Kroha remembered how, On sunny days I transported the harvest and various loads with them from faraway lands into other rooms, paying a toll at the threshold of mother’s room.

Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde

189

Across paths that were at times dangerous, under giant chairs and a cruel table (with which I also sometimes talked), I proudly carried the load with a team of such beautiful and charming cows.

One day tragedy struck his cows. “The leg of a big person” stepped on one of them, “killing” it. Little Kroha was crestfallen about this fatal encounter, something that the big person did not understand. What Kroha perceived as a fabulous blue cow, the offending adult saw as the worthless handle of a broken clay pot. “Young man, it would be a miracle to make a cow out of the handle of a pot,” the adult asserted. Little Kroha stood his ground, maintaining that it was “no miracle”; he had really witnessed his cows being born out of the broken pieces of a pot that his mother had dropped.35 Drawing from this early memory, Kroha argued that what adults call “children’s fantasies” are realities for children, and that “To a child a toy is the realization of their perception.” His goal was to convince Czechoslovak toy designers and manufacturers to recognize the active role of children in the making of toys. It is important to note that Kroha’s article on the agency of young people and their role in the construction of playthings was not first published in Tvar in 1964. It dated from 1922, initially appearing in the interwar applied-arts journal, Drobné umění (Minor Arts), to which Podhajská, Sutnar, and other avant-garde designers contributed.36 Thus, during the first half of the Cold War, despite the grim years when Stalin was alive and socialist realism dominated cultural expression, avant-garde ideas about toys and children’s play remained significant to Czechoslovak designers. The extent to which that remained true after the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring and the subsequent period of normalization is a subject for future study, as are the related topics of toys as material agents for building communism and possibilities for children’s negotiations with playthings during the second half of the Cold War.

Notes 1

More research is welcome on the history of toys in socialist Czechoslovakia. Useful publications are the exhibition catalog Tereza Bruthansová, Libuše Niklová (Prague: Arbor vitae, 2010); and articles of Jana Barešová including, among others, “Vývoj hračkářství na Příbramsku, Part 2,” Panenka 2, no. 2 (2009): 18–19; “Ústředí lidové umělecké výroby a její hračky, Part 4,” Panenka 5, no. 1 (2012): 12–15, and “Tofa,” Panenka 5, no. 2 (2012): 30–35. For studies of children and childhood in socialist

190

2

3

4

5

6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13

Childhood by Design Czechoslovakia see Jiří Knapík, ed., Dětí, mládež a socialismus v Československu v 50. a 60. letech (Opava: Slezská univerzita, 2015); Martina Winkler, “Kolektivní versus rodinná výchova v socialistickém Československu? Rozbor českých filmů a knih pro děti,” Acta historica Universitatis Silesianae Opaviensis 8 (2015): 175–192; and Frank Henschel, “‘All Children Are Ours:’ Children’s Homes in Socialist Czechoslovakia as Laboratories of Social Engineering,” Bohemia 56 (2016): 122–144. The constructed nature of folk art and toys in Central Europe is discussed in Manuel Schramm, “The Invention and Uses of Folk Art in Germany: Wooden Toys from the Erzgebirge Mountains,” Folklore 115 (April 2004): 64–76. Some scholars of Czechoslovak folk toys talked about their “primitive” features. See, for example, Naděžda Melniková-Papoušková, “Hračka a její význam,” Tvar 15, no. 1–2 (1964): 32–45. Associations with wood and wooden toys are discussed in Amy F. Ogata and Susan Weber, eds., Swedish Wooden Toys (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 15–18. Valuable studies on Czech design during the interwar period include Alena Adlová, České užité umění 1918–1938 (Prague: Museum of Applied Arts, 1983); and Jiří Fronek, ed., Artěl: Umění pro všední den, 1908–1935 (Prague: Arbor vitae, 2009). Information on Podhajská’s education and early career is in Megan Brandow-Faller, “‘An Artist in Every Child—A Child in Every Artist’: Artistic Toys and Art for the Child at the Kunstschau 1908,” West 86th 20, no. 2 (2013): 195–225. Research is needed on Podhajská’s life and activities between 1945 and her 1963 demise (her work did not appear in Tvar, perhaps because she was out of favor with the Communist Party). Color photos of Podhajská’s and Sutnar’s toys are in Froněk, Artěl, 154–165. On the persistence of the avant-garde among visual artists, see Maruška Svašek, “The Politics of Artistic Identity: The Czech Art World in the 1950s and 1960s,” Contemporary European History 6, no. 3 (1997): 383–403. Jindřich Halabala, “Význam a činnost poradního sboru pro hračky,” Tvar 4, no. 10 (1952): 310–312. Ibid. V. Komárková, “K otázce nových hraček na mateřských školách,” Předškolní výchova 5, no. 6 (1950–1951): 187–189. Halabala, “Význam a činnost poradního sboru pro hračky.” Postwar Czechoslovakia’s first president, Edvard Beneš, created ÚLUV to insure “the healthy developmental premises of folk and artistic production.” See Beneš Decree no. 110/1945 Sb., October 27, 1945, “O organisaci lidové a umělecké výroby,” Sbírka zákonů Československé republiky 49 (November 7, 1945): 257–261. ÚLUV produced Tvar until 1958, when a reorganization placed it under the Union of Czechoslovak Visual Artists (Svaz československých výtvarných umělců).

Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde

191

14 For Grus’s motorcycle, see http://www.upm.cz/index.php?page=123&language=cz& year=2010&id=150 (accessed July 24, 2017); for the Swedish motorcycle, see Ogata and Weber, eds., Swedish Wooden Toys, 22. 15 Jan Pistorius, “Jak dělám hračky,” Tvar 3, no. 9 (January 1950): 269–273. 16 Ibid. 17 For this cover art, see Tvar, 4, no. 10 (1952). 18 Václav Jaroš, “K výstavě ‘Dítě a hračka’,” Tvar 4, no. 10 (1952): 292–293. 19 Ibid. 20 A photo showing the toy in detail is in Pistorius, “Jak dělám hračky,” 273. 21 Eva Kubiová, “Význam hraček při výchově dítěte,” Tvar 4, no. 10 (1942), 294–296. 22 For the images discussed here, see Tvar, 4, no. 10 (1942). 23 Cathleen M. Giustino, “Industrial Design and the Czechoslovak Pavilion at EXPO ’58: Artistic Autonomy, Party Control and Cold War Common Ground,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 (2012): 185–212. 24 See Miroslav Lhotský, “Soutěž na dřevěné hračky pro Světovou výstavu,” Tvar 9, no. 2 (1957), 56–59. A photo of the train is on page 58. 25 On the Politburo response, see Giustino, “Industrial Design and the Czechoslovak Pavilion at EXPO ’58,” 207. 26 Useful images of the “Toy and Puppets” section in the Czechoslovak Pavilion at EXPO 58 are in “Úspěch československého umění,” Tvar 10, no. 9–10 (1958): 298– 301; and Daniela Kramerová and Vanda Skálová, eds., Bruselský sen: Československá účast na světové výstavě EXPO 58 v Bruselu a životní styl 1. poloviny 60. let (Prague: Arbor vitae, 2008), 184. 27 Viktor Fixl, “Potřebujeme pro své děti nové hračky,” Žena a moda 12, no. 12 (1960): 22–23. 28 For discussion of the interwar avant-garde see, for example, “Sovětská architektura dvacatých let,” Tvar 15, no. 1–2 (1964): 3–11. 29 Jaroslav Hlaváček, “Výchova návrhářů hraček,” Tvar 15, no. 1–2 (1964): 12–31. 30 Melniková-Papoušková, “Hračka a její význam,” 32–45. 31 “Závěrečná zpráva úkolu PRVT č. 3.04 z roku 1965: Kolekce nových výrobků,” Moravian Provincial Archive (Moravský zemský archiv), Fond Fatra Napajedla, inventory no. 165, carton 19. 32 Bruthansová, Libuše Niklová, 87. 33 Ibid., 9. 34 Miroslava Drgáčová, “Hračky Libuše Niklové,” Naše Pravda: List PV KSČ a rady ONV v Gottwaldově, September 6, 1966: 1. Original source located through ibid., 98. 35 Jiří Kroha, “O hračce,” Tvar 15, no. 3 (1964): 65, IX. This issue also included an article on Le Corbusier. 36 For the original publication, see Jiří Kroha, “O hračce,” Drobné umění 3, no. 1 (1922): 56–58.

9

Reconstructing Domestic Play: The Kaleidoscope House Karen Stock and Katherine Wheeler

“This is not a house for Barbie,” stated architect Peter Wheelwright and artist Laurie Simmons regarding their Kaleidoscope House (2001) which presents a potentially de-gendered toy grounded in early twentieth-century utopian ideals.1 Because Simmons’s work often incorporates toys and dolls, Larry Mangel, the president of Bozart toy company, approached her to design a dollhouse.2 Bozart promoted its products for “kidults,” which is the company’s clever way of expressing that their merchandise appeals to adults who still enjoy play as well as children interested in more sophisticated toys. The Kaleidoscope House aligns with this mission and subverts many of the conventions of dollhouses of the past while reinforcing a Modernist ideal. Exchanging the nauseating pinkness and townhouse arrangement of stacked floors one room deep of Barbie’s Dreamhouse, the Kaleidoscope House’s multi-colored translucent “skin” and Modernist open plan signal an ideological openness (Figure 9.1). A sculpture as well as a toy, the Kaleidoscope House is whimsical, inviting, and impeccably styled with interior furnishings and decorations by contemporary artists and designers. In this way, the house recalls the original function of the dollhouse as a miniature showplace of wealth and taste for adult collectors, while still creating an object that can be handled and manipulated by children. The sleek, mass-produced Kaleidoscope House is far from the basic wooden toys or leaves and twigs from nature that the philosopher Walter Benjamin recommends for children’s play. He disparages toys of the industrial age because they lack the personal touch of the craftsman and stifle creativity.3 The Kaleidoscope House, however, combines the best of both worlds as it combines thoughtful design with the mass produceability of industrialization. It is an object that encourages open play as well as experimentation with color, light, and

194

Childhood by Design

Figure 9.1 Kaleidoscope House, Laurie Simmons and Peter Wheelwright for Bozart Toys, Co., 2001. Image courtesy of Peter Wheelwright. Photo by Laurie Simmons.

role-play with the potential to entrance both children and adults. The dollhouse also serves as an object for adult collectors that represents both a fantasy of designer lifestyle and a connection to their own childhood. The German art historian and early scholar of toys, Karl Gröber, in his seminal work Children’s Toys of Bygone Days, states: “The fantasy of a grown-up, be it ever so winged, can never recover the wealth of visions which course past the heart of every child … the tiniest object swells into a world, a hint, however slender, weaves itself into a fairy-tale.”4 According to Gröber, however, the division between childhood and adulthood is more porous than fixed, and the adult seeks avenues back to enchanted moments. Gröber continues, “Through a chink in the dense curtain which shrouds the past, he catches a glimpse of the long vanished magic land of his childhood.”5 The dollhouse is perhaps one of the most fertile vehicles for a return to childhood pleasures. As Susan Stewart notes, precisely because the dollhouse is inaccessible to the body and cannot be known sensually it “is the most abstract of all miniature forms. Yet cognitively the dollhouse is gigantic.”6 This duality—being both small and large, both concrete and abstract—makes

Reconstructing Domestic Play

195

the dollhouse a rigorous cognitive exercise or, more colloquially, an exercise of the imagination. The Kaleidoscope House invites both children and adults to exercise their imaginations and weave a uniquely Modernist fairytale. This dollhouse provides access to an unusual realm of fantasy that has the qualities of both here and elsewhere—as the inspiration for a utopian model of home and a liberated view of domesticity. This is a world that may have come into being if Modernist culture of the early twentieth century had taken a different course.

Brief history of the dollhouse The dollhouse has a long history as a source of pride and amusement for both adults and children. The name of “doll” or “baby” house references its small size, as its function was not necessarily that of a toy.7 The earliest recorded house was created in 1557–1558 for Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, and was designed as part of his Kunstkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, demonstrating that his own residence in miniature was worthy of inclusion. Other wealthy individuals throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries spent large sums in order to recreate their luxurious way of life in miniature. However, from its origins as an object worthy of male attention and a sign of wealth, the dollhouse has typically been gendered female with the implicit, or at times explicit, purpose of teaching girls how to be proper women. Recent scholars, such as James E. Bryan in this volume, have noted that the function of the dollhouse was far more nuanced than a straightforward didactic tool. The miniature made household tasks more appealing and allowed for “inspirational” play. During the 1600 and 1700s, girls were deemed to be in need of instruction on managing large households and the dollhouse was therefore both an ideal didactic tool for a young woman as well as appropriate for the adult collector. The life of the middle-class woman was consumed with the management of the household.8 One German historian, writing in 1765, explains: “Concerning the training of maidens, I must make reference to the playthings many of them played with until they were brides, namely the so-called Baby Houses. These contained everything that was needed for house and home, presented in miniature and some went so far in lavishness that such a plaything came to be worth a thousand guilders or more.”9 These “playthings” made of lavish materials such as silver and ivory were utilitarian works of art whose value was partly linked with how thoroughly they reflected real life. However, as Susan Broomhall convincingly

196

Childhood by Design

argues, the early lavish dollhouses should not be interpreted simply as “historical mirrors providing descriptive evidence of upper-class homes.”10 These houses, as well as later miniature dwellings, are far more complex artifacts of the “aspirations and identities” of those who create and those who play within these imagined spaces.11 The dollhouse was repositioned as a toy beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries “when concepts began to change as to childhood mentality, [which were] parallel to new developments in the education of children.”12 In other words, even when play began to be seen as an integral part of childhood, the role of the dollhouse changed only slightly. The didactic purpose was more implicit, but the dollhouse was still intended to teach children the values of the adult world. Karl Gröber asserted that girl’s play and toys “always keep in one orbit, for to her the mother with her round of household duties will always be the model for her play until the end of her childhood.”13 Therefore, the miniaturized household duties of the girl were to lead directly to the real household duties of the woman. The popularity of the mass-produced dollhouse for children reached its peak in the nineteenth century, while the popularity of the dollhouse continued to expand during the twentieth century when adult fascination with finely crafted miniatures returned with artisans and shops gearing their wares to the adult as well as the child.14 The dollhouse, while still at times costly, serves as an affordable miniature signifier for a lifestyle that may be out of reach. The dollhouse provides pleasure in the “dual satisfaction of picturing oneself in the interior—for consciousness always yearns for the haven of inwardness—while simultaneously mastering from the outside that interior space wherein one feels secure.”15 This pleasure, however, is always tinged with a longing for the unattainable and leaves a “bittersweet aftertaste.”16 Childhood reflections haunted by adult unease are a theme that runs throughout Laurie Simmons’s body of work. This is especially apparent in Simmons’s early photographs of individual miniature rooms which are the distant progenitor of the Kaleidoscope House.

Laurie Simmons In and Around the House Laurie Simmons’s early photographs engage with the power of the miniature to capture adult concerns regarding a woman’s place within the domestic interior and the nature of home. Simmons recounts that, as she was searching for

Reconstructing Domestic Play

197

a direction after completing her BFA in 1971, she stumbled on a toy store in upstate New York. There she found toys like those she had played with as a child. These objects became the subject of her earliest black and white photographs from 1976 to 1978.17 Initially, Simmons photographed empty rooms that at first glance look full size. She observes, “It’s about being able to make a large world manageable, because the end result of a photograph is ambiguous, and even though these things are small, I try to convince the viewer that they’re very large and very real.”18 Some images do appear uncannily lifelike such as Sink/Ivy Wallpaper, 1976 (Figure 9.2). Once Simmons inserts the housewife doll, however, the illusion of reality is hopelessly broken, creating an emotional resonance and even pathos in the scene.19 The housewife appears hysterical in a number of images depicting the kitchen. She stands on her head, lies on the floor, sits in the sink, and seems generally ill equipped to perform her domestic duties. The bathroom scenes exhibit the most dramatic lighting. As the doll stands next to the tub, she appears caught in a film noir type scene suggesting a narrative that cannot be deciphered, reminiscent of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, 1977–1980.

Figure 9.2 Laurie Simmons, Sink/Ivy Wallpaper, black and white photograph, 13.5 × 21 cm, 1976. Edition of 10. Image courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.

198

Childhood by Design

Simmons admits that she was initially “too embarrassed to share them with anyone else.”20 This is understandable. The ostensible subject of the works are toys, and not just any toys but dollhouse toys. In an era when women were slamming the door on domestic servitude, the home was unfashionable on several levels. In some ways, the social upheaval of the 1970s was an attempt to assassinate the “Angel in the House” that Virginia Woolf speaks of in her 1931 essay “Professions for Women.” Woolf explains why this Angel, celebrated in Coventry Patmore’s poem of 1854, needed to be destroyed: I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman … I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her.21

This phantom haunted not just female writers but any woman who chose to pursue a career. The Angel embodied a debilitating selflessness and an identity defined solely through domestic duty. Woolf continues, “My excuse … would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me.”22 However, the domestic interior cannot, and should not, be entirely abandoned. At the end of her essay, Woolf encourages women to decorate and furnish the room that they have reclaimed from the Angel. Woolf asks, “How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms?”23 These are difficult questions for a woman of any generation and, as a young artist, Simmons approached the dilemma with the novel solution of constructing miniature rooms. Simmons does not approach the Angel as an adversary. Instead she “plays” with her, entering into the Angel’s domain. The images are neither a feminist condemnation nor a celebration of the 1950s suburban housewife, one of the more pernicious avatars of the Angel. Perhaps because the 1970s was an era when women did have more choices, Simmons regarded this figure with compassion and sympathized with her loneliness. The photographs, numbering in the hundreds, were not originally conceived as a series, and it was only in retrospect that Simmons connected the individual rooms to conceptually create a “house.” Although some images appeared in earlier exhibitions, it was not until after the Kaleidoscope House that Simmons selected just over fifty images for inclusion in the exhibition In and Around the House of 2003. Simmons explains that in revisiting the photographs:

Reconstructing Domestic Play

199

I became aware of a potential narrative and structure that hadn’t been obvious to me during the years I was shooting. I actually began to see a house with many rooms, as well as indoor and outdoor space. I also began to think about a female presence, both real and implied, and to formally locate a space that didn’t exist in my mind when I was originally exploring this territory with the camera. The project that you see here took shape when hundreds of long-forgotten images were revisited with the notion of creating a home within In and Around the House.24

The individual images are frozen moments of play and construct a halting narrative. However, whether they coalesce into a home is another question. Simmons’s photographs capture a simulacrum of childhood and cultural fantasies. They evoke a combination of nostalgia, sadness, and loneliness. Simmons exploits this nostalgic quality, “I was simply trying to recreate a feeling, a mood, from the time that I was growing up: a sense of the fifties that I knew was both beautiful and lethal at the same time.”25 This is a mood that is familiar to many people. Even those who did not grow up in the 1950s are aware of the idealized, fictional nuclear family that made reality appear dysfunctional and inadequate. Through the photographs Simmons gains an element of control over this beautiful and lethal space. In the constructed miniature world, the house remains immaculate and the endless cycle of domestic drudgery is paused in a moment of perfect stasis. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observes, the miniature is an “exercise that has metaphysical freshness; it allows us to be world conscious at slight risk. And how restful this exercise on a dominated world can be! For miniature rests us without ever putting us to sleep. Here the imagination is both vigilant and content.”26 This “metaphysical freshness” is achieved when Simmons leaves the isolated, domestic world of the housewife doll and collaborates on the Kaleidoscope House. Simmons reflects “I always loved the part of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy wakes up in a Technicolor world. Kansas looks pretty good in black-and-white, but suddenly the Yellow Brick Road, the red poppies, the ruby slippers make the world on the screen glow.”27 This metaphor is especially apt for the Kaleidoscope House. The traditional suburban home “looks pretty good” in her photographs but cannot compare to the spectacular color of the Kaleidoscope House. Like Dorothy leaving Kansas, the housewife is transported to another land, a space of color, openness and, implicitly, a space of freedom and empowerment.

200

Childhood by Design

The Kaleidoscope House as a Modern/ist utopia The brightly colored “glass” panels cladding its exterior give the Kaleidoscope House its name, demarcate it as a toy, and link it to modern theories on glass, color, and light.28 The Kaleidoscope House functions as a cross-over in that it appeals to both children and adults. It is a model of a contemporary lifestyle to which all ages can relate, and yet still serves as a vehicle for the imagination. Invented in the nineteenth century by Sir David Brewster, the kaleidoscope is an optical device “for creating and exhibiting beautiful forms” through the movement of colored glass pieces, an effect which Wheelwright and Simmons have translated to the Kaleidoscope House.29 Despite today’s perception of modern architecture as all white, early twentieth-century architects considered color an essential part of architecture. In his 1928 essay, “Space–Time Colour,” Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), a member of the De Stijl movement, writes: “Plastic expression in architecture is inconceivable without colour. Colour and light complete one another. Without colour, architecture is expressionless.”30 For Le Corbusier (1887–1965), color is as essential and “as powerful as the ground plan and section” in designing architecture, and he created his own collections of colors for his buildings.31 Color theory was also prominent in the Bauhaus curriculum, with Paul Klee (1879–1940), Johannes Itten (1888–1967), Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and Josef Albers (1888–1976) each teaching color as a design element that had the potential to convey emotions, create synesthetic connections to music, or transcend the material realm. The writer Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) and the architect Bruno Taut (1880–1938) saw glass as the best way to bring color to architecture. A luxury item prior to industrialization, by the turn of the twentieth century glass was available in larger quantities and sheet sizes, spurring the notion of a glass architecture.32 Scheerbart’s manifesto Glass Architecture and his novel The Gray Cloth and Ten-Percent White: A Ladies Novel, both published in 1914, proclaim the possibilities of glass to create change in not only architecture, but also society. For Scheerbart, the old architecture of brick with its heavy, load-bearing walls must give way to the new material of glass. He begins his manifesto: We live for the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged … to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character from the rooms in which we live. We can only do that by

Reconstructing Domestic Play

201

introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass—of coloured [sic] glass. The new environment, which we thus create, must bring us a new culture.33

Glass architecture, through the dissolution of the solidity of the enclosure, would result in a new architecture of light, create a new urban condition, and break down cultural barriers for a new way of living. Scheerbart proposes that architects begin with small projects like “verandas” with colored glass on three sides that would entice clients to commission larger projects.34 Scheerbart claims, “Glass architecture makes homes into cathedrals, with the same effect.”35 The effect he references is spiritual and otherworldly, the experience of standing in a Gothic cathedral with light streaming through stained glass windows. Gothic architecture, for both Scheerbart and Taut, is the root of their conviction in colored glass, because it links glass, color, and light with spirit. In his 1912 essay Das grosse Licht, Scheerbart describes the experience of the light in a Gothic cathedral: “This great light is the core of the Mysteries. Today we want to capture it and put it to work again in our crystal palaces. The great light makes people good. Through it their noble ideas come alive.”36 Glass, therefore, is a material that has the power to create transcendent spiritual and metaphysical experiences that improve mankind. Scheerbart presents these ideals in a more light-hearted way in his novel The Gray Cloth which tells the story of the architect Edgar Krug, who is obsessed with creating an architecture of colored glass. To preserve the purity of the experience of his designs, he asks his soon-to-be wife, the organist Clara Weber, to sign an agreement before they marry that she wear only gray with 10 percent white, as he does, so as not to distract from his colored glass designs. The synesthetic experience of the colored glass and the “roar” of Clara playing the organ connects to the Kaleidoscope House’s living room with its colored “glass” walls and the tiny piano playing the Gymnopedie No. 1, a work by the avant-garde composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). At the end of the novel, Edgar and Clara sit in their glass tower salon and Edgar comments, “All that is beautiful on the face of the earth. And we find it all again in glass architecture. It is the culmination—a cultural peak!”37 Glass architecture is not merely a shell in which you live, it is an enrichment of how you live. Scheerbart’s ideas were taken up by Taut in his Glashaus pavilion at the 1914 Cologne Werkbund Exhibition.38 The pavilion, built of multiple types of glass—blocks, tiles, panels, mirrored balls, chandeliers, and cases to exhibit

202

Childhood by Design

other products of glass—is a monument to the possibilities of this brittle, enigmatic material. At the base of the glass-tiled waterfall on the lower level stood a milk glass screen behind which a projector with a kaleidoscope created what Scheerbart described as “a magnificent and rich variety of colors.”39 The synesthetic effect must have been otherworldly with the swirling colored lights, glass tiles, and piped-in music. On the exterior of the pavilion at Taut’s request, Scheerbart contributed fourteen aphorisms cast into the base of the pavilion’s dome proclaiming: “Happiness in Color/Only in Glass Culture,” “Colored Glass Destroys Hate,” and, touting glass’s resistance to fire, “Burnable Materials/Are Really a Scandal.”40 Glass was a nod to the future. To promote these ideas further, Taut founded the Crystal Chain (Gläserne Kette, technically the “Glass Chain”) in 1919, a group of artists, architects, and writers who circulated letters under pseudonyms to promote their ideas.41 Taut, unsurprisingly, wrote primarily about glass architecture which he, like Scheerbart, thought had the ability to remove the psychological and cultural effects of a solid masonry wall.42 To embrace the color and light of glass was to bring the effects of the sun and nature in built form, making the spirit tangible. As Iain Boyd Whyte notes, “Just as the body could become spirit through transfiguration, so, conversely, the spirit could be given physical, built form through the medium of the architect.”43 It was the architect’s responsibility to “become the faith” in that process. Architecture’s role, therefore, goes beyond the shelter of the body to the enrichment of the soul. The brilliantly colored panels of the Kaleidoscope House not only sheath it in color and light but transcend their architectural role of enclosure to engage the spirit through play and the imagination. Although a miniature, the house is structurally sound. To achieve the glass enclosure required a modern structural system to take the forces of the loadbearing masonry wall. Le Corbusier’s Domino House (1914) of thin columns and flat plates in reinforced concrete was a revolutionary system intended for mass production. Its application in the Kaleidoscope House results in a structural system of six vertical supports and floor plates of the most modern of materials, plastic. The transfer of the structural load to the columns results in the Kaleidoscope House’s free plan, free facade, and flat roof; elements of Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture. Wheelwright and Simmons have also pulled the columns back from the corners in the main living area, creating an open corner condition. Visually opening the corner was a technique used by architects such as Gerrit Rietveld in the Schroeder House (1924). To define the corner is to define the space inside it; therefore, keeping the corner open by

Reconstructing Domestic Play

203

moving the structure off of it breaks the “box” that defines the space. The effect (if one were 5-inches tall) is of spatial continuity from the interior to exterior. The frames for the sliding colored panels provide a layer of compositional complexity, by creating patterns, proportional relationships, and symmetries. On the entrance elevation, for example, the frames create an ABA pattern on the first and third levels and a different pattern on the second level, while reinforcing the main axis of the central bay. In the first floor, this axis runs through the entrance, stair, and kitchen (right through the refrigerator), culminating in the living room fireplace (Figure 9.3) and accentuating the symmetrical arrangement of the bedrooms on the second level and the office and terrace/garage on the first. The central axis is also vertically marked with the red chimney with its little opening, which allows a view out from the mezzanine at the top of the stairs, a view that full-sized people can only see from the chimney side. The overall visual effect is one of a contained composition enhanced by a complex and changing colored enclosure. In creating the Kaleidoscope House, Wheelwright and Simmons create not just a dollhouse, but a scale “model” that articulates the full-scale ambitions and ideals of glass architecture. Like Scheerbart, Wheelwright is also a novelist, publishing As it is on Earth in 2012. Wheelwright perceives similarities between writing and architecture: “How does one enter the story? How does one move through it? What is its structure?”44 The rooms of the house, like the chapters of the story are woven together through the imagination of the viewer/reader. In constructing the narrative of the Kaleidoscope House, Wheelwright invites the viewer—whether they be adult or child—to embellish the space with their own stories. Much like Simmons’s early photographs, adult sophistication and childhood fantasy are

Figure 9.3 Plans of Kaleidoscope House, (L) Ground Floor with living, dining, kitchen, and office (R) Upper Level with mezzanine and bedrooms. Courtesy of Peter Wheelwright. Redrawn by Lacey Stansell, 2017.

204

Childhood by Design

intertwined so that the distinction between small and large seems insignificant. There is power in the small scale, as Bachelard recognizes: “The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it … One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.”45 It is in imagination’s ability to defy the rational by inhabiting and possessing the miniature that the Kaleidoscope House is both engaging and powerful.

In and around the Kaleidoscope House One aspect of this possession is the defiance of gender and architectural stereotypes of both the typical dollhouse and the suburban single-family home. America’s post-Second World War suburban dream was predicated on each family having their own home with the woman as the caretaker of the domestic space. Toys were part of this ideological lesson that children learned unconsciously as they played. Barbie is perhaps the most visible toy that promoted a lifestyle.46 The doll was “sold” to mothers as a way to teach their daughters the right way to dress in order to catch a man’s attention.47 But the phenomenon of Barbie did not stay within the parameters set by Mattel’s marketing strategy. She is “emphatically feminine” in her appearance but simultaneously refuses the “self-sacrificing, other-oriented” ideal of mother and wife.48 Recent studies of Barbie have revealed the subversive potential of the doll as she is appropriated by various collectors; however, for many Barbie still “signifies fixed gender roles, heterosexual norms and consumerist values” that undermine female agency.49 Wheelwright positions the Kaleidoscope House as an attempt to subvert this traditional interpretation of Barbie: “The fixed sociality and domestic practices of the Barbie dolls, with their coy relationships to publicity and privacy (not to mention their political-correctness benignly concealing an assimilationist conservatism), would require quite an adjustment in the transparent, flexible, and minimal open plan of this dollhouse.”50 The Kaleidoscope House intentionally deconstructs the strict gender binaries and excessive consumerism promoted by toys such as Barbie. Through the open spaces that elide public and private, and the non-gendered color scheme, the Kaleidoscope House posits an alternative suburbia. Most dollhouses feature an elaborately detailed kitchen that is demarcated as the domain of the wife, or female servants. The central location of the kitchen in

Reconstructing Domestic Play

205

the Kaleidoscope House as part of the main living-dining space and separated only by a counter, references the kitchen as the “heart” of the home, while it suggests a different view of who might occupy it. This placement implies that whoever prepares the meals is not relegated to a separate room away from the family and is central to the “story” of the house. The Kaleidoscope House breaks “nearly every stylistic rule of dolls’ housing”51 but is a place that a “21st-century doll can call home.”52 Marketed along with the Kaleidoscope House, the Bozart toy company sold furniture, art, and accessory packages by well-known designers. Home is not just the shell of the house, but the objects within it. This integration of design positions the house as an architectural Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, and a model of the ideally furnished modern home with a recognizable designer touch. In addition, the house illustrates early twentieth-century theories of the marriage of design and mass production such as those of the Bauhaus, for instance.53 The Kaleidoscope House furniture is a mix of 1:12 scaled reproductions of full-size designer items— including the Elan modular sofa by Jasper Morrison, the dining chairs by Karim Rashid, and the Ford 021 Concept Car by Marc Newson—and items designed specifically for the Kaleidoscope House, such as the “Flo Glo” dining table by Karim Rashid.54 For the musically inclined doll, a Steinway Tricentennial Piano designed by Dakota Jackson provides enriching leisure possibilities. A miniature art collection is also available for the Kaleidoscope House that includes Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987, and Mel Bochner’s 1''=12'', 2000. Both works playfully comment on the dollhouse as commodity. Bochner’s piece, which simply shows the equation of the title in white font on a red background, was specifically commissioned for the dollhouse and captures the idea that in the Lilliputian world of the dollhouse one inch is the conceptual equivalent of twelve. Kruger’s work shows a black and white photograph of a hand holding a sign that boldly proclaims “I shop therefore I am.” The work satirizes those who define their identity through the objects they acquire. This is an interesting choice for the Kaleidoscope art collection since the house itself is a highly consumable object that blurs the distinction between original art and mass production. As one commentator notes, “it is a model that can be purchased and taken home to houses that can never hope to equal this new toy.”55 For most people their real homes fall short of their ideal. But through purchasing the Kaleidoscope House, originally priced at $250 without accessories, the adult purchaser, rather than the child “inhabitant,” can express their sophisticated taste and dwell in a Modernist dream space, making the

206

Childhood by Design

Kaleidoscope House similar to the early modern dollhouses designed for the Kunstkammern of adult collectors. Simmons’s Untitled (Woman’s Head), 1976, is also included in the Bozart art collection (Figure 9.4). One can imagine the eerily blurred black and white image hanging in the Kaleidoscope House like a portrait of the family’s grandmother. The housewife doll is a reminder of the past, an avatar of the Angel in the House, that no generation of women can or should completely forget. The traditional doll contrasts with the current family, called “action figures” in the Bozart catalogs. The mother and father of the family (Mr. and Mrs. Blue-Green) are modeled on Simmons and Wheelwright themselves, who are not married to each other in real life. Simmons’s first instinct was to have only dolls of children for the house, creating a place where children were in essence exploring a world without adult supervision. She changed her mind when she learned from a child psychologist that the children would “create a nuclear family out of the child dolls anyway.”56 The Kaleidoscope children—a boy and a girl—are included in two additional packages of kids and pets. Wheelwright jokes, “I feel a certain eerie pleasure in finding myself wedded in dollhood to Laurie Simmons. As the plastic mother and father figurines soon to take up residence in the fantasy world of the

Figure 9.4 Laurie Simmons, Untitled (Woman’s Head), black and white photograph, 13.5 × 21 cm, 1976. Edition of 10. Image courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.

Reconstructing Domestic Play

207

Kaleidoscope House.”57 In allowing themselves to be turned into figurines, the playthings of children, both Simmons and Wheelwright potentially relinquish a portion of the implied power that comes with their position as creators. At the same time they more firmly secure their position as the “owners” of the home. Wheelwright and Simmons have the rare opportunity to shrink down, become toys, and through this the impact of the house grows conceptually large. This duality is part of the magic of the miniature.

Conclusion The Kaleidoscope House can take its place among a select group of Modernist toys that seek to combine the creative adult and the precocious child in building a utopia. One such toy is Taut’s Dandanah, The Fairy Palace (1919), a set of colored cast-glass blocks with which children could create palaces and experiment with the effects of light and color.58 For Taut, children’s play was a mode of learning that would remain with them into adulthood. Taut writes: And we have a “great” ally here: in children. Children rejoice in the festival of light, … And we win over children, who have been thrust into this cold, joyless life, through play. Our building is play: “our goal is the play of style.” And we make children our master builders with real playthings (for example my glass construction kits with colorful nearly unbreakable blocks). These master builders see with emotion, and when they are grown-ups they will build with and through us, even if “we” are already dead.59

Both Taut and Scheerbart believed children were “enraptured” by colored glass and would embrace glass architecture and inherently understand its utopian ideals.60 The Kaleidoscope House carries on this legacy by inspiring children to carry on the ideals imprinted in their toys. The colored panels that are invisibly tinged with the history of utopian idealism, enclose and protect the interior while adding a magical effect of changing color. The dollhouse becomes one of Taut’s prisms, a world within itself. Wheelwright and Simmons have created a toy with multi-layered narratives of domesticity, color, material, and utopia. The open play allows for the possibility of an enriched architectural and cultural future. Montaigne says that play to a child is not play, but the most serious of occupations. It is a preparation for the seriousness of life which will come all

208

Childhood by Design

too soon.61 Wheelwright and Simmons are both sensitive to the liminal space between the child yearning to be an adult and the adult wishing to return to the innocence of childhood. The child may see the adult as being all powerful, and mimic this authority in play, but the adult realizes that this power is an illusion. Wheelwright observes: “as [Simmons’s] work has always suggested, we are all dolls placed hither and fro within and according to the social matrix that determines domesticity.”62 Even as we pass out of childhood and into adulthood, we are still subject to the demands of larger forces and find refuge in playing house. Decorating the dollhouse is not so very different from decorating the full-size domestic interior. There is a difference in degree but not in kind. Didier Maleuvre observes: “Miniaturization acts on the bourgeois wish for a Lilliputian world, which is always a politically domesticated world … the bourgeois at home never stops playing house … the interior is in itself a magnified dollhouse, a cutely domesticated universe over which the inhabitant can fancy himself the benevolent master, a mixture of Robinson and Gulliver.”63 The dollhouse is a more controllable and comprehensible version of the social forces that everyone must negotiate. As Bachelard notes, “the tiny things we imagine take us back to childhood, to familiarity with toys and the reality of toys.”64 The daydreamer, of any age is able to imaginatively climb inside the miniature house. Through the miniature the child looks forward to adult responsibilities while the adult attempts to recapture something that they never possessed. Reverie and utopia, fantasy and built reality, childhood and adulthood, all coalesce in the diminutive space of the Kaleidoscope House. A toy is never just a toy.

Notes 1 Peter Wheelwright, NEST magazine, vol. 10, Fall 2000, n.p. 2 Laurie Simmons is based in New York and exhibits her work both nationally and internationally. She is known for her photographic works that feature miniatures and ventriloquist dummies. For a profile of the now closed Bozart, see: http://www. totemdesign.com/DM/manufacturers/bozart.html. 3 Walter Benjamin, “The Cultural History of Toys,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1999), 114. 4 Karl Gröber, Children’s Toys of Bygone Days (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1928), 1.

Reconstructing Domestic Play

209

5 Ibid. 6 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 63. 7 Leonie von Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature: Four Centuries of Dolls’ Houses (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 8. 8 Ibid., 17. 9 Halina Pasierbska, Dolls’ Houses from the V&A Museum of Childhood (London: V&A Publishing, 2015), 9. 10 Susan Broomhall, “Imagined Domesticities in Early Modern Dutch Dollhouses,” Parergon 24, no. 2 (2007), 49. 11 Ibid., 47. 12 Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature, 8. 13 Gröber, Children’s Toys of Bygone Days, 4. 14 One indication of how adults have embraced miniatures is the National Association of Miniature Enthusiasts, a non-profit organization that promotes the collection and artistry of the miniature, complete with conferences and their own journal. https://miniatures.org/ 15 Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 136–137. 16 Ibid., 136. 17 Sarah Charlesworth, Laurie Simmons (New York: Art Press, 1994), 8. 18 Ibid., 10. 19 Simmons does not explicitly name the doll figure but Jan Howard refers to the figure as the housewife doll since “an unmarried woman is unimaginable in a 1950s dollhouse.” in “Picturing Memories,” in Laurie Simmons: The Music of Regret (Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997), 20. 20 Laurie Simmons, “In and Around the House,” in In and Around the House, Photographs, 1976–78 (New York: Carolina Nitsch Editions, 2003), 19. 21 Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in A Bloomsbury Group Reader, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 275. 22 Ibid., 276. 23 Ibid., 278–279. 24 Simmons, “In and Around the House,” 24. 25 Charlesworth, Laurie Simmons, 9. 26 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 161. 27 Simmons, “In and Around the House,” 23. 28 For the importance of the glass house in architectural history, see Reyner Banham, “The Glass Paradise,” The Architectural Review CXXV (February 1959): 87–89.

210

Childhood by Design

29 Sir David Brewster, The Kaleidoscope: Its History, Theory and Construction, 3rd edn (John Camden Hotten, 1870), 1. 30 Joost Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1974), 175. 31 http://www.lescouleurs.ch/1/le-corbusier/le-corbusier/. See also Le Corbusier, Polychromie Architecturale: Le Corbusier’s Color Keyboards from 1931 and 1959, ed. Arthur Rüegg (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1997). 32 Cecil D. Elliot, Chapter 5 “Glass,” in Technics and Architecture: The Development of Materials and Systems for Buildings (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 157. 33 Paul Scheerbart, “Glass Architecture,” in Glass Architecture by Paul Scheerbart and Alpine Architecture by Bruno Taut, ed. Dennis Sharp, trans. James Palmes (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 41. Emphasis added. 34 Ibid., 44. 35 Ibid., 72. 36 As translated in Iain Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letter: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 7. 37 Paul Scheerbart, The Gray Cloth: Paul Scheerbart’s Novel on Glass Architecture, trans. John Stuart (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 123. 38 Taut dedicated the pavilion to Scheerbart, and Scheerbart dedicated Glass Architecture to Taut. The 1914 Werkbund Exhibition also featured Walter Gropius’s and Adolf Meyer’s Werkbund Model Factory, another example of glass architecture. 39 Paul Scheerbart, “Glass Houses: Bruno Taut’s Glass Palace at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition,” in Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!: A Paul Scheerbart Reader, ed. Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 97. See also Noam M. Elcott, “‘Kaleidoscopic-Architecture’: Scheerbart, Taut, and the Glass House,” in Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!, ed. McElheny and Burgin, 112–113; and Ufuk Ersoy, “To See Daydreams: The Glass Utopia of Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut,” in Imagining and Remaking the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia, ed. Peter Lang (Oxford: Verlag, 2011), 130–131. 40 John Stuart, “Unweaving Narrative Fabric: Bruno Taut, Walter Benjamin, and Paul Scheerbart’s The Gray Cloth,” Journal of Architectural Education 53, no. 2 (1999): 67–68. 41 Scheerbart’s pseudonym was “Glaspapa.” 42 Ersoy, “To See Daydreams,” 118. 43 Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letter, 5. 44 Jayne Merkel, “Peter M. Wheelwright,” Architectural Record 200, no. 10 (October 2012): 38. 45 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 150.

Reconstructing Domestic Play

211

46 Barbie’s lifestyle was also promoted at full size in the “Barbie Dreamhouse Experience” that was constructed in 2013 in Sunrise, Florida. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/17/barbie-dream-house-sawgrass_n_3253660.html 47 Marlys Pearson and Paul R. Mullins “Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3, no. 4 (December 1999): 233. 48 Mary F. Rogers, Barbie Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 16. 49 Kim Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 60. See also Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 50 Wheelwright, NEST magazine. 51 Mark Morris, Models: Architecture and the Miniature (West Sussex: WileyAcademy, 2006), 130. 52 Pilar Viladas, “Playtime: Welcome to the Dollhouse,” New York Times Magazine, October 8, 2000. 53 http://www.lauriesimmons.net/projects/kaleidoscope-house/#/images/5/ 54 The commercial relationship of miniature furniture to its full-scale counterpart is also part of the history of the dollhouse. Early modern dollhouse furnishings were often artisans’ samples, perfectly crafted miniature examples to entice buyers of large-scale versions. See Birgitta Lindencrona, “Dollhouses and Miniatures in Sweden,” in Swedish Wooden Toys, ed. Amy F. Ogata and Susan Weber (New York: The Bard Graduate Center, 2014), 191. 55 Morris, Models, 130. 56 Viladas, “Playtime.” 57 Wheelwright, NEST magazine. 58 Taut designed the models and Blanche Mahlberg invented the blocks. See Howard Shubert, “Toys and the Modernist Tradition,” in Toys and the Modernist Tradition, exhibition catalog (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1993), 17, 18, 20. See also Barbara Shapiro, “Dandanah, The Fairy Palace,” in Architecture and its Image, ed. Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1989), cat. no. 128. 59 Bruno Taut, “Glass Architecture,” in Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!, ed. McElheny and Burgin, 121. 60 Scheerbart, “Glass Architecture,” 66. 61 Gröber, Children’s Toys of Bygone Days, 3. 62 Ibid. 63 Maleuvre, Museum Memories, 135. 64 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 149.

Part Three

Toys, Play, and Design Culture as Instruments of Political and Ideological Indoctrination

10

Material Culture in Miniature: Nuremberg Kitchens as Inspirational Toys in the Long Nineteenth Century James E. Bryan

This essay considers the one-room dollhouses known in German as Puppenküchen (literally “dolls’ kitchens”) and in English as “Nuremberg kitchens” after the capital of the nineteenth-century German toy industry (Figure 10.1). These toys were meant to dazzle, fascinate, and beguile; and for many they still have such an effect. Until now, seemingly all that has been written about Nuremberg kitchens has been more descriptive than analytical, a situation this essay is meant to redress. Compounding the problem is that Puppenküchen are commonly discussed as a subset of dollhouses; focused studies such as Sabine Reinelt’s Puppenküche und Puppenherd in drei Jahrhunderten (Dolls’ Kitchens and Dolls’ Stoves in Three Centuries) and Eva Stille’s Doll Kitchens: 1800–1980 are relatively rare.1 Specifically, my essay reconsiders the standard explanation of their purposes as “educational,” arguing that they did not teach practical aspects of domesticity so much as they encouraged girls to aspire to be homemakers through the enchantment of the miniature. Nuremberg kitchens reached a peak of popularity in nineteenth-century Germany, closely associated with middle-class female domesticity, but the form itself dates back to 1572, when the Princesses of Saxony, aged five and ten, were given a toy kitchen with 275 different tin dishes, furniture of all sorts, and a poultry yard. Now lost, it was one of the earliest recorded dollhouses of any sort.2 Since then, many adult collectors as well as children have owned multi-room dollhouses, but these one-room kitchens seem to have been regarded, almost exclusively, as children’s playthings. Some of the first images of miniature kitchens are found in the 1803 catalog of Georg Hieronymus Bestelmeyer, a wholesale

216

Childhood by Design

Figure 10.1 Typical Toy Kitchen, German, Late Eighteenth to Mid-Nineteenth Century, 17 × 29 × 13 7⅜8 in. (43.2 × 73.7 × 35.2 cm), New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Sylmaris Collection, gift of George Coe Graves, 1930, Accession # 30.120.123.

toy merchant who purchased his stock from numerous home-based artisans to resell to retailers throughout Germany and abroad. These cottage industry pieceworkers were paid very little, allowing wholesalers and retailers to offer Nuremberg kitchens at prices easily afforded by middle-class consumers.3 By the end of the century industrialized mass-production by firms such as Moritz Gottschalk, Gebrüder Bing, and Märklin reduced prices even further.4 Early dollhouse histories interpreted the purpose of the Nuremberg kitchen as self-evident: to teach girls lessons in housekeeping and cooking. Flora Gill Jacobs’s 1953 A History of Doll Houses, the first published toy history focusing explicitly on dollhouses, asserted that “toy kitchens have been positively cluttered in their effort to teach what apparently was the highly utensilized art of cookery.”5 In her 1965 second edition, Jacobs expanded on this explanation, and repeated it again in the 1978 catalog of her prominent private dollhouse museum.6 Similar interpretations were expressed by toy historians in collector’s guides by

Material Culture in Miniature

217

Constance Eileen King in 1983, Valerie Jackson in 1992, and Margaret Towner in 1993, and even in museum catalogs by Susan Hight Rountree in 1996 and Halina Pasierbska in 2008.7 Such straightforward explanations are not limited to the English-language collectors’ literature. In her 1986 Schöne alte Puppenstuben (Beautiful Old Dollhouses) Johanna Kunz wrote, “[a] responsible mother also pursued a pedagogical approach when setting up a dollhouse or kitchen for her children. She should become familiar with playing at housework to prepare for the duties she will have to fulfill later.”8 But, in contrast to the predominant interpretation established by Jacobs, these model kitchens are better understood as meant to encourage girls to adopt traditional roles by making housekeeping seem fascinating through the attractions of miniaturization. The dynamics of that appeal will be explored here by considering the formal properties of miniature kitchens as well as their documented history, thus employing a material culture approach. That methodology posits that the artifacts people make, own, and use necessarily manifest the values, attitudes, and expectations they hold, so that by the close examination of their physical possessions (material) others may discern their metaphysical worldviews (culture).9 Most dollhouse histories have been written by and for collectors. These works have presumed that miniatures are interesting, but a few important authors have considered why that should be. In his 1964 Poetics of Space philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed that values become condensed and enriched in miniature, so that through them an owner gains a more certain sense of possession. Noting that great reduction in size can reconcile disparate elements or obliterate imperfections normally visible, Bachelard discussed miniatures as inducing reverie and a sense of security.10 Novelist Steven Millhauser’s 1983 essay “The Fascination of the Miniature” owed much to Bachelard, with further insights into the focused concentration miniatures require from observers and the ways they allow a totality of comprehension not usually possible at full scale.11 Poet and critic Susan Stewart’s 1984 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection likewise echoed much put forth before by Bachelard, adding apt observations on the inwardness of most dollhouses (which tend to emphasize interior decoration more than exterior architecture). As Stewart has it, dollhouses stand for virtual worlds to be gazed upon rather than inhabited, and frequently function as proxies for things too expensive or archaic for everyday existence.12 A few additional observations on the powers of miniaturization can be made. First, there can be an intriguing dissonance in seeing familiar things

218

Childhood by Design

in unfamiliarly tiny forms, rendering the banal magical. Second, especially when highly detailed, miniaturization may provoke admiration of the virtuoso craftsmanship needed to create such small objects so precisely. Third, miniature objects can possess an uncanny dual nature as both representation and original, a most unusual quality. In his 1929 Surrealist painting The Treachery of Images René Magritte demonstrates that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe, but is instead just an image of one. However, a chair four inches tall is both a depiction of a typical full-scale chair and an actual chair in its own right. Admittedly, historical children might not have thought consciously of these qualities while playing with their toy kitchens, but users need not be aware of such influences for them to have effects. The literature on dollhouses is largely silent as to what children thought of Nuremberg kitchens. Toy historian Eva Stille relates fond memories of cooking in child-sized kitchens reported by Queen Elizabeth of Rumania (born 1843) and Princess Marie of Erbach-Schönberg (born 1852), although their aristocratic experiences might not be the best evidence of typical childhoods.13 All accounts and depictions seem to presume that girls were the intended audience for toy kitchens, but Stille also relates several anecdotes of boys playing with them too, usually as assistants to girls who took the lead in the traditionally gendered activity of play-cooking.14 Although primary source materials remain scant, it is quite possible, too, that nineteenth-century German girls might have reacted negatively to Puppenküchen and the gendered lessons associated with the object. In her pioneering study on dolls and American girlhood, historian Miriam Forman-Brunell describes how nineteenth-century girls often rejected the gendered prescriptions of motherhood and domesticity associated with doll play, often engaging in hostile and/or violent play.15 Given that a standard character in fin-de-siècle German girls’ novels was the wild tomboy who resists customary feminine decorum—a fictional personality type rooted in reality— it is not difficult to imagine that some German girls would have engaged in similarly hostile behaviors towards dolls’ kitchens as practiced by some of their American and English counterparts.16 On the other hand, it appears probable that many German girls enjoyed their toy kitchens. A distinct tradition developed of mothers passing on their childhood kitchens to their daughters, which, by the nineteenth century, became a widespread practice.17 It seems likely that these mothers expected their daughters to enjoy the same toys they had, and would have avoided inflicting them with playthings they had despised as youngsters. However, many

Material Culture in Miniature

219

mothers no doubt felt pressure to encourage socially expected femininity in their daughters, and to do so via conventional playthings such as Puppenküchen. Some mothers might have forced these models upon their daughters, for while these toys might not have taught practical lessons in household management they certainly reinforced conventional gender roles. A detailed formal analysis of toy kitchens is valuable in considering their use and meaning. Most surviving examples show variations on a standard form: a single reduced-scale room with the front wall and ceiling missing, as with a stage set, allowing convenient access to the interior and an unobstructed view of the minuscule contents. Some might have a roof above or a pantry to one side, but until the 1890s these were exceptions.18 An eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century Nuremberg kitchen tended to have a raised hearth beneath a smoke hood centered on its rear wall, representing a masonry platform for simultaneously cooking several dishes at a convenient height. Built of wood, these miniature versions could not actually hold a burning fire, but one was sometimes represented in paint. Occasionally these cooktops were placed in a back corner, but mostly they were in the middle of the back wall, forming a centralized visual focus for the room. Flanking this were cabinets and shelving for the display of pots, pans, and other implements, often arranged so that the fittings on the left coordinated with but did not mirror those on the right. The boards supporting these shelves could be cut into decoratively scalloped edges similar to those on German peasant furniture, frequently emphasized with painted pinstripes. Early kitchens were typically painted a dull tan or pink, but many might also be dark green or blue,19 often with black and red or white checkerboard floors.20 The collections of dishes were frequently more than the rooms could easily contain. Oftentimes kitchen paraphernalia filled every shelf, hung all over the walls, and spilled over much of the floor. As in real homes, by the mid-1800s miniature metal stoves began to replace “masonry” ranges, but otherwise dolls’ kitchens of this era were much as described above. These metal stoves were freestanding and did not necessarily form the central element of the room, but often still did. Additionally, dolls’ kitchens that had previously appeared simple and rustic now began to display a more elaborate décor, with ornate wooden moldings, stenciled painted trim, or patterned wallpapers. Decorative pilasters framing the open front of the room were also often seen.21 As the nineteenth century ended dolls’ kitchens continued to reflect trends in full-scale interior design, as with the introduction of “hygienic” features. As

220

Childhood by Design

people became aware of the spread of diseases by microorganisms, household cleanliness became a medical necessity. All-white kitchens were promoted as sanitary because germ-harboring filth would stand out, signaling that proper scrubbing was in order. Surfaces covered in shiny white tiles or shiny white paint became the standard, and pots and pans previously prominently displayed were shut away in cupboards to better keep them clean.22 Toy makers represented the ceramic tiles with printed papers that have yellowed over the years, mitigating the visual effect.23 Besides hygiene, other elements of design reform were manifested in dolls’ kitchens. Woodwork could include the whiplash curves of Art Nouveau or the geometric detailing of the Wiener Werkstätte, or a solid colored wall could be capped by an Arts and Crafts landscape wallpaper frieze.24 Nuremberg kitchens have typically been described by later toy historians as meant to teach girls how to be good wives and mothers once they were grown. This straightforward and rather self-evident interpretation needs nuancing in light of the particular qualities of the miniature. While dolls’ kitchens may have complemented traditional gender roles, they were more inspirational than instructional. Toy kitchens did not teach practical lessons in household management and cooking. Instead, through the peculiarly beguiling quality miniaturization can bestow, Nuremberg kitchens encouraged young girls to find mundane tasks (what might even be classified as drudgery) interesting, appealing, and something to be looked forward to and embraced.25 This subtle difference between practical instruction and preparation for future roles and vocations parallels the situation in nineteenth-century America. As cultural historian Gary Cross has noted, “toys reflected conventional work roles and the tools that went with them. But they did so with no self-conscious effort to ‘train’ the child,” an observation that might be applied to the nineteenth-century Nuremberg kitchen.26 Uncontestably there is a long record of Germans asserting the educational benefits of dollhouses for impressionable children. One of the earliest examples, now lost, was built by the entrepreneurial Nuremberg widow Anna Köferlin, which she opened to the public for a small admission fee in 1631. Köferlin’s advertising broadsheet survives, describing her dollhouse as fitted with all the accoutrements of a prosperous burgher home. Köferlin explicitly states her intention that it serve as an example of correct household management, writing “to provide instruction for the young … dear children, look you well at everything, how well it is arranged; it shall be a good lesson to you.”27 In 1765, Paul von Stetten the Younger, in his Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg (History of

Material Culture in Miniature

221

the City of Augsburg), commented upon the customs of the previous century, noting, “[c]oncerning the training of maidens, I must make reference to the toys many of them played with until they were brides, namely the so-called dolls’ houses.”28 During the nineteenth century, manufacturers, educators, and intellectuals took it for granted that toys had a formative effect upon children, but disputed what their proper nature and application should be. In 1886, the trade newspaper Wegweiser für die Spielwarenindustrie und verwandte Branche (Guide for the Toy Industry and Its Related Branches) stated “[n]obody in our time sees a toy as simply a meaningless thing … we have recognized that toys and play have a high intrinsic educational value.” In his 1904 Das Spielzeug im Leben des Kindes (The Toy in the Life of the Child), art historian Paul Hildebrandt specifically called for girls to learn hospitality and cooking skills by practicing with toy kitchens that were as complete and accurate as possible.29 On the other hand, loosely inspired by the theories of kindergarten pioneer Friedrich Froebel, by the late 1800s many avant-garde critics such as Ferdinand Avenarius and Joseph August Lux opposed elaborately detailed toys as counterproductive to developing children’s imaginations, and called for playthings that were abstract, or at least highly stylized, rather than precise representations of real life. While their arguments received attention in journals serving the toy trade, and in those aimed at high culture circles, they do not seem to have had much influence on the style or nature of many toy kitchens.30 Public debates notwithstanding, most German commentators held that toys helped children to become good adults by encouraging cultivated mentalities and gender-appropriate expertise. Many toy makers and parents simply took it for granted that girls would inherently prefer such gendered playthings. The conventional interpretation of the didactic purpose of these kitchens, rooted in Jacobs’s History of Doll Houses, is consistent with nineteenth-century German attitudes about “educational” playthings. As historian David Hamlin points out, many German toys of this era were promoted as educational, when in fact they could teach very little of substance about the subjects they putatively covered. Merchants wished to move product, and wished to believe they were providing a beneficial public service while doing so. Parents wished to please their children, and wished to believe they were nurturing them while doing so. Adults engaged in a collective, tacit agreement that as long as toys referenced conventionally approved topics and behaviors, nobody would scrutinize too closely whether they actually taught significant lessons.31 This parallels play

222

Childhood by Design

theorist Brian Sutton-Smith’s observations on the late twentieth-century belief that toys contribute to the intellectual and emotional development of children, which became widely accepted among parents, educators, and toy manufacturers despite a lack of empirical research to support it. As Sutton-Smith theorized, “there is very little scientific evidence in favor of the view that play has a positive outcome,” and “our basis for believing in the relationship between play (or toys) and achievement lies more in our own cultural desires, than in any wellestablished collection of scholarly information.”32 Whether or not the kitchens did, in fact, teach practical household skills remains questionable, but it is likely that the majority of nineteenth-century German parents nonetheless purchased such miniature kitchens with such goals in mind. That toy kitchens were meant more to beguile than teach is supported by the following line of argumentation. To begin with, a mother wishing to instruct her daughter in the practicalities of food preparation would have had no need for a miniature kitchen, but could instead easily take her to the actual kitchen and have her observe and assist in the cooking of real meals. No doubt this occurred in countless German homes. Moreover, after about 1870 there were formalized schools that offered lessons in cooking and domestic science.33 Furthermore, most miniatures did not necessarily reflect their full-scale prototypes but were instead reconfigured to be visually appealing through a symmetrical presentation of the furnishings. In most dolls’ kitchens the cooking range is placed in the very middle of the rear wall, while in real German homes it was often tucked into a corner of the room, probably because it was more structurally stable or made better use of limited floor space.34 Besides the visual appeal of symmetry, a practical motivation for this inaccuracy could be that for active play physical access from three sides was more engaging than from just two. Another deviation from reality might have involved the increased elaboration of decoration that began to be applied to Puppenküchen in the late nineteenth century. If kitchens in real homes were commonly simple utilitarian spaces, the many miniature versions trimmed with wallpapers and gingerbread moldings would have been much more striking in appearance.35 Some dolls’ kitchens were even more emphatically designed to be more visually attractive than realistic. Most were rectangular, with their side walls at right angles to the back one, but some had canted rear corners.36 Others had their sides widely splayed, resulting in even greater than usual similarity to theatrical sets, while providing greater visibility of the superabundant paraphernalia within.37 This resemblance to the stage might be connected by similar purposes

Material Culture in Miniature

223

to appeal to the imagination and transport the viewer from the here and now. In fact, toy theaters with paper doll actors, paper sets, and scripts for numerous plays and operas were very popular toys in Germany and Austria beginning about 1830, with sixty-three different publishers known.38 In some instances, Puppenküchen demonstrate even more unusual configurations. Three such examples belong to the Altonaer Museum in Hamburg. The c. 1750 Smarje family toy kitchen’s polished hardwood structure incorporates convoluted rococo arches and fretwork grilles on its exterior (Figure 10.2).39 Another from about the 1830s has its rear wall scalloped into a so-called Dutch or Flemish gable, a very tall chimney above the range, and side walls angled out to make the front noticeably wider than the back (Figure 10.3). A third from about the same time likewise has a very tall chimney (a north German regional variant), a striking diamond rather than square or rectangular floorplan, and walls topped by an open railing of spindles (Figure 10.4).40 The Stadtmuseum in Munich owns an example from about 1840, made of sheet metal with the kitchen on a dais overlooking a garden with a fountain, with ornamental balustrades and scrolling rooflines framing the scene.41 Undoubtedly these decorative, visually appealing configurations had more to do with making toys aesthetically captivating than teaching domestic management, as most German homes had kitchens laid out as squares or rectangles rather than as trapezoids or other odd shapes, much less ones that were so baroque. As Brian Sutton-Smith observed, “[p]lay schematizes life, it alludes to life, it does not imitate it in any very strict sense.”42 Many of these toy kitchens were passed down along female lines through multiple generations.43 What might have been a fairly accurate kitchen for a young girl of the mid-nineteenth century would have been very much outdated by the time her granddaughter played with it in the early twentieth. Being a family heirloom might increase its appeal, but that same nostalgia would also make it less suitable for demonstrating current best practices in homemaking. Similarly, while toy makers certainly kept up to date with the latest domestic technologies, their catalogs also record Puppenküchen that went virtually unchanged for decades.44 Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century examples included distinctly anachronistic elements, such as sets of long-handled pans meant to keep cooks’ hands away from the flames on open hearths, which continued to be popular in miniature long after the introduction of metal stoves had made such safety features obsolete.45 A certain segment of the toy-buying public apparently found something quaint and cozy in kitchens from the past that they preferred

224

Childhood by Design

Figure 10.2 Smarje Family Toy Kitchen, German, c. 1750, approximately 31 ½ × 20 1⅜16 × 30 in (80 × 51 × 76 cm), Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg, Altonaer Museum.

Figure 10.3 Toy Kitchen, German, Schleswig-Holstein, c. 1830–1840, approximately 35 ⅝ × 20 ⅞ × 23 ⅜ in (90.5 × 53 × 72 cm), Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg, Altonaer Museum.

Figure 10.4 Toy Kitchen, German, Altona, c. 1830, approximately 20 ½ × 18 × 23 ¼ in (52 × 46 × 59 cm), Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg, Altonaer Museum.

Material Culture in Miniature

225

over contemporary arrangements, at least in the playthings they provided their children. The most striking feature of most dolls’ kitchens were their various and sundry contents, made in vivid detail in a wide array of materials and decorative surfaces, such as metals that might be ornately embossed or lithographed or ceramics that might be decorated with sculptural reliefs or painted colors. Miniature kitchenware was made in wood, glass, earthenware, stoneware, porcelain, iron, lead, tin, copper, brass, pewter, and other alloys. While some objects were translated into other media because the full-scale originals were made of materials difficult to handle in miniature, such as “pottery” imitated in turned wood or milk glass, many were astonishing in their accuracy.46 Sometimes manufacturers of mainstream consumer products such as Meissen or Villeroy and Boch porcelain made smaller duplicates of their wares in the same patterns, suitable to dollhouse use.47 This surfeit also relates to another anachronism often seen in dolls’ kitchens, for by about 1900 the standard practice in real kitchens was for pots, pans, and dishes to be stored in closed cabinets, whereas in miniature a great many were still being displayed on open shelves or hanging from pegs on the walls.48 To hide all of a toy kitchen’s cookware behind cupboard doors would have undermined the point of having it—an elaborate and enchanting display. Among the most prominent objects found in Nuremberg kitchens were copper molds for shaping aspics, cakes, ice cream, and such. Most were made as swirls resembling turbans (“Turk’s heads”) or other abstract shapes, but bunches of grapes, cockleshells, fish, lobsters, and other forms are also seen. As true cookware these jelly molds were appropriate to their settings, but their fanciful shapes made an especially spectacular show. Miniaturized gadgets such as ice-cream machines, butter churns, and sausage grinders that approximated or even exactly duplicated the mechanical action of full-scale models also added greatly to the interest of dolls’ kitchens. Frequently, however, such functionality turned less on actual usefulness than on adding to the child’s delight—making ice-cream by the tablespoonful would be much more amusing than practical. Two such pieces were among the contents of the c. 1800 Nuremberg kitchen formerly on display at the Washington Dolls’ House and Toy Museum. One was a one-and-a-half-inch tall brazier to warm a pan of food, which seems to have actually held a live fire at one time, as its wooden handle was scorched at the end closest to its metal basket. However, given its small size it likely could not keep hot long enough to cook much at all. That was even more the case with the other item, a laundry iron of hollow metal with

226

Childhood by Design

a swinging door at the rear for inserting hot coals. A life-size example would provide heat to press clothes, but at this scale the coals would probably not be able to warm their metal container to an effective temperature before they exhausted themselves.49 One category of kitchen accessory definitely intended for visually-seductive display rather than actual functional use was the wide variety of imitation foodstuffs formed of gum tragacanth, a paste made from the juice of the box thorn plant (Astragalus). The ultimate function of food is to be eaten, and these tragacanth foodstuffs were inedible, which did not, however, detract from their allure.50 The beguiling quality so critical to miniature kitchens did not preclude genuine functioning components. By the late nineteenth century, toy makers started producing sheet metal model stoves that generated enough heat to cook very small portions of food. These small-scale stoves were heated by burning tea candles or lamps using various alcohol-based fuels, or by connections to a home’s gas piping, or later, by electricity.51 There was also an extensive doit-yourself literature for the diminutive stoves. Eva Stille has discovered ten different toy kitchen cookbooks published between 1853 and 1954, with some issued in multiple editions. These usually advised very young children to only engage in “cold cooking”—mixing ingredients but not actually heating them. Older girls were encouraged to warm up leftovers from the family table and were provided recipes very much like miniaturized versions of full-scale cooking.52 Often comprehensive in scope, Henriette Löffler’s 1890 Kleines illustriertes Praktisches Kochbüchlein für die Puppenküche (Little Illustrated Practical Cookbook for the Doll Kitchen) gave directions for 239 different recipes divided into seventeen categories, with twenty-one suggested menus of three or more dishes each, ranging from potato soup to chocolate cake.53 Clearly, the recipes could actually result in fully edible, miniature meals that might, we imagine, satisfy even the hungriest doll. However, this apparent functionality and usefulness masked the kitchens’ true purpose: to add delight and wonder to the mundane task of cooking through the novelty and preciousness of the miniature. If the social function of girls’ toys was to make a future of homemaking seem appealing, then it is understandable that cooking and the space and equipment dedicated to it would be emphasized more than other tasks. Cooking, along with sewing, was one of the regularly expected duties of a nineteenth-century middleclass German housewife that could involve creativity and self-expression. In cooking, raw materials are transformed into finished dishes that serve a

Material Culture in Miniature

227

necessary nutritional purpose and also provide aesthetic pleasure through the senses of taste, smell, and sight. In preparing foods, old favorites or entertaining novelties can be crafted that satisfy desires and receive praise from others. Many other household chores, such as washing clothes or sweeping floors, are more about performing routine maintenance, involving much less opportunity for artistic expression, and so would be much less enticing to celebrate as standalone miniaturized broom closets or laundry rooms. What is perhaps most impressive about many Puppenküchen is the sheer superabundance and variety of their miniature cooking paraphernalia. Pots and pans gifted to generations of girls often overwhelm the storage capacity of the cupboards and shelves to cover much of their floors. Such overflowing displays of material abundance—so crammed as to impede movement—were hardly models of proper household management. Through such sensory overload, dolls’ kitchens served more to enchant their young owners with the prospect of future housewifery than to actually illustrate best practices in that occupation. Such presentation techniques formed a direct parallel to the contemporary phenomenon of department stores, which aimed to seduce their primarily female shoppers into impulse purchases through vast, spectacular displays of merchandise, staggering in both variety and volume.54 Other one-room dollhouses directly connected childhood play with adult consumerism. Many miniaturized shops were produced, often with ornate architectural trimmings, side walls splayed to better display the abundant merchandise, and sales counters in front of sets of drawers labeled with the names of a wide array of goods. Milliner’s boutiques and dry-goods stores were made, but the most popular, and most closely related to Nuremberg kitchens, were miniature grocery stores with bulk foodstuffs such as rice, coffee, and tea offered in the marked drawers, or miniature butcher’s shops with tiny cuts of meat in plaster or composition (sawdust bound together with glue) hanging in profusion.55 Similarly, toy historian Sabine Reinelt interprets the exact duplication of some of their main product lines in miniature by porcelain firms like Meissen or Villeroy and Boch as marketing strategies meant to develop brand loyalty in the girls who would eventually become adult customers.56 These mid-to-late nineteenth-century German toys manifest a shift in childrearing Gary Cross describes as taking place slightly later in early twentieth-century America. Cross discusses a change in adult aims, from protecting children from exposure to the temptations of the wider world and

228

Childhood by Design

carefully controlling the information and influences they encountered, an ideal of “sheltered innocence,” to indulging children with the pleasures of novelty and amusement experienced by the constant acquisition of sensational goods in an endless pattern of consumption, an ideal of “wondrous innocence.”57 While some toys, such as model stores, overtly encouraged children to adopt consumerism as an ethos, the lavishness and continuously increasing contents of model kitchens implicitly encouraged it as well. Nineteenth-century German girls’ endless accumulation of diverse and exquisite paraphernalia for their miniature kitchens can also be seen as a collecting practice, distinct from actual play. Progressive reformers strongly objected to highly elaborate toys as being made merely to be admired rather than played with, whose specificity and detail supposedly inhibited children’s imaginations.58 Yet toys as intricate as Nuremberg kitchens with ever-expanding batteries de cuisine could have provided some children with different forms of satisfaction and self-expression than such experts could or were willing to recognize.59 Miniature kitchens were also often used in a distinctive fashion pertaining to their purpose to inspire more than to teach. In many German families, Nuremberg kitchens were not used throughout the year but were only brought out at Christmas. An 1824 engraving by Johann Michael Voltz in the collection of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin illustrates a prosperous family’s lavish holiday display atop their parlor table, with two Christmas trees, presents, and a toy kitchen. The trees are lit with numerous small candles, but so is the kitchen, which has several perched on the upper edges of its walls.60 Elise Rose’s introduction to her 1861 dolls’ kitchen cookbook discusses the toy completely in terms of how it adds to a family’s sense of togetherness and joy at Christmas.61 Doll kitchen historian Eva Stille discusses one example commissioned in Bregenz in 1885 and only shown at Christmas as it was passed down female lines for over 100 years. Stille cites another sold in 1933 by a family moving from Frankfurt to America. Until then it had been cherished by three generations of their women, and was in turn set up every Christmas for three generations by women in the purchasing family.62 As such, toy kitchens would have fit in with other miniatures Germans associated with Christmas. Nativity scenes (crèches) were widely shown, especially in Roman Catholic homes. In the early 1800s small tableaux in tragacanth were exhibited by the confectioners of Berlin, and by the end of the century elaborate dioramas in department store display windows were a staple

Material Culture in Miniature

229

of the holidays.63 Clearly a toy associated so closely with these festivities must have been seen as special and celebratory, and not purely instructional, which would in turn imply to a young female observer that it represented a future state that was likewise special. In summary, with their layouts that were more aesthetic and theatrical than accurately representational, with their evocations of nostalgia as family antiques or as deliberately old-fashioned new products, with their mechanical functions that were more dazzling than productive, with their lavish displays of eye-catching paraphernalia, and with their associations with the festivities of Christmas instead of ordinary everyday life, Nuremberg kitchens were not truly meant primarily to provide girls with practical training in the skills of homemaking. Instead, they were meant to generate wonder and amusement, thereby inspiring in girls an anticipation of and desire for their expected roles as household managers.

Notes 1

2

3

4

Sabine Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd in drei Jahrhunderten (Weingarten, Germany : Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1985), trans. my own with assistance from Anneli Nelson Williams; Eva Stille, Doll Kitchens: 1800–1890, trans. Edward Force (West Chester, PA: Schiffer, 1988) originally Puppenküchen, 1800–1890 (Nuremberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1985). Most dollhouse histories discuss at least a few Nuremberg kitchens. Two texts illustrating numerous examples are Johanna Kunz, Schöne alte Puppenstuben (Weingarten, Germany : Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1986) and Evelyn Ackerman, The Genius of Moritz Gottschalk: Blue and Red Roof Dollhouses, Stores, Kitchens, Stables, and Other Miniature Structures (Annapolis, MD: Gold Horse, 1994). Karl Gröber, Children’s Toys of Bygone Days: A History of Playthings of All Peoples from Prehistoric Times to the XIXth Century, trans. Philip Hereford (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1928), 18. See also Flora Gill Jacobs, A History of Doll Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 21. Stille, Doll Kitchens, 20–21; Leonie von Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature: Four Centuries of Dolls’ Houses (New York: Viking Press, 1980) (Originally Das Puppenhaus, Munich: Verlag Georg D. W. Callwey, 1978), 60. Olivia Bristol and Leslie Geddes-Brown, Dolls’ Houses: Domestic Life and Architectural Styles in Miniature from the 17th Century to the Present Day (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1997), 100, 117, 125–126; Margaret Towner, Dollhouse Furniture (Philadelphia, PA: Courage, 1993), 12–13, 24–28, 31–32, 50–51.

230

Childhood by Design

5 Jacobs, A History of Doll Houses, 140. 6 Flora Gill Jacobs, A History of Dolls’ Houses (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), 159; Flora Gill Jacobs, Victorian Dolls’ Houses and Their Furnishings (Washington, DC: Washington Dolls’ House & Toy Museum, 1978), 63, 65. 7 Constance Eileen King, The Collector’s History of Dolls’ Houses, Doll’s House Dolls and Miniatures (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 381–382; Valerie Jackson, A Collector’s Guide to Doll’s Houses (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 1992), 13, 53; Towner, Dollhouse Furniture, 9; Susan Hight Rountree, Dollhouses, Miniature Kitchens, and Shops from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1996), 62; Halina Pasierbska, Dolls’ Houses from the V&A Museum of Childhood (London: V&A Publishing, 2008), 60, 65. 8 Kunz, Schöne alte Puppenstuben, 15, trans. mine. 9 Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982), 1–19. 10 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion, 1964), 150, 152, 159, 161, 172, 174, 179. 11 Steven Millhauser, “The Fascination of the Miniature,” Grand Street 2, no. 4 (1983): 128–135. 12 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 61–63, 65, 70–71. 13 Stille, Doll Kitchens, 33. 14 Ibid., 12,73. 15 Miriam Forman-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 5, 7–8, 20–23, 26–27, 30–33. 16 Jennifer Drake Askey, Good Girls, Good Germans: Girls’ Education and Emotional Nationalism in Wilhelminian Germany (Melton, Suffolk, England: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 13, 104–105, 109–111. 17 Stille, Doll Kitchens, 10–11. 18 Ibid., 45. 19 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 40. 20 Stille, Doll Kitchens, 47. 21 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 46; Stille, Doll Kitchens, 14, 64, 102. 22 Stille, Doll Kitchens, 47–48. 23 Rountree, Dollhouses, Miniature Kitchens, and Shops, 76–79; See also Kunz, Schöne alte Puppenstuben, 112–113; Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 76–83; Stille, Doll Kitchens, 47–48, 54–55.

Material Culture in Miniature

231

24 Examples of toy kitchens with design reform woodwork were displayed at the Washington Dolls’ House and Toy Museum, now closed. http://www.antiquetrader. com/antiques/collectibles/washington-dolls-house-toy-museum-founderscollection-heading-market See also Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 81, 83 92; Kunz, Schöne alte Puppenstuben, 88, 112; Stille, Doll Kitchens, 62. 25 Reinelt refers in passing to the inspirational aspect of dolls’ kitchens, but never explores the idea in depth. Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 7. Stille likewise alludes to this without pursuing it. Stille, Doll Kitchens, 16. 26 Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 25. 27 King, Collector’s History of Dolls’ Houses, 38–40; von Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature, 14–16. 28 Von Stetten’s full title is Erläuterungen der in Kupfer gestochenen Vorstellungen aus der Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg (Commentary on the Copperplate Engravings Showing Scenes from the History of the City of Augsburg): von Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature, 16–17, note 18. 29 Quoted in Bryan Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 146–147. 30 David D. Hamlin, Work and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 127–182; Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood, 27–40. 31 Hamlin, Work and Play, 22–23, 34–36, 43, 47, 53–56, 99–100. 32 Brian Sutton-Smith, Toys as Culture (New York: Gardner, 1986) 1–12, 124–125; Cross, Kids’ Stuff, 125. 33 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 30–31. 34 The majority of the house plans shown in Robert Pfaud, Das Bürgerhaus in Augsburg (The Middle Class House in Augsburg) (Tübingen, Germany : Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1976) indicate that the kitchen hearth was located exactly in the corner, or very near it. See also Karl Ermannsdorfer, Das Bürgerhaus in München (The Middle Class House in Munich) (Tübingen, Germany : Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1972). 35 At present this is difficult to ascertain. For this period kitchen histories focus on culinary trends and technological innovations, with little attention given to interior design, while interior design history focuses on public rooms, with little attention given to service areas. The literature can also be contradictory. Stille describes ornate kitchen cabinets being popular in real homes until the 1920s, but most of the illustrations she provides of such rooms seem fairly plain and simple. Stille, Doll Kitchens, 18, 26–27, 36, 38–39, 45, 50–51. 36 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 47, 76, 157; Stille, Doll Kitchens, 41.

232

Childhood by Design

37 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 47, 142, 157; Stille, Doll Kitchens, 41, 52, 96, 157. 38 George Speaight, “Toy Theatre,” in Papiertheater: Puppentheatersammlung der Stadt München (Munich: Stadtmuseum, 1977), 5–6, 9. 39 von Wilckens, Mansions in Miniature, 221. 40 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 66, 67. 41 Ibid., 70. For two other distinctively configured examples see ibid., 53, 54. 42 Sutton-Smith, Toys as Culture, 138. 43 Stille, Doll Kitchens, 10–11. 44 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 50, 98; Stille, Doll Kitchens, 194–195. 45 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 46. 46 Stille Doll Kitchens, 31–32, 53, 143–144. 47 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 133–134. 48 Stille, Doll Kitchens, 15, 47–48, 54. 49 Author’s firsthand observations, June, 2001. Also illustrated in Faith Eaton, The Ultimate Dolls’ House Book (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1994), 56–57. For other miniature gadgets approximating rather than fully duplicating the actions of their full scale prototypes see Stille, Doll Kitchens, 15, 178–179. 50 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 126–128. 51 Stille, Doll Kitchens, 33, 186–187. 52 Ibid., 13, 33, 186–187. 53 Henriette Löffler, Kleines illustriertes Praktisches Kochbüchlein für die Puppenküche (Little Illustrated Practical Cookbook for the Doll Kitchen) (Ulm: J. Ebner’s, fifth edition, 1890), 7, 66. 54 Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 5, 26, 28–31, 59–60, 65–67. 55 Ackerman, The Genius of Moritz Gottschalk, 9–14, 25, 143–162. 56 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 133–134. 57 Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3–42. 58 Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood, 27–40; Hamlin, Work and Play, 127–182. 59 Shirley Teresa Wadja, “And a Little Child Shall Lead Them: American Children’s Cabinets of Curiosities,” in Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, ed. Leah Dilworth (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 57. 60 Reinelt, Puppenküche und Puppenherd, 40–41. The engraving may be viewed online at http://www.dhm.de/datenbank/dhm.php?seite=5&fld_0=20043294

Material Culture in Miniature

233

61 Elise Rose, Kochbüchlein für die Puppenküche, oder: Erste Anweisung zum Kochen für Madchen von 6–14 Jahren (Little Cookbook for the Doll Kitchen, or, The First Instructions in Cooking for Girls 6–14) (Kassel: Gebrüder Gotthelft, c. 1861), 3–6. Henriette Löffler also references the connections to Christmas gifts in her preface. Lőffler, Kleines illustriertes Praktisches Kochbüchlein, iii, v. 62 Stille does not specify whether the Jewish sellers observed Christmas as a secular celebration, although a 1932 photograph shows this dolls’ kitchen in front of a Christmas tree. The buyers certainly displayed it among their holiday decorations. Stille, Doll Kitchens, 9–11. For the modified celebration of Christmas by German Jews see Joe Perry, Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 67–76. 63 Perry, Christmas in Germany, 145–146, 150–151, 161; Hamlin, Work and Play, 103–126.

11

Making Paper Models in 1860s New Zealand: An Exploration of Colonial Culture through Child-Made Objects Lynette Townsend

A hand-painted paper cutout model of an English village (Figure 11.1), made by the children of the Saxton family in 1860s New Zealand and now stored in the history collection at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), provides unique insight on childhood and family life in the colonial era. The histories and stories associated with the model and the children who constructed it contribute to the growing body of diverse colonial histories that explore personal experiences and local developments in the context of larger global forces. As historian Tony Ballantyne suggests, these stories are important because they complicate existing interpretations of the past and illuminate new versions of history.1 Rather than one master narrative dominating, a web of historical stories can prevail, stories that highlight a rich range of perspectives and lived experiences from diverse peoples including those of different ethnicities, gender and ages, and those inclusive of children and young people. As an example of model making, the Saxton model village contributes to our knowledge of nineteenth-century children’s pastimes undertaken in New Zealand. It supplements research by folklorist Brian Sutton-Smith who documented many of the clapping, chanting, and rhyming games played by New Zealand colonial children.2 It is also a counterpoint to the outdoor activities, and rough and tumble games written about by New Zealand historian James Belich.3 As a quiet indoor educational activity it showcases an alternative occupation to the needlework, embroidered works, and tapestry samplers undertaken by girls, examples of which are held in museum collections across New Zealand and throughout the world.

236

Childhood by Design

Figure 11.1 Model village made by the Saxton children in New Zealand, c. 1864, paper, ink, paint, wool, wood, glass, templates published by H. G. Clarke & Co., 250 x 550 x 230 mm. CC BY-NC-ND licence. Te Papa (GH004320).

The idyllic three-dimensional scene created by the Saxton children around 1864 meshed together a combination of two, possibly three, pre-printed models. The finished model included Victorian town houses, a farmyard with animals, and a steam locomotive in a historicist Tudor-style train station. The model was created out of a commercially made product but is illustrative of the way children adapt and create things in ways that are not predetermined by adults or manufacturers. As such, I argue that the Saxton model and other examples of child-made items are important representations of children’s material culture, which are extremely valuable for historical research particularly when focusing on extracting a child’s perspective, and provides the opportunity to directly reflect on the experiences of children. In this essay I contend that examples of children’s material culture (or items that have been made, adapted, or created by children themselves) are distinguishable from the material culture of childhood, i.e. adult-designed objects. As with the Saxton model, children’s material culture is inclusive of items from the adult world or commercially produced items. However, the distinguishing factor is that these objects have been appropriated, adopted, or adapted by children

An Exploration of Colonial Culture

237

for their own means, as opposed to other examples of childhood objects that have been assigned or imposed on children by adults. These child-generated sources of evidence provide a counterpoint to the multitude of childhood objects held in museums and private collections, largely toys, dolls, or clothing, that are adult-generated or adult-controlled evidence.4 The value in focusing on examples of children’s material culture is that they provide researchers with potential access to the child’s private inner world. These typically undervalued and rarely collected items are tremendously valuable historical artifacts that uniquely represent the historical perspective of children particularly when they are interpreted from multiple perspectives and analyzed in conversation with the associated historical context. The Saxton model village, for example, represents multiple aspects of the children’s lives. The scene depicted starkly contrasted with the newly developing world the children encountered in New Zealand, and was an important memento of Great Britain. As will be shown throughout this essay, the model is evidence of the family’s ongoing connection to a British way of life and the enduring British diaspora in colonial New Zealand. The Saxton family, originally from the market town of Whitchurch in Shropshire, were among some of the earliest British settlers in New Zealand. John and Priscilla Saxton traveled on a New Zealand Company ship, named the Clifford, arriving in Nelson in 1842 with five of their children: Conrad aged eight, Edward aged six, Charles aged four, Priscilla aged two, and baby George who was eight months old. A further four children were born in New Zealand between 1844 and 1852; Emily, John, Elizabeth, and Barker. John Saxton’s diaries, drawings, and lithographic prints, held in the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, provide invaluable primary evidence to explore colonial settler life in New Zealand. However, while the diaries are rich with detail about what John Saxton saw, thought, and felt on his journey to New Zealand and after arrival, only a few of his entries directly mention the children, necessarily reflecting his own paternalistic point of view. In contrast, the model village is a unique historical artifact linked directly to the children, manifesting their artistic activities and personal experiences in a tangible way. The Saxton model village materializes important themes explored in this essay including colonial pedagogical influences, as well as the social and cultural contexts of settler children’s everyday lives. Through close analysis of the Saxton model village and other comparable child-made objects, I illustrate that children’s material culture is uniquely placed

238

Childhood by Design

to unlock direct and highly personalized insights into the activities of children and the social history of childhood. My detailed exploration of the model employs an object-driven approach to investigating the multiple histories embedded in and surrounding the model, engaging with written as well as material sources.5 In this approach, objects are reconnected to their historical contexts, people, and experiences, and tangible things are conceived as the base evidence of complex relationships. The underlying premise is that “objects are not dumb but inexhaustible, capable of an infinite range of readings and re-readings.”6 In this essay I argue that objects inform the way in which we understand the past not just as three-dimensional illustrations but as the material evidence of our lives. In focusing on objects, with their multifarious meanings and nebulous qualities, historians can continue to uncover more about the human experience.7

The Saxton model village: Construction and design The model village is a three-dimensional diorama, twenty-five centimeters high, by fifty-five wide and twenty-three centimeters deep, which depicts an English farmyard, town, and railway scene. The painted paper cutouts have been glued and mounted on lightweight cardboard and set up in a homemade case with wooden sides and back, and a glass front. The front of the box features a black and gold painted wooden frame, which appears to have been added later. Metal mounting fixtures are attached to the back indicating that the model was displayed on a wall at home. The model is made out of a combination of pre-printed paper model templates manufactured by H. G. Clarke & Co. Such mass-produced commercial templates could be cut out and variously configured as a farm, village, or train station. In this case, the children amalgamated the models to construct a single diorama depicting (from left to right) a farm, village, and railway, adapting, coloring, and embellishing the scene with additional elements of their own. The diorama includes a basic rural barn and shed, houses, a hotel, churches, people, a horse and cart, as well as other animals such as a dog, horses, and grazing cattle. A windmill and viaduct are featured in the background. A railway station with locomotive includes an unusual double disc spectacle signal, which was used by the Lancashire & Yorkshire, and Brighton railway companies.8 Other details evocative of contemporary nineteenth-century England include advertisements at the train station for a marionette show and a toy maker.

An Exploration of Colonial Culture

239

The model appears to have been hand-painted by a child, and the train has been embellished with smoke made out of wool. Although some nineteenthcentury cutout toys were pre-painted, in this case the painting is apparently not that of a professional artist. The hand coloring is a little thick and unevenly applied in some places, and not of professional quality, but the work of a proficient amateur, most likely a child. The paintwork demonstrates that the child-artist had considerable knowledge and skill in their sophisticated use of shading and range of colors used to create depth and naturalistic details. This competence is particularly evident on the barn roof where there are two shades of blue, on the trees where shades of green and brown have been applied, and in the background where the painter has included a combination of green and gold fields. The Saxton family, who donated the model to the museum, originally believed that it was made by children while traveling from England to Nelson between 1841 and 1842. This was a story passed down through the family, and relayed to the museum at the time of acquisition. However, on further investigation, it appears that the model was created during the 1860s in New Zealand, and not en route in the 1840s. One piece of evidence to support this is the style of clothing, particularly the large circular full-bodied skirts worn by the women and girl depicted in the model. These are consistent with what was fashionable in Britain between the late-1850s and the mid-1860s. Furthermore, mass-produced paper models of this type were not in production in Britain until about 1860. Most of the printed components of the Saxtons’ model village were manufactured by H. G. Clarke & Co, a company that published a wide range of paper cutout toys for children, as well as other printed material and books. Advertisements promoting the sale of the farmyard part of the Saxton model, “The Little Modeller No. 4—A Model Farm,” confirm its availability at that time. These include advertisements in children’s magazines such as The Boy’s Miscellany (1863–1864), a magazine aimed at working-class boys, the 1864 “Shakespeare Tercentenary Supplement” in the Essex Standard, a British newspaper, and “Peter Parley’s Annual for 1867—A Christmas & New Year’s Present for Young People” in 1867 by Darton & Co., who were all well known for publishing children’s literature. Shops selling toys for children were present in Nelson by the mid-1860s. Advertisements in Nelson newspapers show that A. Dupuis in Bridge Street specialized in “Berlin woolwork patterns, stationery and toys,” and J. Hounsell in Trafalgar Street was selling a variety of toys. It is, indeed, quite possible that the paper models were purchased by the Saxton family at a shop in Nelson. If

240

Childhood by Design

not, they may have been sent to New Zealand by family or friends still living in England. Postal deliveries of letters and other items such as clothing, household items, and toys were a common occurrence in colonial times. As historian Laura Ishiguro points out in her publication about the trans-imperial family, exchanges of material artifacts between imperial center and periphery was a practice that enabled families to maintain a connection with distant relatives and friends. Alongside the workings of memory and imagination, epistolary practices facilitated a reworked performance of family in lieu of physical and visual contact.9 Likewise, in creating the model village the Saxton children were participating in a popular childhood activity that traversed British family life throughout the colonies and in so doing reinforced their British identity and culture.

Pedagogical influences in colonial New Zealand Paper models and other types of cutout toys were hugely popular throughout Britain in the 1860s and 1870s. Not only were the models affordable, paper modeling was considered to be a respectable and educational indoor pursuit that children were encouraged to practice. In a nineteenth-century publication explaining how to make paper models, by German educational writer Bernhard Heinrich Blasche and translated into English by Daniel Boileau, paper model making is described as “a new, elegant, and instructive amusement for children.”10 The text goes on to explain the myriad benefits of paper modeling, such as promoting manual dexterity, practical applications of geometry, the knowledge of proportions, and encouraging a taste for the arts of design. Blasche also championed the superiority of model making over other activities, arguing that playing cards and reading books were inert pastimes that distracted young people from “duty” and ultimately “happiness.” He writes: [A]nd, above all, of affording a salutary antidote to that listless indolence, that pernicious love of cards, or that rage of indiscriminately reading any book at random, which are unfortunately tolerated in many respectable families during the long winter evenings, and which are alike unfavorable to the comfort and to the best interests of young persons, as they greatly tend to obstruct them on their road to duty and happiness.11

In the broad sense of learning-by-doing, Blasche’s ideas on the benefits of model making corresponded with that of other influential nineteenth-century

An Exploration of Colonial Culture

241

educationalists. Friedrich Froebel, for example advocated productive activity in the development of the mind and body, and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi argued that children should learn through participating in activities and engaging with physical things. Furthermore, Robert Owen believed in a new order that would be realized through education that, along with other topics, focused on natural history and geography lessons. Owen’s lectures on geography and history were often accompanied by maps, drawings, and diagrams: visual teaching aids that align with the Saxton model village. The first commercial paper cutout models to be cut out from a sheet and assembled were available in Europe as early as the seventeenth century. Examples regularly appeared in German and French toy catalogs from about 1800. The advent of chromolithography in 1837 resulted in more colorful and elaborate designs that only needed construction and did not require painting like the Saxton’s model. These early nineteenth-century models were high-end toys compared to the mass-produced examples in the 1860s and 1870s. Even so, both types of models were regarded as beneficial, constructive, and educational for children. Some toy manufacturers producing printed paper models for children focused on the educational value of toys. For example, Schreiber-Verlag, a German company known for its quality printed models, were producing items that were known as educational tools. Their models included examples of famous and generic buildings, toy theaters, and representations of events. Many of their products aimed to reproduce, in paper form, significant cultural events as they happened in reality. In creating models of specific buildings, cities, villages, and rural sites, children were to learn about foreign places and people.12 The fundamental principle behind educational toys was that children should learn through doing. Arguably more valuable to children at the imperial periphery than those at the metropolitan center, paper models like the Saxtons’ offered colonial children opportunities for lessons in history and geography as, through its construction and fashioning, children gained insight into the types of buildings, modes of transport, and fashions prevalent in contemporary Britain. For those born in New Zealand, such mass-produced playthings provided a condensed snapshot of mid-nineteenth-century life in Britain, and for the Saxton children, an idealized image of the family’s homeland. Paper-modeling was also, quite potentially, a powerful visual cue for nostalgic memories, imaginings, and the family’s ongoing connection to the British Empire, and a point of comparison between colonial New Zealand and the life the family left behind.

242

Childhood by Design

The Saxton model depicted a scene that was vastly different to 1860s Nelson, a colonial settlement only about twenty years old. Although it was given city status in 1853, the settler population in the 1860s had reached about four thousand seven hundred.13 Local indigenous Māori populated the region, and there were disputes between settlers and iwi (Māori community) over land ownership and Māori rights. There was no railway but it is possible that the train and railway station in the model inspired discussion about the railway lines under construction in New Zealand in the 1860s. Nelson at this time had several churches, a school, brewery, flax mill, tannery, wool mill, and shops. Unlike England, most houses were predominantly made of wood although a few were constructed from brick or stone. By 1864 all of the Saxton children who traveled to New Zealand by ship were adults, but John and Priscilla had another four children who were born in Nelson, New Zealand: Emily (b. 1844), John (b. 1847), Elizabeth (b. 1849), and Barker (b. 1852). In my interpretation, it was most likely Barker Saxton, who was then twelve years old—an age contemporaries considered ideally suited to constructing and painting models—who created this particular model, possibly assisted by his fifteen-year-old sister Elizabeth. Moreover, it is quite possible that the model may have been an intergenerational collaboration calling on the expertise of the children’s father, an accomplished artist who may have offered his children guidance in its design and execution. That the model was framed and displayed suggests that the family treasured and upheld it as a valued memento. Heightened by its educational qualities, the model was framed and displayed like other admired children’s artworks, such as embroidered samplers, esteemed for their edifying potential in the colonial era. Te Papa has many examples of nineteenth-century samplers in its collection, many of which had been framed or carefully stored by generations of families as treasured family heirlooms. Paper-model making is also comparable to embroidery in that it was a quiet indoor activity with a creatively educational purpose. Embroidered samplers, for example, showcase the maker’s skill in needlework, their knowledge of the alphabet, and family history. However, a key point of difference between paper-model making and embroidery is that embroidery was a feminine activity often associated with rigidly-defined, submissive gender roles.14 Paper-model making was recommended as an activity for both boys and girls, and lacked embroidery’s connotative resonances of silence and submission. Even so, some interesting comparisons can be drawn between paper-model making and embroidery from a pedagogical perspective. One obvious link between

An Exploration of Colonial Culture

243

the physical nature of both activities and the proclaimed benefits of enhancing manual dexterity immediately comes to mind. Scholars researching Victorian girls’ needlework conclude that it was thought to be of vital importance and valued for training the eye, hand, and memory. As history curator Claire Regnault has rightly argued, “[w]ithin a girl’s education, needlework had a range of pedagogical ends. Samplers were not only about learning and recording types of stitches, but often reflected lessons in scripture, literacy and numeracy.”15 Like the Saxton model, many examples of needlework represent lessons in social studies and reflect the imperial, colonialist setting, both in terms of the local context and the broader British diaspora. Two silk embroidered pictures in Te Papa’s collection, both depicting Māori on the Whanganui River, exemplify the parallel influence of local and global forces. These embroideries made in 1880 and 1891 include Māori dressed in feather kakahu (cloaks), traditional waka (canoes), and native New Zealand flora and fauna (Figure 11.2). The works

Figure 11.2 Alice Clapham, Wanganui River Embroidery, 1880, Wellington, silk, feathers, glass beads, burr totara frame, glass, 730 x 600 x 25 mm. Gift of the Clapham Family, 1951. Te Papa (PC000798).

244

Childhood by Design

are illustrative of the makers’ engagement with the then popular arts and craft movement—both in terms of their real-life subject and use of subtle naturalistic materials such as earthy colored silks and feathers. One of the embroideries is known to have been made at the Mrs. Murray School, a school attended by girls of wealthy families in Wellington, and clearly demonstrates the inclusion of embroidery in the curriculum. Despite the fact that children had very few toys in 1860s New Zealand, the educational value associated with toys and related activities constituted a critical consideration for colonial parents, concerns even more pronounced among aspirational middle-class settlers like the Saxton family. Many of New Zealand’s early colonial settlers believed that the education of children was an essential element in societal reform, and a key component in the establishment of a new and better society.16 Educational toys like the model village were clearly in keeping with the thinking of prominent educationalists and a desire to build a better, more egalitarian, well-educated, and prosperous society.

A better life? John Saxton’s diaries indicate that he was seeking to achieve a better life by improving the socio-economic position of his family. Saxton’s entries indicate that he immigrated to New Zealand on the advice of his brother-in-law, New Zealand Company director Joseph Somes. In his diary Saxton recorded that Somes told him anyone might do well there with two thousand pounds, noting “I drank this in greedily but it was a fearful temptation …”17 John Saxton’s diaries, workbook, and artworks record his journey to New Zealand and early life in Nelson. They also express his vision for the future and contain inventions and handy hints for new colonists. His panoptic lithograph (Figure 11.3), depicting Nelson and the harbor (1842–1845), presents a particularly idealistic picture of his new home. The golden hued landscape, pretty cottages, and people busily setting up home suggest the perfect rural lifestyle, and a busy but industrious new world.18 A hand-colored version of the lithograph was included in Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s book, Adventure in New Zealand, a publication that intended to present New Zealand as the perfect place for resettlement. However, Saxton’s diaries tell another story and show that life was not only hard work but dangerous too. The family’s first years were particularly tough,

An Exploration of Colonial Culture

245

Figure 11.3 John Waring Saxton, Nelson, 1842, lithograph, paper, 240 x 432 mm. Te Papa (1992-0035-1732).

and were marred by a series of disasters upon arrival. The prefabricated house they brought with them leaked when it rained and then was demolished by a landslide. Mary Saxton, John’s sister-in-law, fell ill and died, and then their second home in Brook Street was damaged by fire. Priscilla Saxton and her mother were often sewing, cooking, and washing late into the night, and were constantly exhausted. By 1845, the Saxtons’ life had greatly improved. The family had moved into the New Zealand Company barracks in Stoke, and homegrown vegetables were plentiful. John Saxton meticulously described meals throughout his diary. One relished meal consisted of “potatoes, artichokes, roast Tuis, as fat as butter …” Even so, he became extremely disillusioned with colonial life. He suffered from recurring bouts of depression, and finally starved himself to death in 1866, aged fifty-eight. Saxton’s diaries are an extremely valuable source of information about the family’s daily life highlighting key events that affected the entire family. The Saxton children, however, are conspicuously absent from the vast majority of diary entries, a situation that only underlines the importance of the model as a unique and rare source of non-textual historical evidence enabling the inclusion of a child’s perspective on the past. That the model was made in the mid-1860s and was under construction while the children’s father was ill, suffering from depression or perhaps dying, imbues it with a tragic underlying poignancy. The model not only stands material witness to the children’s presence while their

246

Childhood by Design

father was dying, for which written evidence is otherwise lacking, and remains a permanent memento of John Saxton’s death. As historian Leora Auslander surmises, examples of material culture are a major form of expression and an outlet for people’s emotions, supplemental to words.19 Throughout history, people have expressed their emotions through the creation of things, and like the Saxton model, these things continue to be present and have meaning beyond an event or the people that created them. They become a key to remembrance or, in the case of the model, offering a portal into the inner world of the Saxton children. I suggest that the imagined idyllic English scene the children created helped them visualize the world John Saxton yearned for but had not achieved in New Zealand. The contrast between the sophisticated cities and networks they left behind in Britain, and the semi-rural life and hardships endured in New Zealand was surely brought to the fore as the children constructed the railway station, churches, and multi-story brick buildings. Perhaps the model highlighted absences in Nelson that were frequently available and a well-established part of urban life for well-to-do British families, i.e. options to attend and participate in popular British cultural activities such as music, dance and theater, art galleries, and museums, which were only newly emerging in 1860s Nelson. Likewise perhaps it stood for lack of access to fashion and travel, and the availability of many consumer items and varieties of food, which were relatively lacking in Nelson but were readily accessible in British towns and cities. Or perhaps the model was a beacon of hope that represented the future, albeit too late for the children’s father.

The historical value of objects Some aspects of the model’s provenance and associated histories may never be fully realized. Even so, the evident connection between child-made objects like the Saxton model and the historical experiences of children suggests that the artifacts of children’s material culture—i.e. objects made, adapted, and crafted by children themselves or appropriated from adults—have the potential to be a rich resource for historical inquiry. Historically, children have left behind few written records of their life, thoughts, feelings or personal experiences. Occasionally a child’s diary survives and letters published in newspapers or magazines have proven to be another rich source of historical evidence. Most often, however, written recollections of childhood reflect an adult’s point of view filtered through selective memory and nostalgia, making them a form of adult-

An Exploration of Colonial Culture

247

generated or adult-controlled evidence.20 The situation is further complicated by the physiological and intellectual limitations of being a child, dependent on age and stage of development and necessarily limited ability to express themselves in written form. More readily available than written sources, however, material objects created for or by children provide direct visual representations and tangible links to the historical experiences of children. As historian Giorgio Riello argues, objects have the capacity to unlock more creative and freer ways of conveying ideas about the past that are not necessarily mediated by written language in books and articles produced by professional historians.21 Museum collections throughout the world are packed with the material culture of the past, with a significant number, if previously unappreciated and under-displayed, of objects relating to children. In a 2016 survey of the history collection at Te Papa I found that there were about two thousand items relating to children. A large proportion of the objects are examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial dress, with a smaller but significant proportion of clothing made and worn since the 1950s including examples of clothing worn for leisure activities such as Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, marching clubs, swimming, dance, and football. Furthermore, the collection includes objects relating to children’s education, health, and social welfare organizations along with examples of children’s furniture and equipment. As is typical in many museum collections, a range of children’s toys and games have been acquired but toys are not the largest category of childhood objects in the Te Papa collection. Historical archaeologist Sharon Brookshaw’s survey of British museums demonstrates a readily available source of the material culture of childhood in museum collections that are diverse and partially representative of many childhood activities and experiences.22 Brookshaw found that 95 percent of the museums she surveyed had childhood objects in their collection, and like the Te Papa collection, the most prominent category of objects relating to children was clothing. Toys were another significantly large group but, contrary to popular belief, were not the largest, despite being the favorite form of childhood material culture of adults. Furthermore, Brookshaw found that of the museums she surveyed, many had a large variety of childhood objects relating to sport, education, discipline, work, health, and religion implying that “museum items relating to children are in fact very widespread.”23 Even so, it is important to consider the idiosyncratic way in which museum collections have developed. Most childhood objects in museum collections, both museums of childhood and museums focused on general history, have

248

Childhood by Design

been selected, donated, and acquired by adult collectors and museum curators via the lens of an adult’s perspective or in alignment with an institution’s broader collecting priorities. Connoisseurship and the physical material characteristics of an object often influences collecting and has resulted in the inclusion of prestigious objects valued for their high-end aesthetic qualities. These are typically objects made of expensive materials, items that showcase specialist techniques such as lace, or those made by esteemed manufacturers and artisans. The nostalgic appeal of childhood objects has also shaped institutional collecting practices. Material culture scholar Thomas Schlereth points out that toys appeal to adults for a variety of reasons. As miniaturized versions of the world, the appeal of toys can arguably be found in representing the world as a smaller, more manageable version of reality. Schlereth argues that children’s toys, as small versions of real things, invert reality and enable people to re-examine life at a Lilliputian level.24 Furthermore, historical toys have appeal in that they are reminiscent of a bygone era, mementos of a lost world that is typically remembered as less stressful and free of responsibility. Objects considered “cute,” adorable, or charming are also popular collection items. In my experience as a curator, the physical appeal of an object elicits a personal response from acquisition decision makers and is therefore more likely included in the collection. Precisely because of their nostalgic, sentimental appeal to adults’ own memories of childhood, toys typically constitute an adult’s preferred form of childhood object both in terms of collecting and in terms of what visitors want and expect to see on display in museums. In a 1984–1985 survey of visitors to London’s Museum of Childhood, Brookshaw found that 91 percent expected to see collections of toys and games on display.25 The explanatory power of manufactured toys and child-made or makeshift toys is another relevant distinction when exploring the historical value of childhood things. Manufactured toys make up the majority of toys in museum collections yet are often more closely aligned with the desires, needs, and interests of adults rather than children. Many of these manufactured, commercial toys can be more accurately defined as the “material culture of parenthood,” i.e. those objects that parents, rather than children themselves, deem essential to childrearing.26 Rather than representing something a child desires, adult-designed toys are illustrative of items parents may feel obligated to purchase for their children not only out of necessity, but as a form of surrogate caregiving and affection.27 Unlike the majority of childhood objects held in private collections or museums, such childmade or makeshift “invented toys”—commonly discarded or worn out through

An Exploration of Colonial Culture

249

use—have rarely been preserved in museum collections. But it is precisely such ephemeral objects that align most closely with the lived experiences of children, their interests and influences, their creativity and imagination, as well as the innate ephemerality of childhood itself. With their close association to the mental worlds and lived experiences of children, then, child-made objects like the Saxton model can be classified as speaking to a genuinely child-centered material world (or what Brookshaw has referred to as children’s material culture) as opposed to the adult priorities and prescriptions guiding most objects falling under the category of the material culture of childhood. The ephemeral, fragile, and temporary nature of most child-made and makeshift toys has deemed their survival rare and conservation problematic, and therefore very few examples have made their way into museum collections. A set of paper dolls in Te Papa’s collection very nearly shared the same fate of discarding as vast amounts of children’s toys. Fortunately, however, the set was rescued from the trash by a Te Papa history curator and is now a valued part of the collection. The handcolored paper doll set belonged to Drusi Megget when she was a child in the 1950s. Drusi individually named each doll, played her own made-up games and domestic dramas with them, and also designed her own sets of clothes. Along with a detailed provenance and recorded memories, these objects materialize an important aspect of Drusi Megget’s childhood and illuminate creative play experiences shared by many children around the world and throughout time. Similarly, a set of peg dolls in Te Papa’s collection reflect multiple aspects of contemporary New Zealand childhood. Made by children for a Wellington shop competition in 2011, the group highlight a variety of influences and everyday experiences. Some of the peg dolls depict film characters, musicians, and the influence of popular culture, while others represent common New Zealand childhood experiences such as an outing to the park or a café, or more deeply one child’s exploration into their cultural identity. Two peg dolls, made in the likeness of Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge on their wedding day, represents the impact of global events and New Zealand’s ongoing connection to Britain via the British royal family and the British diaspora. Like the Saxton model village, the peg dolls demonstrate that children engage with events, styles, realities, and circumstances far beyond their immediate circumstances. Another set of children’s objects in Te Papa’s collection are rare examples of makeshift toys, which once again offer a glimpse into the private world of children. The nineteenth-century collection is mainly made up of discarded adult items, which were appropriated by children in the 1870s. The set is comprised of little

250

Childhood by Design

pieces of jewelry, broken brooches and bracelets, small ceramic trinkets, and broken dolls that were found hidden at a historic colonial cottage in Wellington, once occupied by the Randell family. The hiding place was just big enough for a small child’s hand to fit into, and it is thought that the hidden treasures belonged to one of the youngest Randell girls who lived at the house in the 1870s. When the house was undergoing restoration, what apparently constituted a colonial child’s hidden treasures were discovered along with a large collection of archaeological material found in and around the cottage. Representing the material world with which the Randell children engaged, the hidden objects offer insight into the types of material culture children treasured in the mid-nineteenth century. Items discarded because they were broken or no longer desirable to adults became prized possessions to the Randell children. Perhaps the broken brooch that could no longer be worn by its previous adult owner, the marble and hat pin, or the cracked pudding doll took on new meaning in the imaginative playful world of the children that hid them. The act of hiding the treasures away alludes to the child’s need for privacy. Perhaps the secret hiding place was needed in a household with ten other siblings so that treasure could be kept safe away from prying eyes and pilfering hands. Research focusing on the private inner worlds of historical children is notoriously difficult to undertake. The paucity of child-generated sources and the dominance of adult-generated evidence makes access to the child’s perspective highly problematic, at best.28 Likewise, objects that represent unpleasant aspects of childhood such as neglect and violence against children, discipline or corporal punishment, and other unhappy memories, are conspicuously absent in museum collections. It is possible that these stories are present but unknown or not recorded, and will only be unearthed with focused in-depth research. Similarly, many objects in museum collections, apparently unrelated to children on a superficial level, might provide access to historical children’s daily lives, if only reinterpreted from the child’s perspective, just as the Saxton model has revealed.

Conclusion The model village in Te Papa’s collection adds to the existing but minimal information pertaining to the daily lives of the Saxton children in colonial New Zealand. Although indirect references to children and childhood can be gleaned through John Saxton’s diaries, direct references are only fleeting, necessarily representing an adult point of view when children are mentioned. The Saxton

An Exploration of Colonial Culture

251

model, on the other hand, brings into high relief a creative endeavor undertaken by the Saxton children, exemplifying a pastime enjoyed by the children and valued by the family. Child-made objects, including those crafted from commercial products like the Saxton model, augment conventional understandings of the social history of children and the family in colonial New Zealand, particularly leisure activities and pastimes. Nonetheless, ephemeral child-made toys like the Saxton model village remain a rare inclusion in most museum collections. Such self-fashioned toys, particularly items made of paper and other cheap materials, have been widely regarded by families, collectors, and museums to be throwaway items and not of great historical significance. However, as I have highlighted throughout this essay, these once devalued objects reflect the social histories and cultural contexts of their creators, children’s interests and activities, and directly showcase children’s creativity and imagination, even if it was originally a commercially produced import from Britain. As a point of comparison the model has provided an opportunity to reflect on the physical landscape of colonial New Zealand, including the growing city of Nelson. Metropolitan commodity culture and new developments in the toy industry as exemplified by the pre-printed patterns are also evident, and, on a broader level, the dominant ideological and pedagogical thinking of the colonial era. While they have hitherto been widely disregarded on a curatorial level, child-made items are critical artifacts of social history in potentially providing direct links to actual historical children’s private lives, personal experiences and inner worlds. Unlike the majority of childhood objects held in private collections and museums, which tend to reflect adult nostalgia, technological and aesthetic innovations in the toy industry and/or broader institutional collecting strategies, child-made objects like the Saxton model are closely aligned with the lived experiences of colonial children. Such objects directly showcase children’s leisure activities, the creative choices they made, and the material world they engaged with. It is these objects that I argue are ripe for investigation because they give historical visibility to children, with the potential to provide insights into the inner world, unique experiences and daily lives of children.

Notes 1 Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012), 12–13.

252

Childhood by Design

2 Brian Sutton-Smith, A History of Children’s Play: The New Zealand Playground, 1840–1950 (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). 3 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders. From 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 2001), 363. 4 Thomas J. Schlereth, “The Material Culture of Childhood: Problems and Potential in Historical Explanation,” Material Culture Review/Revue de la Culture Materielle 21 (Spring/Printemps 1985), 15. 5 Bronwyn Labrum, “Material Histories in Australia and New Zealand: Interweaving Distinct Material and Social Domains,” History Compass 8/8 (2010): 810. 6 Kevin Moore, Museums and Popular Culture (London and Washington, DC: Cassell, 1997), 52. 7 Giorgio Riello, “Things that Shape History: Material Culture and Historical Narratives,” in History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. Karen Harvey (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 43. 8 David Veart, Hello Girls & Boys! A New Zealand Toy Story (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014), 26. 9 Laura Ishiguro, “Material Girls: Daughters, Dress and Distance in the TransImperial Family,” in Colonial Girlhood in Literature Culture and History, 1840–1950, ed. Kristine Moruzi et al., (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 214. 10 D. Boileau, Papyro-Plastics, or the Art of Modelling in Paper; Being an Instructive Amusement for Young Persons of Both Sexes (London, 1830), v. 11 Ibid., viii. 12 “Paper Model Companies,” V&A Museum of Childhood, http://www.vam.ac.uk/ moc/collections/paper model-companies/ (accessed May 19, 2016). 13 Carl Walrond, “Nelson Region—Population and Society,” Te Ara—the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/nelson-region/ page-8 (accessed June 13, 2016). 14 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1986), 215. 15 Claire Regnault, “Embroidering the Whanganui,” in The Lives of Colonial Objects, ed. Annabel Cooper et al. (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015), 166. 16 Helen May, The Discovery of Early Childhood (Auckland: Auckland University Press with Bridget Williams Books, 1997), 19. 17 John Waring Saxton, Diaries 1841–1851, ed. typescript., Francis Bett. National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga O Aotearoa. 18 Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Marker: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001), 66. 19 Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (October 2005): 1018.

An Exploration of Colonial Culture

253

20 Schlereth, “The Material Culture of Childhood,” 15. 21 Riello, “Things That Shape History,” 26. 22 Sharon Brookshaw, “The Material Culture of Children and Childhood: Understanding Childhood in the Museum Context,” Journal of Material Culture 14, no. 3 (2009): 365–383. 23 Ibid., 373. 24 Schlereth, “The Material Culture of Childhood,” 3. 25 Brookshaw, “The Material Culture of Children and Childhood,” 368. 26 Ibid., 368. 27 Allison J. Pugh, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009) and Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993). 28 Schlereth, “The Material Culture of Childhood,” 15.

12

Toys for Empire? Material Cultures of Children in Germany and German Southwest Africa, 1890–1918 Jakob Zollmann

Around 1900, the sailor suit became the predominant piece of formal clothing for the sons and daughters of German aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. In the era of Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918), a monarch whose ambitious policies aimed to transform the newly unified German Kaiserreich (1871) into a great “world power,” the symbolic meaning of this garment represented enthusiasm for the imperial navy, colonialism, and a family’s pride in being part of a rising nation.1 The education of German children, both at home and at school, mirrored these tendencies and included new material objects informed by the broader colonial world outside Europe. The Prussian minister for education, Gustav von Gossler, declared in 1890: “Now that our eyes are wide open … that we see colonies before us; everywhere we have the impression that in one way or another we may have to penetrate the fence, which enclosed our educational system.”2 Indeed, the generation of German children born after unification grew up in a world that was much wider in global perspective and political and economic opportunity than that which their parents had experienced. This essay sheds light on the repercussions of German imperialism and colonialism on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German children’s playthings. It argues that the colonialist imagination, ideas of German dominance and subjugation of “colonial people” in Africa began to pervade German nurseries both in a direct and indirect manner. In particular, material expressions of exoticism on children’s playthings became widespread as can be seen from tin soldiers, children’s books, or zoological playsets informed by African animals.3 Following this analysis of German toys with a colonial imprint, the second section will present a case study focusing on material cultures of childhood in one German colony, German Southwest Africa (today Namibia).

256

Childhood by Design

In a race with Great Britain for territory, trade, and naval bases around the globe—a race intensified by Germany’s delayed participation in the “Scramble for Africa”—Imperial Germany acquired colonies in Africa (Togo, Cameroon, German East- and Southwest Africa, 1884/5) and the South Seas (New Guinea, Marshall Islands, 1884/5; Western Samoa, 1900). Located between Britain’s Cape Colony and Portuguese Angola, the territory of German Southwest Africa (GSWA) was mostly arid, like the Namib desert, or semi-arid. Yet despite the lack of rain and permanent rivers, the colony was considered Germany’s only settler colony that could accommodate thousands of farmers. Similar to policies in the neighboring Cape Colony, transforming GSWA into a “white man’s country” represented a primary aim of German colonial administrators.4 Given that both colonial officials and the settler society at large had a pressing desire to populate the colony with German families, children and childhood were essential to Germany’s colonialist visions in a very tangible way. It was nothing less than a patriotic duty of German settlers to procreate future generations of white Southwesters. This ideal of Germans being born and growing up into a colonial society was thoroughly informed by German middle-class conventions of child rearing. As a particular point of reference, my case study of GSWA highlights the experience of the three children of civil servant Paul Rohrbach, and his wife Claire, a teacher, in Windhoek, the capital of GSWA.

The “Scramble for Africa” and toy production in the German metropolis The actual possession of colonies and detailed scientific knowledge about nonEuropean wildlife were not prerequisites for German toy manufacturers to produce toys, particularly zoological sets, informed by ideas of the exotic or “primitive” other. Preceding the “Scramble for Africa” by centuries, non-European wildlife, including African species such as monkeys, elephants, or lions, had long been depicted in European art and had also been used as models for zoological toys.5 Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, such “exotic” animal toys tended to become increasingly true-to-life as precise information on African animals was disseminated through encyclopedias, magazines, and travel reports regularly carried in newspapers, exemplifying what historians have referred to as the “ubiquitous interest in the non-European world among Germans living

Material Cultures of Children

257

in even the most provincial places in Germany.”6 Such animal toys constituted material expressions of adult purchasers’ interest, curiosity, and longing for all things “alien,” “adventurous,” and “extraordinary”—feelings that, as I argue, were not necessarily foreign to their child users. In addition, a new genre of handcolored puzzles made of wooden cubes that precisely depicted African species of birds like the ostrich likewise attest to the growing imaginary presence of non-European wildlife in German nurseries.7 It was hardly accidental, then, that Robert Schumann’s well-known piano pieces “Scenes from Childhood” (written in 1838 but remaining popular throughout the Wilhelmine era) commenced with the piece “Of Foreign Lands and Peoples.”8 With the onset of the “Scramble for Africa” in the 1870s, Germany’s popular and scholarly interest in the African continent—from its flora and fauna, to its geography and peoples—reached a peak, decisively influencing how parents and teachers presented the wider colonial world to German children. Following the acquisition of colonies in the 1880s, schoolbooks began to include sections on the German colonies and Africa in general. World maps showed parts of Africa and the Pacific region now labeled as “German.”9 While much has been written about colonial exhibitions in Berlin and other German cities, scholars have yet to address the experience of such exhibitions from the child’s perspective, as these exhibitions were evidently visited by children accompanying their parents.10 Complementing the predominance of military values in Wilhelmine-era families and schools, the African colonial experience directly affected toy production in the Kaiserreich.11 German toy makers began to cater to a distinctly colonial taste that merged the older interest in exoticism with new categories of children’s playthings portraying African colonial subjects. With the installation of colonial military in German overseas territories in the late 1880s, toy producers not only adapted their range of goods to these imperial developments but profited from them. A variety of playthings, including tin soldiers, zoological miniatures, trading cards, books, racialized dolls, and optical devices, allowed children to play out Germany’s colonialist and imperialist ambitions within the context of the middle-class Kinderzimmer, or nursery, at a time when rituals of gift giving assumed heightened significance in the German middle-class household. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, colonialist narratives of violent domination could be reenacted by German children and their parents through the purchase of sets of colonial tin soldiers. Since the late eighteenth century, tin soldiers had “conquered the world,” first emerging as amusements

258

Childhood by Design

for grown men, then as toys for children.12 In depicting soldiers and scenes from military life, the early modern Zinnfiguren, or tin figures produced in Nuremberg and other toy manufacturing and distribution hubs, invariably reflected the latest military developments. Thus late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tin soldiers modeled after colonial and imperial forces represented no exception to this trend.13 The toy collection of the Berlin Museum holds such a set of tin soldiers produced around 1900. These colonial tin soldiers were clearly recognizable as Schutztruppen, or protection forces, of German Southwest Africa, wearing a distinctive broad brimmed hat and grey uniform. In one particular figurine, the exotic African location was made visible through a palm tree beside a cannon. The entire arrangement was intended to be a boys’ plaything but with a marked educational and political value. By acting out imaginary battles, boys were supposed to learn order and a basic military vocabulary, commanding a “catalog of virtues” (Tugendkatalog) very different from the one handed down to girls.14 In the Berlin Museum set, the tin soldiers’ positions tended to show marching or attacking men ready to bayonet their African enemy, who were often present in the scenery. One figurine (Figure 12.1) shows a hand-to-hand fight between an African “warrior” and a German Schutztruppler, the latter using his rapier to strike dead the African. The meaning of this toy—intending to indoctrinate users with the idea that the natives’ defeat by the more “civilized” and orderly Germans represented a foregone conclusion—would have been apparent to contemporary purchasers subscribing to stereotypes that chaos and disorder characterized native African life.15 Although intended for the nursery, such colonialist playsets were beset with unmistakable messages of the might and domination of the conquering German soldier. It is difficult to establish with any certainty whether historical children in Imperial Germany obediently played out their parents’ narratives of German domination but is quite possible that some children may have favored the African figurines over the German ones, or perhaps allowed the African tin warriors to defeat the Schutztruppen. Likewise reflecting the growing influence of colonialism on Wilhelmine-era toy production was a new genre of mass-produced animal figurines, or Massetiere, molded from a putty made of sawdust, chestnut flour, gypsum, kaolin, and glue and then hand-painted. Rooted in older traditions of zoological playthings and miniatures, for instance the tin figurines of monkeys made by Nuremberg toy maker Johann Hilpert in 1780, companies like Lineol and Hausser Elastolin

Material Cultures of Children

259

Figure 12.1 Colonial German and African tin soldiers, manufacturer unknown, c. 1900, Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 79/12.

were extremely successful with their true-to-life models representing African wildlife.16 Such companies were so concerned with naturalistic accuracy that sculptor Albert Caasmann actually used animals from the Berlin Zoo as models for Lineol prototypes.17 To a previously unrecognized extent, then, the mass availability of toys like these speak to an interaction, undoubtedly triggered by German colonialism, that impacted normative notions of what bourgeois children were supposed to play with. By 1900, the African animal kingdom had achieved a permanent place in the German bourgeois nursery. The Berlin Museum also contains examples of toys whose purpose was to teach children about African wildlife through playful interaction. A Zoologisches Lotto (Zoological Puzzle) was advertised as being an “entertaining and instructive parlor game.” It consisted of several cardboard cutouts—one concerning Africa, showing an Egyptian temple, a river, two palm trees, and a black man holding

260

Childhood by Design

a spear—into which the child had to insert eight small cards adorned with pictures of African animals like giraffes, gorillas, and zebras. On the relief of the cardboard a question was printed in rhymed form about the missing animal and the small card gave on one side the response and depicted the corresponding animal on the reverse. For example, one card read: “What is the name of the horse with tiger skin? That is the zebra, shy and fast.”18 Similarly, a trilingual Zoologisches Quartett-Spiel (or zoological quartet game) focused on vocabulary training. Forty-eight playing cards gave the names of four animals, variously categorized as “African animals,” “European animals,” “birds,” and “marine animals,” and so on, in German, French, and English. One of the four animals of one category was depicted on the card and the child had to ask—not in German but in English or French—his or her players for the three missing cards. The instructions explained that the “child learns playfully the vocabulary by using the foreign language” and furthermore learned about animals from around the world.19 Combining play with didactic content on African wildlife, such animalthemed toys can be understood as speaking to cultural-political impulses beyond their obvious educational purpose: i.e., teaching children to memorize names and appearances of foreign animals. Indeed, in an age when colonial big game hunting was considered a privileged undertaking, knowledge about “big game” African animals allowed children to indirectly participate in the colonial project, or, through an awareness of such species’ dwindling numbers, even participate in the emerging conservationist movement.20 Similar to elsewhere in Europe and North America, Imperial Germany favored a gendered usage of playthings. Adults considered military-themed toys like tin soldiers as most appropriate for boys, finding an equivalent in dolls for girls, as Bryan Ganaway’s essay in this volume scrutinizes. Much has been written about the cultural and educational value ascribed to dolls throughout the nineteenth century, the so-called “golden age of dolls.”21 This “golden age” was rooted in improved production processes and new materials but also in a newfound emphasis on doll play as a domestic teaching tool.22 Historians like Ganaway argue that “[m]ost Germans viewed this toy as an essential component of orderly middle class girlhood,” which was to encourage conformance to patriarchal family structures and women’s (largely private-sphere) domestic roles as wives and mothers.23 However, not unlike the Prussian Minister of Education’s prescriptions, German imperialism widened the context of doll play to encompass an increasingly politicized colonial world. From the 1870/80s onwards, a popular category of

Material Cultures of Children

261

Negerpuppen emerged that depicted supposedly “African” physiognomic features in an essentializing and infantilizing manner. In English, the German term Negerpuppe is often translated as “gollywog,” a term originating in the 1895 American children’s book by Florence Upton The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg. Although “gollywog” originally referenced a specific type of doll (dark skin, kinky hair, white-outlined eyes, and exaggerated lips, often wearing a tail-coat) rooted in the tradition of blackface minstrelry, gradually, however, the term gollywog came to be applied to a broader category of racially stereotyped black dolls. Much like the American gollywog, German Negerpuppen were used to explain and popularize the concept of “race” through the dolls’ tangible depiction of stereotypical African features such as broad lips and exotic-looking garments. Such black dolls had a clear function as instruments of racial indoctrination, complementing texts, pictures, and figurines about Africa and people of African descent likewise read or shown to children in a perfectly circular fashion. As a result, the meaning of the doll as an educational tool changed decidedly to encompass a much more political, non-domestic didactic purpose. As was true for zoological figurines, black dolls were used by German children long before Germany’s acquisition of colonies or anthropological interest in the concept of “race.”24 The Berlin Museum holds a doll, sewn from dark brown leather, dating from the first half of the nineteenth century. Notably, however, the doll’s face seems to lack the essentializing, and infantilizing racial features characteristic of later dolls. Given a lack of information about what the doll wore, the only element that marked the doll as “other” was its red-and-whitestriped turban, a type of headgear uncommon in the German lands that played on age-old slippages between the figure of the Moor and the sub-Saharan black African.25 This early nineteenth-century example stands in marked difference to dolls with stereotypically “African” features produced around and after 1900. The same museum contains several examples of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Negerpuppen that were apparently meant to resemble “real” African babies. The museum’s depot has preserved most of these dolls without clothing, but it cannot be excluded that producers once sold them clothed or that children clothed them according to their own tastes or imaginations. One porcelain baby doll, produced by the Heubach-Köppelsdorf manufactory around 1920 (Figure 12.2), shows clear signs of racialized African features and cultural traits. The doll’s red and white colored suit with a plunging neckline, hoop earrings (Kreolen), colorful necklace, and broad, rouged lips reinforced

262

Childhood by Design

Figure 12.2 Negerpuppe (gollywog) with bisque head. Manufaktur HeubachKöppelsdorf, c. 1920. Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 75/31.

Material Cultures of Children

263

racial stereotypes on appearance and African women’s apparently questionable moral character. However, in their efforts to commodify racial difference, doll producers set clear financial limits. For reasons of cost effectiveness, the design of the body and head of such “African” baby dolls was identical to white baby dolls of the epoch. In the production process, the producer merely changed the color of the porcelain or celluloid from white to black but kept the same forms.26 Similarly, another popular category of so-called Badepuppen (bathdolls), a genre of small, unclothed dolls able to float in a bath tub in use since the latter half of the nineteenth century, were sometimes produced not in white but in blackcolored rubber.27 While historian Robin Bernstein has revealed that nineteenth- and twentieth-century America was marked by a distinct tradition of “violent and degrading play with black dolls,” very little is known about how children in Imperial Germany actually played with their Negerpuppen. Undoubtedly, the historical context informing play with black dolls differed greatly between the two societies. In the United States, populated by large numbers of African slaves and, after the Civil War, former slaves, gollywog play was linked to “contests over citizenship, personhood, and the memory of slavery.”28 On the other hand, Wilhelmine Germany had never been a slaveholding society and the number of Africans was limited to around one thousand even as their presence grew due to the newly acquired colonies.29 Outside of major cities, most German children in the Kaiserreich would rarely have seen a person of African descent. Yet, despite Africans’ relatively minimal presence in Imperial Germany, Africans were still imagined and objectified through a racial lens, to be pitied or abhorred for their allegedly strange customs. German children’s literature about the colonies was, as literary scholars have argued, “essentially war literature disguised as adventure stories” where “gruesome” Africans were to be defeated and civilized.30 Both before and after German unification, Germans were deeply interested in a genre of translated Sklavengeschichte (slave narratives). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic antislavery Uncle Tom’s Cabin was, for instance, immediately translated into German when it was published in 1851. During the Wilhelmine period, numerous editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were specifically adapted for children.31 But the discursive context informing Negerpuppen says little about German children’s actual play with the dolls. Two quotations from sources written around 1900 will be used to shed light on children’s experiences with their black dolls. As a boy, Duke Friedrich Wilhelm of Mecklenburg (1871–1897) had “a favorite

264

Childhood by Design

toy, since he could take it with him into the bathing water, a small Negerpuppe made of rubber whom he called ‘Mulle,’” a curious name also adapted by his siblings.32 The theme of a black doll emerging as the child’s favorite toy is repeated in the autobiography of the German-American psychoanalyst Karen Horney (1885–1952). As she recalled Christmas Eve 1900 in her family’s home in Blankenese near Hamburg: “In addition to you, dear diary, I found a Negro boy (doll) whom I had eagerly wished for. I want to play again with dolls, even though I am already a 15-year old teenage girl.”33 The sources themselves are silent as to whether playing with black dolls reinforced or subverted racial prejudice and the colonialist mindset. However, these children’s self-declared preferences for black dolls may very well suggest a tension between adults’ ideological prescriptions and children’s actual usage of the toy. Adult expectations for the toy were grounded in contemporary discourses on scientific racism that would not have allowed for straightforward expressions of affinity or even love towards black dolls. On the other hand, however, German children’s recollections of Negerpuppen as their favorite plaything may have reflected a highly patronizing, if curious, racialized attitude towards the doll that was totally in line with scientific racism. One wonders how the Duke of Mecklenburg’s favored bath toy did anything but reify dehumanizing stereotypes of Africans. In light of the expectation (shared by parents, producers, and marketers) that children should have used the dolls in a humiliating or degrading fashion, children’s actual appropriation of the dolls complicates the dolls’ intended function as instruments of racial indoctrination. Other types of commercial playthings came under the sway of colonialism and imperialism, allowing companies to profit from the popularity of Germany’s so-called “place in the sun.” Miniature versions of general stores, or Kolonialwarenläden (shops for colonial wares), were intended to be used by children to re-act scenarios of purchasing goods imported from the colonies. The narrative subtext of these Kolonialwarenläden was to instruct children how German ingenuity managed to transform African nature and chaos into marketable products. Similar messages of German might and African disorder were conveyed by commercial trade cards to be collected by children as marketing incentives. In response to the 1904–1907 rebellion against German colonial rule by the Ovaherero and Nama peoples—a military campaign in which several thousand volunteer German soldiers participated—the meat extract company Liebig was quick to adapt card motives, printing hand-colored scenes from the war in Africa.34

Material Cultures of Children

265

Children’s books further promoted Germany’s colonial project through allusions and direct references. In doing so, authors left no doubt that “the Africans” urgently needed guidance towards German Kultur (or culture and civilization) and scientific progress. For instance, the Münchener Bilderbogen, a popular series of cartoon-like pictorial broadsheets published by Braun and Schneider in Munich in 1891, released Knecht Ruprecht in Kamerun (Farmhand Rupert in Cameroon). This series of twelve images depicted Farmhand Rupert’s encounter with a group of Cameroonian man-eaters who destroyed German dolls, rocking horses, and books. The verses told German children that the Cameroonian children apparently did not know what else to do with the toys brought over from Europe but to devour them. Playing on deeply rooted stereotypes of the native African as childlike and gruesome, the story was a particularly stunning example of racist fantasies merging with child indoctrination.35 The preceding examples of toys, books, and dolls attest to the direct and indirect presence of colonialism in the average middle-class German nursery, a discourse turning on ideas of native subjugation, European domination, and African exoticism. Depending on presents chosen by parents and other relatives, the sum of all toys available to a middle-class child in Imperial Germany likely had a marked colonial imprint that was informed by Germany’s stake in the “Scramble for Africa.”

Imperial domination: Children, childhood, and material culture in GSWA Examining German Southwest Africa (GSWA) as a case study, the section to follow studies the material culture of childhood and children in the German colonies, considering how German children received the offerings of the German toy market, such as the examples considered previously, as well as how toys served cultural-political purposes in encounters with native populations. Within this case study, particular reference will be made to upper-middle-class officialdom through recourse to the primary source memoirs of the Rohrbach family, and these children’s self-fashioned playthings. Demographically, the colonial situation implied clear social and racial distinctions between African and European settler children, at least in theory. In 1912/13, after roughly twenty-five years of German rule in GSWA, there were 14,800 Europeans (including 12,292 Germans) living in the colony (9,046 men; 2,808 women; 2,962 children; 61 percent men, 19 percent women, and

266

Childhood by Design

20 percent children) among roughly 140,000 Africans, mainly the Ovambo, Ovaherero, Nama, and Damara peoples, but of the latter category’s gender and age distribution little factual data is known.36 Indeed, as colonial administrators dreamed of a steadily growing German population in order to populate the colony with a “white” European settler population, German children were to play a critical role in populating Germany’s colonial dominions. Yet the willingness of German men of all classes during the first two decades of formal German rule to “mix” with the local population and to procreate a sizable group of “mixed-race” children was seen with dismay by officialdom. As such, in 1905 “mixed marriages” were officially banned in GSWA, which still did not, however, hinder extra-marital relations and further mixed births in practice. Researchers estimate that in 1911 around 1,000 children of mixedparentage were still living in the colony.37 Despite official efforts to keep these categories legally discreet, these statistics underline how the distinction between “African” and “German” children who were born in GSWA was often blurred. Moreover, the everyday life experiences of colonial children did not always allow for clear-cut distinctions according to origin. “German” children learned African languages from African servants while “African” children grew up in (or in close proximity to) German households. Such African children not only learned to speak German and were often dressed in European children’s clothing, but played with similar and, at times, the very same toys like balls, bows and arrows, and sticks. In metropolitan Imperial Germany, barely 20 percent of families were able to purchase manufactured toys for their children.38 In GSWA this percentage of German families was probably not much higher, since the income of German settlers was often remarkably low in spite of their economic expectations.39 While it is difficult to make comprehensive conclusions on the mental and physical worlds surrounding European settler children in GSWA, existing primary source materials allow us to reconstruct, at least partially, the material culture surrounding the children of upper-middle-class bureaucrats. For instance, a collection of private letters by Claire Rohrbach, the wife of GSWA settlement commissioner Dr. Paul Rohrbach, sheds light on the lives and material surroundings of a bourgeois household in an urban colonial setting. Claire Rohrbach, trained as a primary school teacher, wrote eloquently about the challenges of rearing her three children; Justus (b. 1899), Hans (b. 1903), and Nina (b. 1905) in Windhoek, where they lived from 1904 to 1906.

Material Cultures of Children

267

Life for children of upper-echelon colonial officials like the Rohrbachs was comfortable to a degree their parents could never have afforded back in Germany. Colonial bureaucrats enjoyed a high salary with supplementary allowances and state-provided mansions. Consequently, the Rohrbach children had African nurses to take care of them daily. This way they not only learned the Otjiherero or Nama/Damara languages, but saw the details of everyday African life—or at least Africans managing a colonial European household—in a close-up setting. Claire Rohrbach described how her two boys put their European rocking horse in front of a wheelbarrow in order to “play ox wagon” (the major transportation means in GSWA) and “imitate the African herder.”40 On another occasion, she recalled how after Justus saw a Pontok, the traditional wattle-and-daub hut of Africans, and took it upon himself to reconstruct his very own Pontok in the family garden, much to his mother’s amazement.41 These play scenarios showed that the children, through play, gained a familiarity with native practices and the colonialist lifestyle, which they proudly demonstrated. The two Rohrbach boys played with German tin soldiers sent by their grandparents, much like the models described above. The Rohrbach boys also enjoyed military parades in Windhoek similar to children in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany. However, much like other settler families in GSWA, the Rohrbach children demonstrated an early familiarity with weaponry that would have been uncommon among metropolitan German children. The colonial setting of the Rohrbach children altered the meaning of military-themed toys in a very real way. Justus, for instance, knew that his father actually had a real rifle available in his house, giving German military culture an immediacy that was atypical of his counterparts in the mother country. “Lately [Justus] brought me my rifle and asked me to explain how to shoot,” his father wondered.42 A few months later Hans received a toy pistol manufactured in Germany. His mother noted: “It cracks all the time—Hans tests his new pistol.”43 From Hermann, one of the African house servants, Justus learned how to use a bow and arrow. As Claire recollected Justus’s pride in this skill; “they hunt mice … the boy likes these things now more than any play.”44 The situation colonial permeated colonial children’s learning processes in profound ways. Given that his mother was a teacher, Justus was expected to learn reading and writing from an early age. Unlike boys in Germany, however, Justus learned to read alongside an African house servant named Pensmann. That the much older Pensmann was sitting next to the six-year-old Justus likely confirmed his parents’ worldview that relegated “the African” to a “child-like”

268

Childhood by Design

being not to be taken as an independent person.45 As Frau Rohrbach surmised: “Bubi [Justus] and Pensmann often read and write together—both are more or less at the same level!”46 This conflation of Africans with the childlike could not but leave an impression on the child’s mind and was likely to create early feelings of superiority, not just towards the servants, but Africans in general. In a similar vein, Justus’s reconstruction of a Pontok in the family garden as a form of child’s play in comparison to “the Africans” constructing Pontoks in order to live therein likely served the parents’ aim to emphasize the categorical racial difference between Europeans and Africans. In their tastes concerning children’s books, the Rohrbachs very much resembled their peers in Germany. Justus learned reading from, as Claire Rohrbach recalled, the Struwwelpeter book (written by Heinrich Hoffmann in 1845), a classic of German children’s literature that taught children about the consequences of their misdoings through ten rhymed tales accompanied by chromolithographic prints.47 Also requested as presents from Germany were the popular children’s books Max und Moritz and Hans Huckebein.48 In addition, Justus’s mother had apparently wanted to purchase the aforementioned Münchner Bilderbogen, which nonetheless proved unavailable in Windhoek stores.49 The material world of Nina, the Rohrbach baby born in Windhoek in 1905, was at first sight less permeated by the colonial setting. An elephant figurine, similar to the Massetiere sets described above, was sent to her by post from Germany one Christmas. As the mother reported, “the Christmas elephant is her favorite animal.”50 On her first birthday, baby Nina received a rubber doll and a handmade dress from the Rohrbachs’ neighbors.51 While middle-class parents in Germany would have purchased ready-made infant apparel, in colonial Windhoek manufactured baby clothes were hard to obtain in the few stores. Thus the present was very welcome, as it relieved Claire Rohrbach, at least partially, of the task of sewing baby clothing. The mass-produced commercial toys analyzed in this essay were produced to be sold to parents of a middle- or upper-class background and should be understood as reflecting the ideological bias of adults and the heightened emphasis on holiday gift-giving within middle-class families.52 To this end, not even the 10,000 kilometers between the metropole and GSWA proved a hindrance to well-heeled families like the Rohrbachs.53 The commercial, factory-produced toys were of considerable import for the socialization of colonial children, whose parents considered knowledge about fauna and flora, geography and

Material Cultures of Children

269

modern languages part and parcel of good education and personal cultivation, or Bildung. The Rohrbach letters suggest that the children of bourgeois families in the colonies could demand the same sorts of toys, including the sorts of books, dolls, trading cards, and tin soldiers examined above, as their kind in metropolitan Germany. The sending of such toys to GSWA by grandparents and other relatives served as a social marker vis-à-vis African and lower-class German children. The parents and, quite possibly, their children too, were eager to underline the possibility of a normative German childhood in GSWA, which necessarily included the availability of the commercial toys analyzed in this essay. The ways in which these toys were employed by German parents and appropriated by children merit the same scholarly attention that, for instance, racialized dolls and doll play have received in the American context. It is to be hoped that further research will shed light on how colonial children received these “toys for empire” and their accordant agendas of colonialism, imperialism, and racism.

Notes 1 Robert Kuhn and Bernd Kreutz, Der Matrosenanzug: Kulturgeschichte eines Kleidungsstücks (Dortmund: Harenberg, 1989); Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Die Kindheit: Kleidung und Wohnen: Arbeit und Spiel: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1979), 128. 2 Cited in Heinz Lemmermann, Kriegserziehung im Kaiserreich: Studien zur politischen Funktion von Schule und Schulmusik (Bremen: Eres, 1984), 17. 3 Cf. Edward Marx, The Idea of a Colony: Cross-Culturalism in Modern Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 181. 4 Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (London: Hurst, 2003), 279. 5 One example is Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of an Indian Rhinoceros (1515). See also Dieter Salzgeber, Albrecht Dürer: Das Rhinozeros (Rowohlt: Reinbek, 1999); Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (London: Weidenfeld, 1972), 92. 6 Matti Bunzl and Glenn Penny, “Introduction. Rethinking German Anthropology, Colonialism, and Race,” in Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, ed. Bunzl and Penny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 1–30 (p.5). 7 Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, 86/286 “Kubenpuzzle mit Vorlage,” early nineteenth century.

270

Childhood by Design

8 Timothy D. Taylor, “Aesthetic and Cultural Issues in Schumann’s ‘Kinderszenen,’” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 21 (1990): 161–178; Udo Zilkens, Robert Schumann: Die Kinderszenen im Spiegel ihrer Interpretationen seit Clara Schumann durch Musiktheoretiker und Pianisten (Cologne: Tonger, 1996). 9 Susanne Grindel, “‘… so viel von der Karte von Afrika britisch rot zu malen als möglich:’ Karten kolonialer Herrschaft in europäischen Geschichtsschulbüchern des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Peter Haslinger and Vadim Oswalt, eds., Kampf der Karten: Propaganda- und Geschichtskarten als politische Instrumente und Identitätstexte (Marburg: Herder, 2012), 258–287. 10 Cf. Timothy Mitchell, “Die Welt als Ausstellung,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randerian (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002), 148–176; Anne Dreesbach, Gezähmte Wilde: Die Zurschaustellung “exotischer” Menschen in Deutschland 1870–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005); Joachim Zeller, “Berlin. Schaustellung von ‘Akkazwerginnen aus Centralafrika’ 1893,” in Kolonialismus hierzulande: Eine Spurensuche in Deutschland, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Erfurt: Sutton, 2007), 426–431; Sierra Bruckner, “Spectacles of (Human) Nature: Commercial Ethnography between Leisure, Learning, and Schaulust,” in Worldly Provincialism, 127–155. 11 Klaus-Ulrich Pech, “Krieg und Kriegsspiel in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur,” in Aggression, Gewalt, Kriegsspiel, ed. Heinz-Peter Mielke (Dorenburg: Museumsverein, 2001), 162–185, 165; see also Lemmermann, Kriegserziehung. 12 Karl Gröber, Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit: eine Geschichte des Spielzeugs (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1928), 33. 13 Theodor Hampe, Der Zinnsoldat (Berlin: Ehrig, 1982 [1924]), 16f. 14 Weber-Kellermann, Die Kindheit, 195. 15 Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 79/12, box colonial and African tin soldiers, c. 1900. 16 http://figurenmuseum.de/masse-tierkatalog/ (accessed December 5, 2016); Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 74/4 Massetiere. Zoo, c. 1920. 17 Heike Köhler and Katharina Kreschel, “Albert Caasmann: Modelleur der LineolFiguren,” Figuren-Magazin: Zeitschrift für Sammler von Aufstell-Figuren 36 (2008): no. 1, 30–32; no. 2, 40–41; no. 3, 20–23. 18 Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 73/16, Zoologisches Lotto, c. 1890. 19 Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, VI 22060, Zoologisches Quartet, Luxus-Papier-Fabrik Berlin, c. 1900. 20 Bernhard Gißibl, “The Conservation of Luxury: Safari Hunting and the Consumption of Wildlife in 20th century East Africa,” in Luxury in Global Perspective: Commodities and Practice, ed. Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Karin

Material Cultures of Children

21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34

271

Hofmeester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 261–298; Bernhard Gißibl, The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa (New York: Berghahn, 2016); Franziska Torma, “Serengeti darf nicht sterben,” in Ökologische Erinnerungsorte, ed. Frank Uekötter (Göttingen: V&R, 2014), 133–156. Insa Focken, Puppen– heimliche Menschenflüsterer: Ihre Wiederentdeckung als Spielzeug und Kulturgut (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 15. Fraser, History of Toys, 160. Bryan Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and Middle-class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 167; see also Weber-Kellermann, Die Kindheit, 84f. “[N]ineteenth-century German anthropology was neither characterized by colonial concerns, nor interested in organizing the world’s peoples according to evolutionary sequence.” Bunzl and Penny, “Introduction,” 1f. Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 88/7 Leather doll, c. 1st half nineteenth century. Ann duCille, “Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (London: Routledge, 2003), 337–348, 339; Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 75/31 Porzelankopfpuppe, c. 1920 (Fa. HeubachKöppelsdorf). Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, II 97/231, schwarze Badepuppe, c. 1900. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 196. Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Robbie Aitken, “Education and Migration: Cameroonian Schoolchildren and Apprentices in Germany,” in Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914, ed. Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmannm (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 213–230, 227 (fn. 2) mentions “over seven hundred Africans,” over a third “originally came from Cameroon.” Bettina Hoffmann, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Germany: A Children’s Classic,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 53 (2005): 353–368 (p. 360). Ibid., 353. Hans Dambrowski, Herzog Friedrich Wilhelm zu Mecklenburg: Lebensbild eines deutschen Seeoffiziers, (Berlin: Paetel, 1898), 4. Karen Horney, The Adolescent Diaries of Karen Horney (New York: Basic, 1980), 17; see also Bernard Paris, Karen Horney. A Psychoanalyst’s Search for SelfUnderstanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Heinz-Peter Mielke, “Krieg und Militär im trivialen Bildgut,” in Aggression, ed. Heinz-Peter Mielke, 207–210, 208; see also Bernd Jussen, ed., Liebig’s Sammelbilder:

272

35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Childhood by Design Vollständige Ausgabe der Serien 1 bis 1138 (Berlin: Directmedia Publishing, 2002); Bernhard Jussen, “Liebig’s Sammelbilder: Weltwissen und Geschichtsvorstellung im Reklamesammelbild,” in Jahrhundert der Bilder, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen:V&R, 2009), 132–139; Joachim Zeller, Bilderschule der Herrenmenschen: Koloniale Reklamesammelbilder (Berlin: Chr. Links, 2008). Münchener Bilderbogen-Nr. 1039, Knecht Ruprecht in Kamerun (Munich: Braun & Schneider, 1891). Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), Nachlass Hintrager N 1037/9, Statistische Materialien, Gesamtbevölkerung 1912. Jakob Zollmann, “Children of Empire: Childhood, Education and Space in German South West Africa, c. 1880–1915,” Journal of Namibian Studies 17 (2015): 71–124, 77. Weber-Kellermann, Die Kindheit, 206. Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 55–77. BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Family, 8.2.1906, 1. BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Family, 26.6.1906, 2. BAK N 1408, Paul Rohrbach to Family, 28.2.1906, 3. However, there were toy air rifles (“Luftgewehr”) available for boys also in Germany. See “Schießwaffen fürs Freie und das Zimmer,” in Deutsches Spielzeug zur Kriegszeit 1915, ed. Claude Jeanmarie (Villigen: Eisenbahn, 1986), 109. BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Sister, 13.6.1906, 1. Ibid., 2. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4. BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Sister, 13.6.1906, 2. BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Family, 6.3.1906, 1. BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Family, 7.10.1906, 2. BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Family, 1.9.1906, 2. BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Family, 6.3.1906, 5. BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Family, 1.9.1906, 2. Weber-Kellermann, Die Kindheit, 84. Ibid., 192, 14.

13

Public Nostalgia and the Infantilization of the Russian Peasant: Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys Marie Gasper-Hulvat

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet Union experienced an upsurge in interest in children’s toys created by peasant craftspeople. Within folk art toys, two genres of primitivism with which modernity was enamored collided: native peasant culture and the as-yet-unformed minds of children. Both of these populations provided paradigmatic “others” against which modern, urban Soviets could position their post-Revolutionary enlightenment. Simultaneously, Soviet adults could draw upon these primitive “others” as sources for authenticity and the undiluted essence of raw human nature. In this essay, I argue that adult Soviet reception of folk art toys between Lenin’s death in 1924 and the beginnings of Stalin’s Great Purge in 1936 frequently conflated the two “primitive” populations of children and peasantry. The conflation of peasants and children within critical responses to and massreproduced representations of folk art toys effectively infantilized the peasantry. During an era when both rural and youth populations were at the center of key Bolshevik public policy decisions, some of which produced widespread famine and massive orphan mortality, this infantilization represented a means by which urban dwellers, both adults and children, received instruction on how to perceive such rural populations. Ultimately, this essay discusses an urban, adult preoccupation with the “primitive” subjects of both children and peasants. This preoccupation marginalized both child and peasant, and such marginalization simultaneously accounts for a dearth of archival evidence representing their perspectives. Soviet infantilization of the peasantry worked in tandem with heavy-handed agricultural policies to remove rural populations’ political agency. But it also

274

Childhood by Design

gave urban working classes ideological constructs by which to interpret the rural masses who migrated in the millions to Soviet cities with increased industrialization.1 Soviet infantilization of the peasantry encouraged beliefs that rural populations were equally as malleable as the clay peasants used to make toys and equally as needing of vospytanie (upbringing) as the children for whom they made toys. Peasant workshops had been producing distinctively Russian toys since well before the 1917 October Revolution. During the mid-nineteenth century, wealthy Russophile revivalists cultivated rural centers of folk art production. Most of these so-called kustar (cottage industry) workshops produced carved, painted wooden objects: fashionable ladies, dashing cavaliers, anthropomorphized goats and bears, and horse-drawn carriages. A few kustar centers produced clay toys of similar iconography, along with whistles shaped like birds. Critics lauded the kustar movement for preserving Russian heritage. However, kustar art objects represented not so much authentic folk art traditions as an amalgam of traditional craftsmanship with the tastes of consumers from elite, highly educated classes. As Wendy Salmond noted, by 1913, “kustar art had effectively taken the place of folk art for the majority of educated Russians and Westerners,” replacing the “ersatz for [the] authentic.”2 Such observations recall Austrian art historian Alois Riegl’s late nineteenth-century criticisms of urban consumers’ detrimental impact on folk craft’s authenticity.3 Particularly when it came to toys, much nostalgia for Russia’s lost craft traditions was hardly grounded in historical precedent. The nesting dolls known as matrioshki provide a case in point. Developed by a Moscow artist in 1891 and produced en masse only since the turn of the century at the kustar toymaking center of Sergiev Posad, these dolls were the result of a cross-cultural appropriation of a Japanese toy.4 Their entirely painted details contrasted significantly with the three-dimensional detail in traditional, carved wooden kustar toys. Nonetheless, during the Soviet era, matrioshki would come to define both domestically and internationally the paradigm for authentic, Russian peasant-crafted toys.5 This doubtlessly owed in part to what Lisa Kirschenbaum called “an unabashed sentimentalization of motherhood” during the early Stalinist years, in contrast to immediate post-Revolutionary skepticism towards the family’s role in children’s upbringing.6 Soviet nostalgia for folk art toys peaked at a moment when pedagogical experts were encouraging toys that inculcated communist values. Construction toys that simulated modern engineering problems, oversized building blocks that

Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys

275

encouraged children to work collectively, industrial toys like burlap conveyor belts, and ABC books that taught about class war and atheism all provided ideological content to Soviet children’s education.7 The Pioneer organization of proletarian youth encouraged children to channel their precocity into adultscale agitational activities and improvement of their own communities,8 and pedagogues exhorted the abandonment of fairy tales.9 Meanwhile, art historians devoted unprecedented attention to folk art toys that might absorb children in their own personal fantasy worlds. Soviet emphasis upon toys’ ideological acceptability hardly excluded peasant-made toys, but did require justification of their place within the socialist system.

Early Soviet folk art toy culture Evidence for the early Soviet preoccupation with folk art toys can be found within popular culture and children’s books as well as in critical scholarship. General public interest in these objects is evidenced by a report that, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Moscow Toy Museum, founded in 1918, was rivaled in attendance only by the Tretiakov Gallery, the preeminent museum of Russian and Soviet art in the capital.10 A 1928 guide to the Toy Museum’s exhibits indicates that the museum devoted one of its five permanent exhibitions entirely to “the toy in peasant art.” Another of the Toy Museum’s exhibitions contextualized folk art toys within an ethnographic and sociological survey of toys in everyday life around the world.11 In other words, folk art toys constituted one of the major draws for visitors to the exceptionally popular museum. Discussions of folk art toys also appeared in the popular press. A literary vignette entitled, “Soviet Nuremberg,” analogizing Soviet kustar centers to Germany’s world-renowned toy-making center, appeared in a 1932 edition of the popular Soviet literary magazine, Krasnaia Nov’ (Red Virgin Soil).12 During the same year, a major article on toys appeared in the newspaper, Sovietskoe Iskusstvo (Soviet Art), the official news organ of the Arts section of Narkompros, the government agency for education and culture.13 Written from the first-hand perspective of a reporter on the ground, this article profiled the kustar industries in the Bogorodskoie district, known for its carved wooden toys. Additionally, many early Soviet children’s books featured illustrations of peasant-made toys. For example, matrioshka figures appear in David Shterenberg’s Moi Igrushki (My Toys) (1930), which depicts toys using Constructivist collage

276

Childhood by Design

aesthetics, as well as in A. Olsuf ’eva and Lidiia Popova’s Igrushki (Toys) (1928).14 Popova’s two-page illustration depicts twelve increasingly large nesting dolls, all isolated against a white background, evoking Suprematist juxtapositions of varying geometric forms. Igrushki also featured the classic peasant toy with a bear on a teeter-totter. While Igrushki also featured more modern, presumably manufactured toys, Ester Papernaia and Irina Karnaukhova’s Ch’i Eto Igrushki? (Whose Toys Are These?) (1930), illustrated by Alisa Poret in a splotchy, irregular primitivist style, is devoted exclusively to rural-made toys.15 It organizes those toys within an ethnographic survey, chronicling the differences in appearances and significations of toys, largely dolls, from various cultures represented within the Soviet Union. Many children’s books depict recognizable kustar toy forms and genres that repeatedly appear in scholarly publications on folk art toys. For example, the classic horse-and-wagon, or its horse-and-sleigh or horse-and-coach variations, appears in Poret’s illustrations for Ch’i Eto Igrushki? and in Dmitrii Mitrokhin’s woodblock-print-inspired illustrations for Kustarnyi Larek (Kustar Stall) (1925).16 These two books, along with My Lepim (We Sculpt) (1931), also feature images of toys representing riderless horses, either singly (Figure 13.1), paired, or as troikas.17 The correspondences of such illustrations with traditional peasant toys would have evoked a nostalgic sense of national identity. Their visual representations reiterated conventional cultural motifs, from dolls with head scarves tied beneath their chins to horses harnessed with ornamented shaft bows. The Russianness of folk art toys was conveyed entirely through their visual resonances, which would have been obvious to their viewers. For example, toys from Viatka depicted musicians playing the characteristically Russian balalaika as well as bayans, accordions which Viatka artisans developed in the 1860s.18 In most cases, toys’ Russianness appeared not only through subject matter, but also through styles of craftsmanship. Perhaps most striking in terms of stylistic resonances between illustrations of toys in children’s books and traditional toymaking practices are two dolls (at the center of Figure 13.1) in Ch’i Eto Igrushki? whose forms unmistakably represent a classic Viatka kustar toy (Figure 13.2). Viatka clay dolls depicted a distinctively fluid female form with the train of her dress pointing out behind her and a modern, brimmed hat upon her head. This toy is another example of where kustar toy traditions diverged significantly from native peasant traditions. As Lev Dintses noted in 1936, such richly ornamented toys as these dolls “are not in most cases related to the peasant milieu,” but rather

Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys

277

Figure 13.1 Alisa Poret, page 1 of Ch’i Eto Igrushki? (Whose Toys Are These?), detail, 1930. Courtesy Russian State Children’s Library.

were the result of a “reactionary retrospectivism” that inspired toy makers in the mid-nineteenth century to create objects that represented urban life.19 Such children’s books would have provided visual vocabulary to a significant portion of Soviet youth. Most of the volumes thus far cited indicate press runs of 25,000 to 30,000 copies. The State Publishing House, which printed most of these children’s books, also issued in 1928 a third edition of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, the patriotic best-seller of the early Soviet era. By comparison, they published this novel in a print run of only 10,000.20 In other words, these children’s books represented some of the most highly-reproduced books in the Soviet Union during the early Stalinist era. Although distributed in much smaller volumes (1,000 to 5,000), the wealth of critical scholarship on peasant toys published during this period is remarkable in itself. Volumes such as Nikolai Tseretelli’s 250-page Russkaia Krest’ianskaia Igrushka (The Russian Peasant Toy) (1933), Dintses’ 140-page Russkaia

278

Childhood by Design

Figure 13.2 Aleksei Den’shin, plate 6 of Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka: Viatskaia Lepnaia Glinianaia Igrushka (Russian Folk Toys: Sculpted Clay Toys from Viatka), 1929. Courtesy Amherst Center for Russian Culture.

Glinianaia Igrushka (The Russian Clay Toy) (1936), and Ivan Evdokimov’s thirty-six-page Russkaia Igrushka (The Russian Toy) (1925) consider exclusively the subject of peasant-made toys.21 Such works positioned folk art toys as bona fide art worthy of scholarly study. For context, in a series of fifty art-related titles published by the Moscow State Publishing House, Evdokimov’s volume stood side by side with only one other volume dedicated to peasant art: the entire genre. No other subcategory of folk art or the decorative arts received its own volume.22 Toys stood on equal ground with the entirety of Russian Academic painting and with ancient Russian architecture. The prominence of toys in this context likely resulted from a collision between the contemporary popularity of toys, the interests of collectors, and Soviet art historians’ emphasis upon peasant culture as evidence for the seeds of proletarian revolution within Russia’s artistic past. Although the study of toys grew largely from the discipline of art history, wherein, for example, Alexei Nekrasov’s Russkoe Narodnoe Iskusstvo (Russian Folk Art) (1924) treats toys as a subgenre of folk art sculpture,23 other scholarly volumes included folk art toys within economic, pedagogical, and ethnographic

Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys

279

analyses. For example, Lev Orshanskii’s Khudozhestvennaia i Kustarnaia Promyshlennost’ SSSR 1917–1927 (Art and Craft Industry of the USSR 1917– 1927) serves as an overview of the folk art genre and its economic impact, with a chapter devoted to toys.24 Yet other volumes consider toys in general with significant sections devoted to handcrafted peasant toys: E. Molozhavaia’s Siuzhetnaia Igrushka: Ieio Tematika i Oformlenie (The Subject Toy: Its Theme and Design) (1935), considers toys from a pedagogical perspective, and M. Iakubovskaia’s Igrushka Gor’kovskogo Kraia (Gorky Region Toys) (1934), details toy production around Gorky Oblast.25 A particularly stunning outlier from these is a richly-illustrated volume edited by S. Abramov, Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka: Viatskaia Lepnaia Glinianaia Igrushka (Russian Folk Toys: Sculpted Clay Toys from Viatka) (1929) (Figures 13.2 and 13.3).26 According to Anatolii Bakushinskii, the author of this volume’s didactic text, such toys were “white clay figures, blazing with the rainbow of their apparel,” made out of “ordinary red pottery clay.” Such clay contained “some impurities from small grains of sand,” and “when diluted with water turns into pliable dough.”27 Artisans used this dough to create fanciful figures of women in elaborately-decorated hoop skirts carrying children, umbrellas, and buckets as well as animal figures such as deer, sheep, pigs, cows, birds, and bears. This volume also depicted toys with elaborate scenes of couples dancing with accompanying musicians, women seated at a table with an onlooking dog, and a woman tending a flock of ducks. Apparently Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka was intended to be first in a set of volumes, based on the words “bypusk 1” (issue 1), on the cover, but additional issues never materialized. This volume required a financial commitment that was largely unparalleled during this era. With sixteen plates of color illustrations, this volume compares only to one other volume published in 1929 throughout the Soviet Union.28 Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka was published by Moscow Art Publishing, a small press with only one or two heavily-illustrated editions per year, as opposed to most of the previously cited volumes which came from statefunded presses. This volume presents evidence that early Soviet scholars and toy enthusiasts dedicated substantial time and capital to publishing documentation of folk art toys. Many of these volumes intended for adult audiences were produced not just for domestic consumption, but also for consumers and collectors abroad. Several, including Dintses, Tseretelli, and Orshanskii, contain synopses and sometimes captions in languages other than Russian, most frequently in French. Prior to

280

Childhood by Design

Figure 13.3 Aleksei Den’shin, plate 7 of Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka: Viatskaia Lepnaia Glinianaia Igrushka (Russian Folk Toys: Sculpted Clay Toys from Viatka), 1929. Courtesy Amherst Center for Russian Culture.

the 1917 October Revolution, kustar objects constituted an important Russian export industry. Salmond has noted how pre-Revolutionary kustar industries developed to the point where their luxury productions had outpriced the budgets of all but the wealthiest of Russian consumers. Demand abroad, fueled by a yearning for “the emotional resonances conjured up by the concept of the Russian peasant,” accounted for most pre-Revolutionary kustar consumption.29 There is no indication in the post-Revolutionary literature that this state of affairs had changed under the Bolsheviks. We can assume that a substantial quantity, if not most, of Soviet folk art toys were produced for export. For example, at a 1925 trade exhibition of Russian art in Paris, two of the eight most significant sections exclusively featured toys.30 On the other side of the Atlantic, in a 1929 brochure produced by the Amtorg Trading Corporation, the official US trade representative of the Bolshevik state, toys feature prominently as one of many peasant handicrafts advertised.31 Foreign-language translations within Soviet publications about toys supported the toy export industry, and such cultural exports represented a vital influx of external capital into the struggling state.

Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys

281

Assimilating toy makers and toy users Most Soviet publications on kustar toy making repeat a similarly infantilizing rhetoric about folk artisans. In his guide to the Toy Museum, curator Nikolai Bartram repeatedly referred to the simplicity of peasant toy craft, noting the cleverness of artisans at employing the simplest of materials such as wood, clay, wool, and duck down to produce these objects. This sort of commentary assigned to the peasant artisan characteristics frequently applied during the early twentieth century to infants and children. For example, James Sully’s 1895 psychological treatise, Studies of Childhood, which was published in Russian translation in 1901, noted how children’s minds are simple and in the process of development.32 Along with the eminent founder of the American Psychological Association, G. Stanley Hall, Sully was one of the pioneers of developmental psychology. He adopted then unheard of methodologies of systematic, long-term observation of children’s behavior to support conclusions about how children developed.33 Sully frequently referred to the children he studied as “clever,” and he stated that their minds represent “the simplest type of human consciousness to which we can have access.”34 Like Bartram’s comments on the peasant artisan, Sully discussed how the immediate environment’s most basic elements occupy children; for a child at play, when an imaginative idea must be worked out, “he virtually transforms his surroundings,” employing whatever objects are at hand to fulfill his imaginative needs.35 Bartram also noted the obsession of peasants with the theme of dashing horses, an observation that might initially seem uninflected. However, horses are the most frequently-mentioned toy or figment of a child’s imagination Sully discussed, from his observation of how a sofa arm became an “untamed horse of the prairies” to his documentation of a child “riding the horse-stick and slashing its flanks.”36 In such a context, that the peasant craftsman would be equally obsessed with these beasts conflates him with the sofa-arm rider. Furthermore, in the preface to the illustrated Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka, Abramov explicitly aligned the peasant artisan with children, commenting that creativity began very early in the development of peasant culture, “like children’s [creativity] as well.” He noted that the folk artisan “begins from a semiconscious state, not knowing yet what to create.”37 Analogously, Sully noted that the first workings of a child’s mind are “rude, inchoate, vague,”38 and that children proceed “by a half-conscious process of reflection and reasoning.”39 Indeed, Sully himself frequently conflated children with “primitive” adult cultures,

282

Childhood by Design

noting, for example, that “child-thought, like primitive folk-thought, is saturated with myth.”40 Correspondingly, Dintses proposed that peasant clay toys’ subject matter was saturated with ancient Slavic mythology.41 A conflation of toys’ primitive nature with that of their makers also appears in correspondences between texts and illustrations within these volumes. For example, Orshanskii began his chapter devoted to the kustar toy trade with a photograph of a snow-covered wooden cottage of a kustar craftsman from Sergiev-Posad, complete with a sleigh off to the side of the house. The next page features a photograph of a young peasant couple inside a house, painting and sculpting toys by the light of a window and lamp.42 In other chapters about folk art produced by the same populations, images of the crafted objects themselves appear instead of such photographs. These illustration choices established the primitive nature not of peasants in general, but of the toy makers in particular. In another iteration of the primitive toy maker, the children’s book Kustarnyi Larek (Kustar Stall) depicts an old peasant craftsman, described in the text as “bespectacled, gnarly, and wrinkled,” “thickly-bearded,” and with his “knife in the loamy soil.” One image depicts him riding his over-full, horse-drawn wagon to a provincial fair; the horse in the image wears a traditional shaft bow, an object frequently ornamented with elaborate decorations in Russian folk art traditions.43 By contrast with Orshanskii’s able-bodied, kustar craftspeople, Chetverikov and Mitrokhin depicted the kustar as an old man with nothing left to provide society than his age-old handicraft. Occasionally, texts implicitly align the identities of toy makers with the identities of the figures that toys depicted. For example, only two illustrations accompany Bartram’s discussion of the Toy Museum’s exhibit on “the toy in peasant art.” One represents a cookie mold of a lion, but the other, notably, depicts a dancing male peasant figurine, as if to illustrate simultaneously the maker and his product.44 Abramov and Bakushinskii included images of a toy explicitly described as “a peasant with a balalaika” and of a toy depicting a bearded man, whose facial hair would have indicated his peasant identity, confronting a bear.45 With even greater detail, Papernaia and Karnaukhova’s textual commentary that accompanies Figure 13.1 describes “a village doll. Her arms are strong from hard work. Matriosha digs in the garden, milks the cows, feeds the pigs. Her dress is simple, brown.”46 Which of these figures inspired such text is unclear, for the only doll which might be interpreted as brown is the lower of the two Viatkainspired city dolls. Nonetheless, the folk art toy is imagined here emblematizing peasant identity.

Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys

283

Peasants and toys under Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan The nostalgic peasant identity represented in Ch’i Eto Igrushki?, however, contrasted significantly with the experiences of most contemporary rural populations. If they had not migrated to large cities, rural inhabitants encountered a drastically different paradigm for agricultural work than traditional village organization had offered. Between 1928 and 1932, the Soviet government implemented Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan, which dramatically transformed Soviet rural life through the collectivization of agriculture. These changes represented the most sweeping reforms to affect the lives of Russia’s rural population since the 1861 abolition of serfdom. The First Five-Year Plan demanded rapid industrialization across Soviet society, in particular increasing efficiency within the realm of agriculture. Under this plan’s collectivization of peasant land holdings, the state abolished private ownership of the means of agricultural production. Peasants throughout the Soviet Union were at first encouraged and then forcibly compelled to abandon traditional ways of working the land. The industrialization of Soviet culture also significantly affected toy making. Relatively few early Soviet toys that children actually played with were peasantcrafted, and even folk artisans began to produce toys grounded in Soviet ideology. For example, Dintses concluded his 1936 history of Russian clay toys with a chapter on “Requirements for Soviet toys and clay toys,” with illustrations of toys depicting a woman on skis, an automobile, and a Red Cavalryman, representing the legendary Revolutionary Bolshevik strike force.47 These clay objects reflect the aesthetics of the Viatka toy tradition, with boldly-patterned dots ornamenting white backgrounds on the skier’s skirt and the cavalryman’s horse. In much of the literature on toys published during this era, discussions of modern toys followed discussions of folk art toys. For example, Tseretelli concluded The Russian Peasant Toy with a chapter on “The Contemporary Kustar Toy,” with illustrations of a wooden crane, whose platform on wheels resembles traditional horse-and-carriage wooden toys, as well as dolls representing a Red Army soldier and Red Navy marine. The juxtaposition of these objects, as well as earlier chapters where Tseretelli contrasted “conservative” and “revolutionary” toys of the past, employed a Marxist dialectical rhetoric, whereby one style or movement in art served as the antithesis to an earlier one, thereby constructing a dialectical progress of development through history. A similar dialectical reasoning appears in the article on toy makers in Bogorodskoie, wherein Fomin made great efforts to dissuade readers of any

284

Childhood by Design

prejudices as to the backwards nature of the town and its toy-making inhabitants. With a description of electric wires running into the homes of the town (symbolic of the scientific and engineering advances of Soviet progress) and another about the worker-organized workshops of toy production, this article represents a contrast to most of the literature discussed in this essay. Rather than infantilizing the peasant toy maker, Fomin’s article represents a rare attempt to color urban readers’ perspective on traditional folk art toy making as keeping up with, or even ahead of, the times. However, because of the limited resources allocated to toy production and the extensive export of kustar toys, most toys that Soviet children played with were generally homemade rather than factory- or kustar-made.48 Indeed, one can find a whole genre of books published during the early Soviet era concerning how to make toys out of everyday materials. These how-to manuals encouraged a can-do attitude in children and their parents, providing instructions on how to manage scarcity in the period of transition to the inevitable bounties that full communism would provide. One particularly notable example of this genre is My Lepim (We Sculpt), a 1931, eleven-page book narrated as a story for children rather than as a how-to manual aimed at parents or mixed audiences.49 In the story, a young boy, Vasya, shows his friend how he has used clay from the riverside to make a horse and a bird toy; his friend then sculpts additional toys, and they leave them to dry overnight. They take these toys to show their friends at school, and the trend spreads. There is no evidence that such a story in any way realistically portrayed Soviet children’s enthusiasm for homemade toys. My Lepim represents a narrative which well-meaning adults constructed to inspire children. Soviet children undoubtedly played with homemade toys; for example, even the prominent Bolshevik Alexander Shliapnikov noted in a 1930 letter that his son enjoyed playing with the toy cars he made himself.50 However, even such archival commentary represents an adult perspective on his child’s experience, providing us with little indication of how the child may have felt about such toys. Nonetheless, My Lepim is remarkable both in terms of the material suggested to produce the toys (clay, as opposed to the sticks, cardboard, pinecones, and potatoes that appear in most of the other do-it-yourself toy books) as well as in terms of the images of the sculpted toys. Vasya’s toys share a remarkable resemblance to the classic Viatka clay toys pictured in Abramov and Bakushinskii’s highly-illustrated volume. Vasya’s bird whistle is not just a simple clay form, it is a distinctive Russian folk art toy form. And the rider leaning on its horse

Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys

285

(Figure 13.4) bears an unmistakable resemblance to the forms of Viatka horse and rider toys (Figure 13.3), with the horse’s and rider’s bodies fused into a single form, differentiated only by paint color.

Figure 13.4 Konstantin Kuznetsov, page 8 of My Lepim (We Sculpt), 1931. Courtesy Russian State Children’s Library.

286

Childhood by Design

The logic of the illustrations in My Lepim implicitly draws upon the rhetoric of infantilization demonstrated in contemporary scholarship of folk art toys. The implication is that if peasants could create these classic, simply-formed toys out of a simple material like clay, surely the clever and inspired children of the new Soviet Union could do the same with basic inspiration from a storybook. Furthermore, Soviet children could expand upon those traditional toys with new, modern subjects depicted in the final pages of the book: a mother and child in modern bathing suits, a train, and a tractor. No consideration, however, is given to the practical, material problems that would arise when attempting to construct such a train or tractor, not to mention the long-necked goose pictured earlier in the book, from clay in the first place.

Conclusion Claude Lévi-Strauss has named the conflation of children with “primitive” cultures as an “archaic illusion.” He proposed that Western observers, among whom we should classify modern Soviets, assimilate “children, primitives, and lunatics” under a single rubric of simple-mindedness.51 Although none of the examples here involved the mentally ill, I have argued for the assimilation of the first two in Lévi-Strauss’ list throughout this chapter. However, for Lévi-Strauss, the “primitive” tended to denote aboriginal societies inhabiting non-Western locales: Australian Aborigines, the Kenyah and Kayan peoples of Borneo, or the Yakuts of Siberia.52 However, a particularly notable example of the assimilation of such exotic primitives with populations within the immediate geographical milieu of purportedly advanced Western cultures appears in the text-less Moi Igrushki. Seven of this book’s eight pages are devoted to the depiction of a single toy, such as a boat or a spinning top. Illustrator David Shterenberg assimilated the child and the exotic primitive through the inclusion of pages occupied each by a monkey, a parrot, and an all-black figure with sticks for appendages and a red cloth draped around its loins and one shoulder. The half-naked body, red-draped cloth, and pronounced, short hair of this last figure all operate to produce a caricature of a sub-Saharan African, similarly to how Mikhail Ezuchevskii and Vasilii Vatagin illustrated African figures in the 1929 children’s book, Deti Negrov (Children of Negroes).53 What moreover unites Shterenberg’s three images of toys representing the exotic primitive are backgrounds created through prints of leaf fronds. These

Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys

287

leaves denote the images of parrot, monkey, and “Negro” as more natural and in harmony with primeval human origins. However, one additional toy appears upon a similar leafy background: a matrioshka doll. In this way, Shterenberg visually united the familiar, domestic primitive “other” with exotic “others” in a visual equation of analogous primitive toys. His images inherently contrast such toys with the boat, which he placed upon a solid-colored background, or a Red Cavalryman and the spinning top, which he placed upon wood-grained backgrounds. Shterenberg, unlike any of the other illustrators discussed thus far in this essay, was a core member of the Soviet avant-garde. During the early years after the 1917 Revolutions, he headed the Department of Fine Art of Narkompros. He also served for a decade as an instructor at Vkhutemas, the Bauhaus-like Moscow institution of artistic education, where he interacted with Suprematist and Constructivist pioneers. Sarah Pankenier Weld has demonstrated how primitivism offered Russian avant-garde artists “an alternative to the rhetoric of progress through a regressive return to mythic origins of the past,” both through so-called primitive cultures and through pre-verbal children.54 Shterenberg’s wordless illustrations of primitive animals and peoples in the guise of toys doubtlessly participate in both these avenues. Soviet rhetoric about folk art toys was deeply connected to concerns about the mythical origins of Russian culture. Abramov commented nostalgically on how toys “originated from time immemorial,”55 and Orshanskii noted that, “in the far north, in the yurt, and in the primitive wooden hovels of warm regions, where humans took the first steps to establish culture, there already were toys—objects of primitive life.”56 In this way, authors like these, along with Shterenberg, employed folk art toys to ground the tumultuous Soviet present within a mythical, simpler past. However, this use of folk art toys generally was not purposed towards returning to such a mythical past, but rather to document and preserve an aspect of Russian rural history already lost to modernity. While a minuscule percentage of the Soviet peasant population continued to make kustar crafts during the early Soviet era, Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan saddled the peasant masses with unattainable goals for grain production, which had to be scaled up substantially to supply the capital for industrialization. And while exports of kustar goods could provide some influx of capital, more efficient methods of cultivation and land management on top of the backbreaking work of millions of peasants were necessary to provide the required grain to increase income from exports in any

288

Childhood by Design

meaningful manner. The vast majority of peasants who remained in rural areas became agricultural laborers at the mercy of the state. And while the processes of agricultural collectivization were critical to the establishment of communism, they nonetheless resulted in massive protests, extensive deportations, and widespread famine which led to the deaths of millions. From a retrospective point of view, we may be fully cognizant of these tragedies. However, during the period of collectivization, Soviet urban populations had limited access to any sort of accurate reports on the status and profound hardships of rural populations. The perpetuation of aggressive rural reform depended, in part, on the support of these urban populations for exploitative agricultural policies. The very nature of peasant identity needed to be molded to encourage perceptions of the peasantry as requiring such stringent guidance. One of the very few ways that urban dwellers could gain knowledge about purportedly authentic peasant culture was through exhibitions of, publications about, and children’s books depicting folk art. Toys featured prominently in such contexts. In this way, folk art became conflated with objects produced for the consumption of children, and the producers of these objects came to be associated with culturally-accepted attributes ascribed to their intended consumers: simple-mindedness, naiveté, and requiring educational formation. Under an “archaic illusion,” the peasantry came to be seen as possessing greater access to the primal and savage urges of the child’s brain. Because of their own supposedly simple, primitive state, folk art craftspeople could, by this logic, identify more with the children and could more successfully produce toys that would appeal to them. Just as the new communist systems of childcare and education would raise model comrades for the bright Soviet future, new communist systems of agriculture would educate and reform the masses of peasant laborers, transforming them from backwards, uninformed, child-like followers of the old ways into enlightened, enthusiastic participants in building the future.

Notes 1 2

Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 219–220. Wendy Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12. For purposes of this

Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys

3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14

289

essay, I will use the terms “kustar,” “folk art,” and “peasant” all to denote crafts made by rural populations. By the early Stalinist era, Soviet scholars largely used these terms interchangeably, although such elision neglected significant nuances between the three genres. Alois Riegl, Volkskunst, Hausfleiss und Hausindustrie (Folk Art, Domestic Labor and House Industry) (Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1894). Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia, 86. Within a domestic context, in 1933, Nikolai Tseretelli used the image of the matrioshka as the lead illustration for his chapter on “Contemporary folk art toys.” Nikolai Tseretelli, Russkaia Krest’ianskaia Igrushka (The Russian Peasant Toy) (Moscow : Academia, 1933), 234. Within an international context, we find that in 1929, the Amtorg Trading Corporation pictured a matrioshka as one of four toys illustrating peasant-crafted toys available for export from the Soviet Union. Amtorg Trading Corporation, Art & Handicraft Exposition of Soviet Russia (New York: Peasant Art & Handicraft Department, Amtorg Trading Corporation, 1929), 10, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027429102 (accessed December 29, 2016). Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 133. Ibid., 77, 154. Catriona Kelly, “Shaping the ‘Future Race’: Regulating the Daily Life of Children in Early Soviet Russia,” in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 267–268. Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 77. Ibid., 267. A. N. Izergina, “O moem ottze, khudozhnike N. D. Bartrame (About my Father, the Artist N. D. Bartram),” in N. D. Bartram: Izbrannye Stat’i. Bospominaniia o Khudozhnike (N. D. Bartram: Selected Articles. Recollections about the Artist) (Moscow : Sovietskii Khudozhnik, 1979), 142. Nikolai Bartram and I. E. Ovchinnikova, Muzei Igrushki: Ob Igrushke, Kukol’nom Teatre, Nachatkakh Truda i Znanii i o Knige dlia Rebenka (Toy Museum: On Toys, Doll Theater, Rudiments of Work and Knowledge and on Books for Children) (Leningrad: Academia, 1928). David Khait, “Sovietskii Niurenberg (Soviet Nuremberg),” Krasnaia Nov’ (Red Virgin Soil) (1932): 7. Semen Fomin, “U Bogorodskikh Kustarei (At Home with the Kustars of Bogorodskoie),” Sovietskoe Iskusstvo 42, no. 180 (September 15, 1932): 2. David Shterenberg, Moi Igrushki (My Toys) (Moscow : Gosudarsvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1930). A. Olsuf ’eva and Lidiia Popova, Igrushki (Toys) (Moscow : Gosudarsvennoe

290

15

16

17

18

19 20 21

22

Childhood by Design Izdatel’stvo, 1928), http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/p2676z298 (accessed December 28, 2016). Ester Papernaia, Irina Karnaukhova, and Alisa Poret, Ch’i Eto Igrushki? (Whose Toys Are These?) (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1930), http://arks. princeton.edu/ark:/88435/j9602336z (accessed December 28, 2016). Papernaia, Karnaukhova, and Poret, Ch’i Eto Igrushki?. Dmitrii Chetverikov and Dmitrii Mitrokhin, Kustarnyi Larek (Kustar Stall) (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1925) http://arch.rgdb.ru/xmlui/handle/123456789/33073 (accessed December 28, 2016). Such toys are pictured in photographs in the following scholarly volumes: M. Iakubovskaia, Igrushka Gor’kovskogo Kraia (Gorky Region Toys) (Gorky : Gor’kovskoe Kraevoe Izdatel’stvo, 1934), 16–17, fig. 1; Alexei Nekrasov, Russkoe Narodnoe Iskusstvo (Russian Folk Art) (Moscow : Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1924), 87, fig. 53; Tseretelli, Russkaia Krest’ianskaia Igrushka, 137 and pictured in the illustrated headpiece on 26. M. D. and Konstantin Kuznetsov, My Lepim (We Sculpt) (Moscow : Pravda, 1931) http://arch.rgdb.ru/xmlui/handle/123456789/35368 (accessed December 28, 2016). Such riderless horse toys are pictured in photographs in the following scholarly volumes: Nekrasov, Russkoe Narodnoe Iskusstvo, 86, figs 52, 96, and 60; Tseretelli, Russkaia Krest’ianskaia Igrushka, 159 and illustrated in the header on 167; E. Molozhavaia, Siuzhetnaia Igrushka: Ieio Tematika i Oformlenie (The Subject Toy: Its Theme and Design) (Moscow: Vsesoiuznoe kooperativnoe ob’edinennoe izdatel’stvo, 1935), frontispiece; a photograph of one such horse over several stages of the carving process also appears as the sole image illustrating Fomin’s popular news article, “U Bogorodskikh Kustarei.” Anatolii Bakushinskii, S. Abramov, and Aleksei Den’shin, Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka: Viatskaia Lepnaia Glinianaia Igrushka (Russian Folk Toys: Sculpted Clay Toys from Viatka) (Moscow : Moskovskoe Khudozhestvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1929). A. A. Banin, Russkaia Instrumental’naia Muzyka Fol’klornoi Traditsii (Russian Instrumental Music of Folk Traditions) (Moscow : Gosudarsvennyi respublikanskii tsentr russkogo fol’klora, 1997), 144. Lev Dintses, Russkaia Glinianaia Igrushka (The Russian Clay Toy) (Leningrad: Academii Nauk, 1936), 5–9, 107. Isaac Babel, Konarmiia (Red Cavalry), 3rd edn (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1928). Tseretelli, Russkaia Krest’ianskaia Igrushka. Dintses, Russkaia Glinianaia Igrushka. Ivan Evdokimov, Russkaia Igrushka (The Russian Toy) (Moscow : Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1925). Evdokimov, Russkaia Igrushka (The Russian Toy) (Moscow : Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1925), 41–42.

Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys

291

23 Nekrasov, Russkoe Narodnoe Iskusstvo. Four years later, in a German history devoted exclusively to toys, Karl Gröber would also classify toys within the category of folk art sculpture. Karl Gröber, Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit: eine Geschichte des Spielzeugs (Children’s Toys of Bygone Days: A History of Toys) (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1928). 24 Lev Orshanskii, Khudozhestvennaia i Kustarnaia Promyshlennost’ SSSR 1917–1927 (Art and Craft Industry of the USSR 1917–1927) (Leningrad: Izdanie Akademii Khudozhestv, 1927). 25 Molozhavaia, Siuzhetnaia Igrushka. Iakubovskaia, Igrushka Gor’kovskogo Kraia. 26 Bakushinskii, Abramov, and Den’shin, Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka. 27 Ibid., 2, 4. 28 Sixteen color plates also accompanied a 161-page volume from the State Art History Institute. Gosudarstvennyi institut istorii iskusstv (R.S.F.S.R.), Russkoe Iskusstvo XVIII Veka: sbornik statei po istorii iskusstva do-petrovskogo perioda (Russian Art of the 18th Century: Collection of Articles on the History of Art from the Pre-Petrine Period) (Leningrad: Academia, 1929). 29 Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia, 12. For an account of preRevolutionary British consumption of kustar goods and its impact on kustar production, see Rosalind P. Blakesley, “The Venerable Artist’s Fiery Speeches Ringing in My Soul,” in Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Grace Brockington (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 79–105. Accounts of other international exhibitions prior to the Revolution appear in Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Exhibiting Kustar Industry in Late Imperial Russia/Exhibiting Late Imperial Russia in Kustar Industry,” in Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930, ed. Judith Pallot (London: Macmillan, 1998), 37–63. 30 Orshanskii, Khudozhestvennaia i Kustarnaia Promyshlennost’ SSSR, 63. 31 Amtorg Trading Corporation, Art & Handicraft Exposition of Soviet Russia, 10. 32 James Sully, Ocherki po psikhologii dietstva (Moscow : K. I. Tikhomirov, 1901). 33 Barbara Katz Rothman, Encyclopedia of Childbearing: Critical Perspectives (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1993), 25. 34 James Sully, Studies of Childhood (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1900), 7, http://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=EnkRAAAAYAAJ (accessed December 28, 2016). 35 Ibid., 36. 36 Ibid., 41, 50. 37 Bakushinskii, Abramov, and Den’shin, Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka, 1. 38 Sully, Studies of Childhood, 7. 39 Ibid., 75. 40 Ibid., 28.

292 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53

54 55 56

Childhood by Design Dintses, Russkaia Glinianaia Igrushka, 16–21, 107. Orshanskii, Khudozhestvennaia i Kustarnaia Promyshlennost’ SSSR, 34–35. Chetverikov and Mitrokhin, Kustarnyi Larek, 8. Bartram and Ovchinnikova, Muzei Igrushki, 15. Bakushinskii, Abramov, and Den’shin, Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka, 3, pl. 12, 14. Papernaia, Karnaukhova, and Poret, Ch’i Eto Igrushki?, 1. Dintses, Russkaia Glinianaia Igrushka, 96–103, figs. 46–48. Kelly, “Shaping the ‘Future Race,’” 270. M. D. and Kuznetsov, My Lepim. A. G. Shliapnikov, letter to A. M. Kollontai, Moscow, August 30, 1930 (RGASPI, Fond 134, op. 1, ed. khr. 437, I. 19). Many thanks to Barbara Allen for this reference. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 88 http://monoskop.org/images/5/5e/Levi-Strauss_Claude_The_ Elementary_Structures_of_Kinship_no_images.pdf (accessed December 28, 2016). Ibid., 13. Aleksandr Solodovnikov, Mikhail Ezuchevskii, and Vasilii Vatagin, Deti Negrov (Children of Negroes) (Moscow : G. F. Mirimanov, 1929), http://arks.princeton.edu/ ark:/88435/tm70mx92f (accessed December 28, 2016). Sarah Pankenier Weld, Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 21. Bakushinskii, Abramov, and Den’shin, Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka, 1. Orshanskii, Khudozhestvennaia i Kustarnaia Promyshlennost’ SSSR, 34.

14

The “Appropriate” Plaything: Searching for the New Chinese Toy, 1910s–1960s Valentina Boretti

That the twentieth century was to be the “century of child”1 was a celebrated notion in China too—enough for it to be declared “the century of the toy.”2 Incontestably it was the century when “experts” sought for “appropriate” and new Chinese toys capable of producing “new children,” be they Republican “new citizens” or Communist “successors to the revolution.” In this regard, China fitted well within broader international tendencies to structure children’s leisure. This essay explores the normative discourse of toy appropriateness and newness from its inception to the early 1960s; with particular recourse to issues of tradition, identity, and national revival, it investigates whether the self-proclaimed new and different discursive regimes of the Republican and Communist eras produced new and different toys. From the early twentieth century, experts advocated the national production of “appropriate” or “new” toys. In the Republican era, “scientific” or movable toys were intended to embody a mobile China, as opposed to the inertia allegedly symbolized by most traditional playthings. Children were encouraged to play with supposedly modern toys such as blocks, balls, dolls, and vehicles, some of which had nonetheless been in use for centuries. Many of the very same playthings happened to be recommended in the Communist era, when “folk toys” were rehabilitated as expressing the creativity of the masses. Ultimately, the actual newness of “appropriate” new toys remained elusive; and so did their Chinese-ness or foreign-ness, that experts attributed flexibly according to their ulterior motives. Indeed, the culture of twentieth-century Chinese toys was informed by a discursive plasticity that largely floated free from the material. Categories were fabricated and aprioristically commended or condemned: if the Communists

294

Childhood by Design

extolled “folk toys” qua folk, mainstream Republican experts frequently censured the category of “our [Chinese] toys” while simultaneously praising several Chinese playthings. In order to signal these discursive figments, this essay shall refer to “Chinese toys” and “folk toys” in inverted commas.

The Republican era “If toys are good, family education is good. If toys are bad, family education is bad. If family education is bad, society will accordingly be bad.”3 Pronounced by the Industrial Magazine of China in 1918, these lines illustrate how toys were made to reflect national rather than parental anxieties. Indeed, from the 1900s to the 1940s, publications for adults and children regularly expanded on the key significance of playthings, while state agencies and education societies staged exhibitions to awaken the public to their relevance. The issues at stake concerned the nation’s very survival: the fate of China seemed to hinge on toys. These anxieties, and the very discourse of toys that emerged in the early 1900s and became mainstream in the Republican era, had originated in the perception that China was on the brink of collapse. According to intellectuals and reformers, the ailing Qing empire, and eventually the fragile Republic established in 1912, urgently necessitated “new people” to implement the conceptual and practical changes required to survive the perils of foreign intrusion and allegedly ineffectual tradition; in China as in other contexts, the young were to be the foundation of national restoration.4 To play this critical role, children were to be shaped into inventive, healthy, and cooperative “new citizens,” “useful” members of society conversant with science and committed to the nation. New methods of childrearing and education were required, for age-old practices were declared incapable of producing competent citizens. Late Qing and subsequently Republican modernizers alleged that traditional culture had stifled or ignored children, failing to appreciate their requirements. Against the backdrop of this largely invented tradition, modernizers positioned their “new” vision of childrearing—a purportedly insightful vision that understood children’s inclinations and therefore appreciated the decisive role of toys in their life. This role was not to be entertainment, but education: if “appropriate,” playthings could cultivate talents, knowledge, and qualities that would serve society and nation.

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

295

The discourse of appropriateness Initiated and disseminated by a non-homogeneous cohort of “experts,” including intellectuals, Chinese- and foreign-trained pedagogues, reformers, and officials, the discourse of toy appropriateness was not ideological strictly speaking. Although not monolithic, it was existential, because playthings became a vehicle to create new people who would redeem China—a goal that largely transcended the ideo-political orientations of its proponents. Moreover, this discourse did not develop under the aegis of a central political power, for no such entity existed from 1912 to 1927, when the Nationalist Party acquired some control of China; the ensuing support of governmental agencies did not cause major discursive alterations, except perhaps for an increase in nationalism, which was however also spawned by the conflicts with Japan. Re-labeling permeated Republican toy culture, as experts redefined the significance and purpose of playthings. In imperial China, as elsewhere, a “toy” was a decorative or recreational object, not essentially or solely intended for children’s use, and very seldom employed for instructional purposes; moreover, some “toys,” like fragrant sachets or tigers, were actually propitious or protective artifacts. Modern discourse stripped toys of ritual marks and, largely, of entertaining purposes, to reframe them as citizen- and nationbuilding instruments on the assumption that they could shape the physical, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic development of children from a very early age. Building on a broad (and very traditional) notion of education, toys were thus reconceptualized as “educational tools” that ought to be designed specifically for children, and were to be used for (formative) play only. This redefinition caused the censoring of some varieties of playthings, like the widely popular edible toys created by street peddlers; also, it entailed a qualification of the concept of toy: a toy was to be “appropriate,” which in practice meant “educational.” Retooling ancient beliefs in the decisive influence of material surroundings on children, and in the transformative capacity of leisure, experts contended that only appropriate and new, or “improved,” toys could shape new people; accordingly, they advocated a renewal of material culture. Although experts seldom offered design suggestions and were somewhat vague on what a new toy actually was, they did illustrate the characteristics of appropriate toys. Drawing on publications for parents, educators, and entrepreneurs dating from the 1910s to the 1940s,5 the following discussion

296

Childhood by Design

shows some suitable and inappropriate toys, and suggests that tradition and appropriateness were flexible constructs. New children ought to have safe, durable, and hygienic playthings, preferably made of rubber, wood or, from the 1920s, celluloid. Most materials traditionally used for toy making, such as clay, paper, straw, and fur, were stigmatized as flimsy, unsafe, or unclean, although experts approved the usage of bamboo, cardboard, and even scrap materials for children’s own toy making. Apparently, many Chinese playthings were detrimental to physical and moral health. If their “flimsiness” was accused of causing carelessness and destructiveness, even more sinister threats to children’s moral integrity were allegedly posed by “shocking” figurines portraying in the finest detail “hideous oddities” like scuffling beggars. Missionary Isaac Headland provides us with a late Qing example of clay beggars (Figure 14.1).

Figure 14.1 Isaac Taylor Headland, The Chinese Boy and Girl (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1901), 108. Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

297

Undeniably these expressive characters are modeled rather realistically, and so probably were their Republican counterparts. Incidentally, experts required playthings to “replicate real society”—within limits, apparently. Beggars were judged too realistic, but the alleged lack of verisimilitude, “ugliness,” and defective proportions of clay, cloth, or fur toys attracted persistent disparagement: while some children found clay toys “fun” or “like the real ones,”6 figurines “hardly look[ed] human” according to experts. Rubber, cloth, or celluloid dolls were conversely appreciated as cultivating sympathy and imagination; although experts recommended them mostly for girls, boys did like dolls and played with them. The European-style doll looked different from traditional figurines or puppets, so much so that it was called “foreign baby” in Chinese. If dolls had embodied foreignness when they were first imported around 1880, however, by the 1930s imported or domestic celluloid dolls were popularly viewed as a symbol of status and up-to-dateness. Due to its chemical origin, celluloid acted as a testimony to the progress of Chinese manufacture: the allure of modernity, coupled with the exoticism of dolls, possibly explains why celluloid dolls often appeared in lifestyle periodicals for adults (Figure 14.2). The example provided is one of many featured in trendy Arts and Life: a babydoll is the quasi-human protagonist of an industrial-promotional composition, with other Chinese celluloid items as its playthings. The toy animals portrayed here would probably have been approved by experts as attractive and perhaps even original. Certainly their producers marketed them as such, but the only innovation is their material. Appropriate toys had to be “novel and original” in artistic design: the novelty and originality of many recommended playthings were, however, slightly mysterious; equally puzzling was their relationship with the much-reviled category of “Chinese toys.” Blocks were judged most suitable for cultivating the imagination, creativity, and ability to cooperate that a new child ought to possess. Comparable playthings had long existed in China: namely, the seven-piece puzzle (known in Europe as tangram) and its derivate fifteen-piece puzzle that allowed a larger range of figure compositions. Although experts ranked both items among the “few” appropriate Chinese toys and often recommended tangrams for nurturing similar qualities as blocks, they rarely verbalized the similarity explicitly—unlike Headland, who had earlier lauded the “fifteen magic blocks,” also arguing that among Chinese toys there were “many duplicates of those common in the West.”7

298

Childhood by Design

Figure 14.2 “Xiao baobao xihuan wan de wujian—Zhongxing sailuluochang chupin” (Objects the Baby Likes to Play With—Zhongxing Celluloid Factory Products), Meishu shenghuo no. 6 (1934), n.p. Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

299

Children’s interest in transportation toys—such as boats because “they float,” as they said—led educator Zhang Jiuru to glimpse potential for improvements to the Chinese communication system.8 Techno-scientific competence was indeed considered necessary for children/citizens to propel China into the future, and dispel the “superstition” that allegedly lurked in masks or figurines of gods and characters from plays and legends. According to experts, playthings like trains, cars, boats and steamships, airships or planes would cultivate a scientific outlook and knowledge. Many of these items were new and foreign, but toy boats appear in Song dynasty (960–1279) art, hence they were hardly unknown to the Chinese tradition.9 Yet experts scarcely ever included them among the “few” traditional Chinese toys that apparently had “scientific” value: the roly-poly (or tilting doll), the bamboo-copter (a toy rotor) or the revolving-horse lantern (a zoetrope), which they recommended for introducing children to concepts of barycenter, propulsion, and air currents. Thus China was “superstitious,” yet it was found to have some “scientific” toys; these did not, however, suffice to redeem “Chinese toys,” which according to experts impeded intellectual and corporeal mobility since most of them were allegedly immobile: namely un-movable, un-changeable in shape (unlike blocks or balls), and unchanged over time. Sometimes leveled at paper or clay toys, and often at “Chinese toys” tout court, these accusations contained an implicit indictment of the bad-tradition construct: a stultified culture had produced static, “conservative” toys that could only produce inert individuals. Robust physical and spiritual agility was, instead, to be the mark of the rejuvenated China. Like superstition, immutability and immobility materialized according to discursive ulterior motives, since many time-honored Chinese toys like tops, shuttlecocks, and kites, whose appearance had not changed conspicuously over time, were mysteriously identified as agents of mobility. While experts often ascribed these items to the Chinese tradition, that thus turned out to be simultaneously mobile and immobile, they hardly ever did so with other appropriately mobile playthings like rubber balls, hobbyhorses, and pull-along toys. Yet the ball, though perhaps not in rubber, had been present in China centuries before boys playing ball were portrayed by twelfth-century artist Su Hanchen; likewise, pull-along toys had long been available in imperial China.10 The hobbyhorse was equally traditional, as we can see in a late thirteenth- to early fifteenth-century scroll that also depicts musical playthings and a slide (Figure 14.3). Modern hobbyhorses may have looked different from those

300

Childhood by Design

Figure 14.3 Unidentified Artist Chinese, Active Late Thirteenth to Fifteenth Century, Yingxi tu zhou, Children Playing in the Palace Garden, Late Yuan (1271–1368) to Early Ming (1368–1644) Dynasty, China, Hanging Scroll; Ink and Color on Silk, Image: 54⅞ × 30 in. (139.4 × 76.2 cm) Overall with Mounting: 113½ × 36½ in. (288.3 × 92.7 cm) Overall with Knobs: 113½ × 39 in. (288.3 × 99.1 cm). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1987, Accession Number 1987.150, CC0 1.0 Universal, Public Domain Dedication.

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

301

portrayed here—but were they conceptually different, or revamped versions of older toys? In 1933, the manual Toys and Education alleged that conceited families despised domestic playthings used by the poor, like the shuttlecock, in favor of the ball because it was “foreign,” hence good.11 Although the contention is highly dubious, since accounts suggest that children from all classes kicked shuttlecocks, it unintentionally illuminates a crucial issue: the selective reconstitution of tradition that undergirded the discourse of appropriateness and newness. Since the ball was neither modern nor inherently foreign, but only construed as such, charges of conceit should perhaps be leveled at experts, rather than parents; because it was expert discourse that equated “Chinese toys” with backwardness and inertia, unwittingly or sometimes explicitly conflating modern and appropriate with foreign-originated. As the above discussion has shown, boundaries between toys old and new, foreign and domestic, appropriate and inappropriate were somewhat blurred. We shall begin to unravel experts’ seemingly paradoxical contentions by addressing the issue of vernacular toys, to then examine “Chinese toys” and the question of selective appreciations and attributions. When critiques were specific and not generically leveled at “Chinese toys,” they usually targeted clay, cloth, paper, or fur figurines and animals. Since these playthings were typically crafted by small peddlers, it could be inferred that the objects of disapproval were vernacular toys per se. The assumption would, however, be misleading, because the highly commended roly-polies, tops, bamboo-copters, and shuttlecocks were vernacular toys, too, equally found on street stalls. The frequent condemnation of “Chinese toys” tout court may have resulted from a synecdoche involving animals/figurines and “Chinese toys,” but at the same time, this study contends, mainstream Republican discourse took issue with “Chinese toys” as a category because that category stood for tradition. “If a nation is strong, its toys are first-rate,” reformer Li Wenquan asserted:12 “Chinese toys” had to be immobile and unsuitable because China was reconstituted as such. This was a largely aprioristic and existential refutation, only tenuously related to tradition itself or chronology. The alleged ineffectiveness of tradition (and of “Chinese toys” past and present) was then deployed by experts to criticize the lack of awareness that purportedly permeated society, and thereby validate their role as enlightening agents. Critiques of “Chinese toys” concurrent with simultaneous appreciations of several Chinese playthings can perhaps be explained through the predicament

302

Childhood by Design

of the bamboo-copter. As children were informed, the Chinese had long had the bamboo-copter but had never developed any scientific invention out of its principle of propulsion—a principle that foreigners had instead exploited to devise the plane propeller.13 Possibly, then, China and toys were construed as receptacles of coexisting backwardness and stymied potential, which experts could unleash. Some appropriate toys, incidentally similar to imported, modern ones, had long been present in China, albeit without the scientific/educational tag; yet experts seldom acknowledged their traditional character, perhaps because of then-current tendencies to conflate modern and foreign. Possibly, however, where Headland saw similarity, Chinese experts wanted to see difference, so as to uphold constructs of inherently dissimilar and largely un-modern Chineseness, which they took upon themselves to rectify—starting with adults. Articulated as early as 1907 by educator Gu Zhuo,14 the notion that adult tendencies to trivialize toys’ importance were responsible for the dearth of appropriate playthings emerged as a constantly reiterated trope. Since toy provision was constructed as a scientific endeavor, adults were treated to a flurry of texts and events centered on mindful choice, and repeatedly accused of carelessness: if in 1914 essayist Zhou Zuoren rebuked those who “uncomprehendingly” bought unsuitable Chinese playthings,15 in 1948 parents were still criticized for buying “rough and slipshod” toys.16 According to experts, adult negligence impeded the very production of appropriate toys, thus jeopardizing China itself—because the near-absence of “good” toys hindered the edification of children, causing moreover the diffusion of foreign playthings. Across the decades, experts alleged that mistakenly seeing toys as mere trifles had led the Chinese to consider toy making an unworthy occupation. Consequently, the production of things crucial for children and nation had been left to peddlers who purportedly did not understand progress and knew nothing of education, aesthetics, technique, or psychology. Their playthings, it was claimed, were deplorable and incapable of competing with “scientific toys,” namely foreign toys. Experts thus called for urgent improvements to toy design and manufacture: playthings ought to be factorymade by specialized personnel; artists, scientists, educators, and entrepreneurs ought to join forces to fabricate better toys or devise new ones.17 While mainstream discourse advocated the standardization of toy making, prominent artist Feng Zikai asserted that the ludic and artistic value of cackling clay chickens, roly-polies, and lucky babies (A Fu)18 crafted by itinerant peddlers with unsophisticated materials was “several hundred times higher” than “stupid

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

303

verisimilar toys.” Those “crude and simple” playthings, whose shapes only hinted at reality, were in his opinion much better for the child’s imagination, which was instead fettered by realistic imitation toys like trains, cars, or furniture. Feng viewed commercially-produced miniatures that replicated adult items in minute detail as failures, and compared them to “burial goods” that likewise were exact replicas of objects; the child, he argued, was not a miniature adult needing miniature adult implements.19 Feng Zikai’s outstanding opinions on peddlers’ toys derived in part from his interest in popular material culture, and mostly from his views on children. While leading pedagogue Chen Heqin, to mention but one, regarded children as prospective citizens, albeit with a different psychology from adults,”20 Feng did not subscribe to the view of children (and toys) as national assets; to him, children were entirely developed beings rather than adults in the making: preserving the “childlike heart” meant conserving one’s original, unsullied nature. Feng’s predilection for children’s honesty and empathy with the nature of things is reminiscent of Rousseau or Schopenhauer, whose theories he was conversant with, but it was in fact rooted in his Buddhist beliefs and in the Chinese philosophical tradition.21 “Folk art,” including toys, did attract interest in the Republican era. Within these intellectual pursuits, however, playthings were valued as artifacts or heritage, but not necessarily as children’s ludic items. The discourse of appropriateness, instead, envisaged toys as educational tools that, as was also believed elsewhere,22 ought to prepare children for the future: creatively manipulating realistic toys allegedly trained the young to play their redemptive part in society and nation. Therefore, while “ornamental” playthings—a category that stretched from clay figurines to over-elaborate mechanical toys—were accused of inducing (detrimental) passive contemplation, prescriptions for toys to be simple and stimulate imagination could not entail endorsements of “unrealistic” peddlers’ creations, neither did they imply that toys were laudable qua handmade. Toy making had to be “scientific,” and preferably mechanized.

Modern toys and “national character” Several small- and medium-scale Chinese toy factories were established from the mid-1910s and increasingly in the 1920s and 1930s; publishing powerhouses like the Commercial Press, that played a significant role in disseminating the discourse of appropriateness, also produced playthings. Self-styled purveyors of

304

Childhood by Design

“novel” and “educational” national toys that suited the (unspecified) inclinations of Chinese children, these enterprises churned out all the appropriate-ish items, from wooden blocks and celluloid dolls to rubber balls and tin cars: for the most part, these were not strikingly new toys but rather edited renditions of old items, whose updated manufacture was construed as signifying progress. If industrialists poached expert discourse, artisan workshops and street peddlers poached the shapes of modern toys. Handicraft toy making was in fact thriving, in the face of lamentations over its alleged disappearance, as expressed for instance in the movie Little Playthings.23 Peddlers produced doll furniture crafted from scraps,24 and long renowned Wuxi clay artisans expanded their output: traditional opera characters were joined by figurines of students and movie characters like the Tramp.25 While noted pedagogue Zhang Xuemen approved several new-ish handicraft and industrial products,26 others remained rather critical of Chinese toy production. Experts viewed appropriate toy manufacture as an enterprise that ought to be overseen by the educated and not be driven by profit: playthings were to be created according to an evolutionary and elitist notion of competence, whereby the “old ways” were to be discarded and (expert-defined) awareness was key. Those supposedly oblivious to the significance of playthings, be they itinerant peddlers, artisan workshops or industrialists, were deterministically bound to produce inappropriate toys. It was indeed dissatisfaction with “commercial” toys that led educator Shao Mingjiu to initiate the China Children’s Products Society whose toys, as announced in 1935, consisted of flashcards, opera characters, and “all sorts of other playthings”27—thus displaying the vagueness and flexible borders of appropriateness/newness that characterized expert discourse. Opera characters, earlier disparaged as unrealistic, were perhaps to signify Chinese-ness, because in the 1930s ideal toys were to possess “national” (minzu) character. Toys and national strength had long been discursively interlaced, not only within larger Republican campaigns for patriotic consumption, but also in relation to children’s national identity. While similar apprehensions existed in other contexts, anxieties in China concerned the very national revival of which children were to be the cornerstone: hence parents and children were relentlessly urged to buy “national” items (guohuo), namely toys made in China. From 1912, entities ranging from the Ministry of Education to the Ladies’ Journal contended that imported toys spawned love for things foreign and conveyed foreign knowledge, thus threatening children’s patriotism and Chinese-ness:

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

305

“educational” items like dolls or vehicles ought to be domestically produced.28 Influential kindergarten educators like Zhang Zonglin, who incidentally disparaged many “Chinese toys,” and initiator of rural kindergartens Tao Xingzhi, maintained instead that both imported toys and their domestic reproductions were to be replaced by items modeled on Chinese patterns and tools.29 The idea that “reproduction” was not enough acquired currency in the 1930s, when the scope of national identity extended to concern, besides children, also toys themselves. While some still conceded the imitation of “good” foreign toys, others maintained that playthings had to be guohuo, but also minzu. Translatable as “nation,” “ethnic group,” “race,” or “Volk,” minzu is a complex notion that can encompass ethnic, racial, and cultural qualities:30 in this context, it meant that toys were to suit the “national character” or be distinctively Chinese rather than “copies” of foreign products.31 The specifics of “national character” remained nonetheless nebulous, aside from sporadic suggestions that kindergarten dolls ought to look Chinese,32 and references to traditional dragon boats. Possibly this was to be a renewed toy Chinese-ness: minzu quality, experts claimed, ought to be accompanied by “progressiveness” and lack of “superstition.”33 These issues introduce larger questions of Chinese-ness and supposedly endangered national identity: if the modernity or newness of appropriate playthings is debatable, so is their inherent Chinese-ness or foreignness. Modern Chinese toys may have appeared to be “copies” of foreign ones, in which case it is hard to perceive how imported toys would damage Chinese-ness while nearidentical domestic ones would not. But in fact, the similarity between most “new” Chinese and foreign toys, and indeed the “nationality” of modern toys, are non-issues: imported or Chinese versions of balls, hobbyhorses, blocks, and pull-along toys were revamped editions of older playthings that were as foreign as they were traditionally Chinese. A discourse that positioned itself as new was informed by traditional arguments. Likewise, many “new” playthings were rooted in the past; modernity, in sum, was not as evolutionary as reformers would have it.

Communist-era “appropriate” toys for the “successors” In the “new China” formally established in October 1949, children were afresh to be “new” and “useful” for the motherland: as in the Soviet Union,34 their well-being was constructed as a key concern of the state. Despite narratives of

306

Childhood by Design

difference, in the early Communist era the ideal child model was not strikingly dissimilar from its Republican counterpart: children were to nurture the “five loves,” namely love for the motherland, the people, labor, science, and public property; education and self-cultivation were to shape them into “successors to the revolution,” fully committed to the collective.35 Appropriate toys were still believed to play a crucial educational role, particularly for preschoolers; accordingly, the state and experts, some of whom had been active in the Republican era, disseminated a normalized toy discourse through publications, and curricular or extra-curricular instruction. Many appropriate toys, and indeed the virtues that they were called to cultivate, were not entirely new; the main difference was the greater emphasis on love for labor and collectivism. Although education reformer Fu Baochen declared in 1950 that children in the “new China” needed “new toys,”36 the practical implications of this (old) rhetoric of newness for toys’ actual visual and material qualities remained unclear. Drawing on texts for educators, parents, and children published up to 1960,37 the following discussion examines what playthings were most frequently recommended as appropriate for new children/successors. Some of these toys were to be bought, but many ought ideally to be self-fashioned by parents, educators, or children, according to the key Communist tenets of frugality and resourcefulness. Mindful purchase remained crucial: the masses, once allegedly deprived of playthings, ought to reject flimsy items that allegedly spawned disrespect for the fruits of labor. Although “Chinese toys” were no longer criticized as a category, up to 1959 some experts, including educator and official Che Xiangchen, disparaged clay and dough playthings as frail and unhygienic. New children had to be dynamic, resourceful, ideologically and morally sound. Their physical vigor could apparently be encouraged by balls, shuttlecocks, pull-along toys, and hobbyhorses; building-blocks, in turn, were called to cultivate imagination, creativity, and the crucial “Communist virtues” of unity, cooperation, collectivism, and love for labor. Jointly building houses, trains, planes, or tractors allegedly turned toddlers into members of a friendly collective, while also enriching their knowledge; for indeed, according to experts, appropriate playthings were to introduce children to their environment, thus preparing them for actively constructing and protecting China. Doll play was yet another means for cultivating cooperation and love for labor. For this reason, experts recommended it for toddlers of both genders, though not for older boys. Dolls were also, crucially, deployed for ideo-political education in relation to the concept of minzu, understood in the meaning of both

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

307

“national character” and “ethnicity.” From 1950, experts, parenting handbooks, art and women’s periodicals all voiced calls for proper doll-minzu: painter Chen Qiucao, for one, argued that dolls ought to wear lively, brave facial features, so as to represent new China’s children.38 Girls and boys were to play with dolls variously dressed as laborers, farmers, and soldiers, which mothers and teachers were encouraged to craft or purchase and manufacturers were enjoined to produce. Like the little gardener shown in the illustration, these dolls portrayed ideologically correct characters, thus fostering the notion of work as pleasure; furthermore, they signified “national character”-minzu, in that they looked (Han) Chinese rather than foreign, which apparently strengthened their appropriateness (Figure 14.4).

Figure 14.4 Women of China (ed.), Chinese Children’s Toys (n.a.: n.a., 1960), n.p. Reproduced courtesy of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

308

Childhood by Design

At the same time, in kindergartens or at home, children also ought to play with another genre of minzu figurines, exemplified by the second doll in the illustration: characterized by different facial features and clothing, these “ethnic”-minzu dolls represented the so-called “national minorities” or “ethnic minorities,” namely non-Han peoples ranging from Miao to Uyghurs that were and are said to be part of China. This variety of minzu dolls would allegedly promote “patriotism” as well as “friendship” towards “brother nationalities.” As argued by pedagogues Zhang Zonglin and Wang Jingpu, children were to regard the motherland as a “big family” where all “nationalities” cooperated in the spirit of brotherly love.39 Given their crucial importance for agricultural development, tractors became a familiar presence in the lives of children in the 1950s, as opposed to their absence in the Republican era: periodicals frequently featured them, and tractors together with planes and ships were among the items that children were encouraged to reproduce as part of toy- or model-making activities. Already present in the Republican period, these activities were now relentlessly promoted because they introduced children to science and labor concurrently, through a combination of theory and practice. A techno-scientific mindset, necessary to build socialism, could apparently be cultivated by traditional and modern toys alike. While the book Scientific Toys enjoined children to make bamboo-copters and revolving-horse lanterns, the manual Toys Made with Matchboxes showed how to craft tanks, pinwheels, or gantry cranes out of scrap materials.40 The promotion of homemade playthings to be resourcefully fashioned with scrap or even waste materials cohabited, however, with a narrative of newness dominated by plastic and automated metal toys.

Industrial progress and mass heritage The “new China” was ostensibly on the move, and so were its playthings. Given the cultural and political relevance attributed to children, toy making and retailing were significant icons of advancement and abundance in (largely fictional) narratives of improvements in the material lives of the people. Constructed as a marker of the party’s benevolence, Communist China’s purportedly burgeoning toy industry was deployed from the 1950s for propaganda purposes both domestically and abroad. Export trade periodicals showcased how the “new China” could produce “the newest types of toys,” such as mechanical vehicles,

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

309

blocks, and minzu dolls;41 concurrently, the domestic audience learned that, as opposed to past penury, all children had toys to play with. The People’s Pictorial regularly treated readers with descriptions of how specialized personnel were at work in Communist-established factories to produce extraordinary quantities of playthings.42 Besides contrasting Republican “profit-seeking” manufacturers with state-controlled factories that produced instructive toys,43 Children’s Epoch showed “new-style” and “scientific” toys, such as battery-operated boats, remote-controlled cars, and magnetic-powered dolls;44 as in the Republican era, movable toys were equated with progressive mobility. Yet from the late 1950s, the fabric of socialist modernity was plastic, which commandeered the position once occupied by celluloid since it signified techno-industrial progress and capacity to “catch up” with more advanced economies. “Fantastic plastic” appeared in periodicals for children and adults in the guise of “novel” toys like pandas, roly-polies, and dolls.45 In fact, mid-1950s families who lived comfortably could purchase blocks and even “a red fire engine,”46 but a wind-up jumping frog could be the only shop toy ever bought by less affluent families.47 Moreover, plastic toys were probably scarce, since a plastic water-gun was still a “rare luxury good” in the late 1960s.48 Parallel to the narrative of industrial playthings as icons of techno-scientific progress, another narrative emerged from the mid-1950s. Discussing handicrafts in 1956, Mao Zedong declared that “[t]hose good things of our people [minzu] that have been shunted aside must definitely be revived and, moreover, must be made even better.”49 Shortly thereafter, a Toy Exhibition Hall was established in Beijing under the auspices of Vice-Chairman Zhu De and his wife Kang Keqing, Secretary of the Women’s Federation. The exhibits included “folk toys,” which the People’s Daily described as endowed with “guileless style and fine form,” noting moreover their “drawing on local materials.”50 A high tide of official enthusiasm ensued: masks and figurines or animals made of clay, cloth, dough, and straw—the very targets of Republican contempt— morphed into symbols of cultural uniqueness, endowed with an authentically Chinese essence and perfectly suitable for children’s use. As “folk” (minjian) toys, they stood for the unaffected simplicity, resourcefulness, and creative honesty of the masses. In keeping with the Communist tradition of deploying folk heritage politically,51 the discourse of folk toys was arguably functional to constructing and projecting, domestically and abroad, the image of a state that progressed while rooted in its distinctive (mass) tradition. For the domestic audience,

310

Childhood by Design

moreover, the narrative of “local materials” was most likely intended to buttress the Communist discourse of frugality and resourcefulness. According to artists and scholars, “folk toys,” now repositioned within the lineage of high art, cultivated aesthetic sense and imagination, transcending mere verisimilitude to lead children into a fantasy world; their expressiveness and tendency for exaggeration were furthermore believed to demonstrate a comprehension of child psychology.52 As the narrative went, artisan toy makers—neglected in the Republican era—flourished under Communist rule; accordingly, the subject matter of their creations had enlarged, drawing from “present-day life:” alongside traditional lucky babies (or A Fu), there were now figurines of farmers and “national minorities.”53 If Republican craftspeople were supposed to modernize, Communist ones were to be “valorized,” according to what the state thought best. With the exception of minzu dolls and tractors, Communist-era toys were not outstandingly different from their Republican antecedents, whether domestic or foreign: at best, some of them were more technologically advanced versions of older models. Once again, rather old toys were tagged as new or appropriate, and made to produce new children.

Conclusion Despite narratives of difference, most of the toys that had served to cultivate Republican “new citizens” were redeployed to train Communist “successors to the revolution”—because the Communists inherited and enhanced both the Republican ideal child model and the Republican mainstream vision of utilitaristic leisure, featuring “appropriate” toys as tools to cultivate children. Since discursive regimes were not radically different, they recommended and produced similar toys; likewise, while advocating newness and deploring the past, both regimes selectively re-staged it. Republican discourse exercised a limited visual impact on toy design, but it had a more marked influence on toys’ material quality, disseminating the notion of “scientific” production with “appropriate” materials. The Communists inherited and retooled these ideas: “local” or scrap materials signified resourcefulness and frugality, while plastic embodied progress. For the most part, the so-called appropriate new toy was nothing more than a re-manipulated old toy, appropriately repackaged and tagged with labels:

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

311

scientific, educational, national, new. Such labels, hardly applied in imperial China, were a novelty; equally, construing and displaying toys as indicators and makers of China’s progress was unprecedented. In all these ways, boundaries between tradition and modernity, and across political regimes, emerge as blurred. The “appropriateness” or “Chinese-ness” of toys lay less in their actual visual and material qualities than in the claims made upon them by critics. China was not, in sum, immune from the confusions of modernity felt across the globe.

Notes 1 Published in 1900 by Swedish reformer Ellen Key, Barnets Århundrade (The Century of the Child) soon gained international fame. Its arguments for the recognition of the rights, needs, and peculiarities of children influenced visions of pedagogy and childhood culture, including design. See Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, eds., Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900–2000 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012). 2 Li Jinzao, “Ertong wanju tan” (On Children’s Toys), Jiaoyu zazhi 10, no. 7 (1918): 34. 3 “Yizi yizhu” (Every Word a Pearl), Zhongguo shiye zazhi no. 1 (1918): 22. 4 On childhood, see Mary Ann Farquhar, Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (Armonk: Sharpe, 1999); Andrew F. Jones, “The Child as History in Republican China: A Discourse on Development,” positions 10, no. 3 (2002): 695–727. 5 Li Wenquan, “Shuo wanju” (On Toys), Zhongguo shiye zazhi no. 5 (1912): 12–13; Xu Fuyuan, “Wanju yu youzhi jiaoyu zhi guanxi” (Toys and Preschool Education), Funü shibao no. 9 (1913): 24–27; Jia Fengzhen, “Jiaoyushang zhi wanju guan” (Toys in Education), Jiaoyu zazhi 11, nos. 2, 5, 6 (1919): 11–16; 31–38; 43–45; Cheng Yu, “Xiaohaizi de banlü” (Children’s Companions), Funü zazhi 6, no. 2 (1920): 17; Xie Zhimei, “Ertong yu wanju” (Children and Toys), Zhonghua jiaoyu jie 11, no. 12 (1922): 2–3; Jiaoyubu putong jiaoyusi, ed., Ertong wanju shencha baogao (Report on the Toy Survey) (Beijing: Jiaoyubu putong jiaoyusi, 1922); Chen Heqin, “Wanju” (Toys) (1925), in Wanju yu jiaoyu (Toys and Education) (Kunming: Yunnan shaonian ertong chubanshe, 1991), 34–37; Yu Jifan, Wanju yu jiaoyu (Toys and Education) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1933); Qian Gengxin, “Ertong wanju de hua” (On Toys), Xiandai fumu 3, no. 5 (1935): 28–29; Xu Yunzhao, “Ertong wanju kexuehua” (Scientifiz-ing Toys), Jiaoyu tongxun 1, no. 6 (1946): 8; Hu Yanli, “Shenme shi youjiazhi de ertong wanju” (What are Quality Toys?), Zhongyang zhoukan 9, no. 14/15 (1947): 10–11.

312

Childhood by Design

6 Zhang Jiuru, “Jiangsu Jiushi fuxiao ertong wanju ceyan baogao” (Report on a Test on Toys at the Elementary School Attached to Jiangsu No. 9 Normal School), Jiaoyu zazhi 14, no. 8 (1922): 10. 7 Isaac T. Headland, The Chinese Boy and Girl (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901), 5, 115–116. 8 Zhang, “Jiangsu,” 9–13. 9 Guoli gugong bowuyuan bianji weiyuanhui, ed., Yingxi tu (Paintings of Children at Play) (Taipei: Guoli gugong bowuyuan, 1990), 27. 10 Ibid., 14, 18, 44–45, 54; Bai Limin, “Children at Play: A Childhood Beyond the Confucian Shadow,” Childhood 12, no. 1 (2005): 19–25. 11 Chen Jiyun, Wanju yu jiaoyu (Toys and Education) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 14–15. 12 Li Wenquan, “Zai shuo wanju” (Again on Toys), Zhongguo shiye zazhi no. 1 (1918): 2. 13 Chen Yuesheng, Jizhong wanju de yuanli (Principles of Various Toys) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 31–33. 14 Gu Zhuo (comp.), You’er baoyufa (Early Childcare) (n.a.: Zhongguo tushu gongsi, 1907), 30. 15 Chiguang [Zhou Zuoren], “Wanju yanjiu yi” (Study on Toys No. 1), Shaoxing xian jiaoyuhui yuekan no. 5 (1914): 1. 16 “Ruhe xuanze ertong de wanju” (How to Choose Toys), Yanjie no. 4 (1948): 84. 17 Ye Gongxiong, “Kaocha Riben jiaoyu wanju ganxiang” (Reflections on Examining Japanese Educational Toys), Jiaoyu zazhi 12, no. 11 (1920): 7–10; Xie, “Ertong”; Zhang Jiuru, Zhou Zhuqing, “Dule quanguo ertong wanju zhanlanhui shencha baogao hou de jinji dongyi” (Urgent Proposal on Reading the National Toy Exhibition Report), Jiaoyu zazhi 16, no. 12 (1924): 4–8; Wang Guoyuan (comp.), Wanju jiaoyu (Toys for Education) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 106–109; Chen Zhengfan, “Ertong wanju wenti” (The Question of Toys), Xiandai fumu 4, no. 8 (1936): 21–22. 18 Generically called A Fu, these clay figurines, formerly thought to exert a protective function, represented auspicious children. 19 Feng Zikai, “Ertong de darenhua” (The Adultification of Children), Jiaoyu zazhi 19, no. 8 (1927): 1–3. 20 Chen Heqin, Jiating jiaoyu (Home Education) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1925). 21 Geremie R. Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975) (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002), chaps. 1, 5. 22 Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), chap. 3. 23 Susan R. Fernsebner, “A People’s Playthings: Toys, Childhood, and Chinese Identity, 1909–1933,” Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 3 (2003): 269–293.

Searching for the New Chinese Toy

313

24 Juliet Bredon, Peking (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1922), 461. 25 Shi Wanli, “Wuxi niren” (Wuxi Clay Figurines), Liangyou no. 122 (1936): 40–41. 26 Zhang Xuemen, Xin youzhi jiaoyu (New Preschool Education) (Shanghai: Ertong shuju, 1933), 132–140. 27 “Chuangban Zhonghua ertong yongpinshe yuanqi” (Establishment of the China Children’s Products Society), and related product announcement, Xin ertong zazhi 1, no. 1 (1935): n.p. 28 Li, “Shuo”: 6–17; Jia Fengzhen, “Lun ertong shehui zhi jiaoyu” (Children’s Social Education), Jiaoyu zazhi 4, no. 12 (1912): 230; Jiaoyubu, Ertong, 10; Xu Yasheng, “Ertong wanju de yanjiu” (A Study of Toys), Funü zazhi 15, no. 5 (1929): 15–16. 29 Zhang Zonglin, “Diaocha Jiang Zhe youzhi jiaoyu hou de ganxiang” (Reflections after a Survey of Preschool Education in Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Zhonghua jiaoyu jie 15, no. 12 (1926): 2; Tao Zhixing [Xingzhi], Zhongguo jiaoyu gaizao (The Reform of Chinese Education) (Shanghai: Yadong tushuguan, 1928), 108–110. 30 Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Revised and Expanded Second Edition) (London: Hurst, 2015). 31 Zhou Leshan, “Ertong de shenghuo yu wanju” (Children’s Life and Toys), Xin ertong zazhi 1, no. 1 (1935): 40. 32 Su Wanfu, Youzhiyuan de shebei (Kindergarten Equipment) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935), 6. 33 Yang Chenru, “Ertong wanju de xuanze” (Choosing Toys), Xiandai fumu 3, no. 10 (1935): 25–27; Zhou, “Ertong.” 34 Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia 1890–1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 35 On childhood, see Charles Price Ridley, Paul H. B. Godwin, and Dennis J. Doolin, The Making of a Model Citizen in Communist China (Stanford: The Hoover Institution Press, 1971); Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation (London: Macmillan, 1985). 36 Fu Baochen, ed., Ertong wanju zhanlan jiniance (Commemorative Volume of the Toy Exhibition) (Chengdu: Huaxi daxue, 1950). 37 Zhong Zhaohua, “Zenyang jiao xiao haizi youxi” (How to Encourage Small Children to Play), Xin ertong jiaoyu 7, no. 5 (1951): 16; Lüda shi minzhu funü lianhehui fulibu, ed., Zenyang jiaoyu haizi (How to Educate Children) (Dalian: Lüda shi minzhu funü lianhehui, 1953), 41; Zhou Shufen, “Zenyang wei haizi xuanze wanju” (How to Choose Toys for Children), Xin Zhongguo funü no. 1 (1954): 31; Wu Lao, “Ertong wanju de sheji” (Toy Design), Meishu no. 3 (1956): 25–26; Che Xiangchen, Zenyang jiaoyu xinde yidai (How to Educate the New Generation) (Shenyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1959), 55–57; Hunan sheng you’er shifan xuexiao, You’er jiaoyu gongzuo jianghua (Talks on Preschool Education Work) (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1959), 42–43; Luan Renmei, “Dui

314

38

39

40

41

42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

50 51

Childhood by Design ertong wanju sheji de yaoqiu” (Requirements for Toy Design), Zhuangshi no. 2 (1959): 48; Li Chang’e, You’er wanju zhifa (How to Make Toys for Preschoolers) (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1960), 1–2. “Zhongguo renmin duiwai wenhua youhao xiehui Shanghai shi fenhui guanyu Deyizhi Minzhu Gongheguo ertong wanju zhanlanhui de wenjian” (Shanghai Branch of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries—Documents on the Exhibition of Toys from the GDR), Shanghai Municipal Archives, file C37-2-49. Wang Jingpu and Zhang Zonglin, “Aiguozhuyi jiaoyu zai youzhiyuan” (Patriotic Education in Kindergartens), in Xu Teli, et al., Lun aiguozhuyi jiaoyu (On Patriotic Education) (Beijing: Qunzhong shudian, 1951), 107–108. Chen Yiding, Huochaihe zuo de wanju (Toys Made with Matchboxes) (Shanghai: Ertong duwu chubanshe, 1955); Guo Yishi, Kexue wanju (Scientific Toys) (Beijing: Zhongguo shaonian ertong chubanshe, 1956). “Pinzhong fanduo de Zhongguo ertong wanju” (The Great Variety of Chinese Toys), Zhonghua renmin gongheguo duiwai maoyi no. 1 (1959): 34–35; “Duoziduocai de ertong wanju” (A Variety of Toys), Zhonghua renmin gongheguo duiwai maoyi no. 3 (1964): 56–57. “Wanju” (Toys), Renmin huabao no. 6 (1956): 32–33; “Suliao” (Plastic), Renmin huabao no. 7 (1958): 27. Fan Er, “Wei haizimen fuwu de gongchang” (The Factory that Serves Children), Ertong shidai no. 12 (1956): 4–5. “Kexue wanju” (Scientific Toys), Ertong shidai no. 6 (1960): back cover. Lin Qin, “Zai budaoweng jiali” (At the Roly-Poly’s Place), Ertong shidai no. 11 (1959): 22–23; “Qimiao de suliao” (Fantastic Plastic), Zhongguo shaonian bao no. 597 (1959): 2; “Youqude suliao wanju” (Amusing Plastic Toys), Renmin ribao 29.01.1962: 2. Joseph W. Esherick, Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2011), 238. Chen Huiqin, Daughter of Good Fortune: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Memoir (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 72. Wen Xin, “Wanju shi wo rensheng de diyi jiyi” (A Toy is the First Memory of My Life), Wanju shijie no. 3 (2007): 49. The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976, eds. John K. Leung, Michael Y. M. Kau (Armonk: Sharpe, 1992), 2: 29. Note: the italicized text between square brackets is my own insertion to clarify the underlying Chinese term. “Ertong wanju chenlieguan zai Jing kaimu” (Toy Exhibition Hall Opens in Beijing), Renmin ribao 21.03.1956: 3. Hung Chang-tai, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

Searching for the New Chinese Toy 52 Li Cunsong, “Tan minjian wanju” (On Folk Toys), Renmin ribao 17.05.1959: 8; Wang Jiashu, “Miren de niwawa” (Charming Clay Figurines), Renmin ribao 02.11.1959: 8. 53 “Ni wanju” (Clay Toys), Renmin huabao no. 11 (1960): 16–17; Li Tsun-sung, “Huishan Clay Figurines,” China Pictorial no. 7 (1964): 36–37.

315

Index Please note that page references to Figures will be in italics. Page references to Notes will be followed by the letter ‘n’ and number of the Note. Abramov, S. 279, 282, 284, 287 accounting 34 Adam, Robert 9 Adlová, Alena 190 n.5 adult fans of LEGO (AFOLs) 103 adulthood, material culture of 5 adult-made toys 3–4, 173 The Adventures of a Pincushion (Kilner) 56–7, 64 n.33 advertising 10, 12, 13. See also marketing children as targets 68, 69 in Christmas period 68, 69, 70 of dolls 47, 50–1, 136–7, 143 in France 68–9 middle class targets 68, 69 Advisory Council for Toys, Czechoslovakia 176, 177, 178 Aesthetes 115, 118 Aesthetic Movement 113 aesthetics 16–17, 113–31 aesthetic education, early 76 aesthetic standards in France 14, 68, 82, 83 aesthetic way of seeing, cultivating 123–4 child as author, maker and giver 123, 124–7 dress 115–18, 128 n.14 Flora’s Feast 115–24 interiors 127 interrelationship with commercialism 79 African-American consumers 147 AGD (American Girl Dolls) 13–14 Aglaia (journal) 116 Albers, Josef 200 Albrecht V of Bavaria, Duke 9, 195 Alcott, Louisa May 115 Alexandre, Arsène 78, 87 n.51

Almqvist, Birgitta 91, 106 n.11 Altonaer Museum, Hamburg 223 American Girl Dolls (AGD) 13–14 anatomical dolls 62 n.2 Anker Building Block Set (Ankersteinbaukasten) 16, 26 n.56, 91 Anschütz, Rudolf 147 n.3 antique toys 77 architectural building toys 15, 16. See also LEGO with stud-and-socket mechanisms 91 Ariès, Philippe 2, 21 n.5, 62 n.1 art for the child movement 17 Art Nouveau 76, 220 Art Workers’ Guild 118, 129 n.20 Artěl Cooperative, Czechoslovakia (1908) 173 art-historical and design-based studies of childhood 3 artisans 9 artistic inventions in toy design 16–17 Arts and Crafts Movement 17, 113, 141 Attfield, Judy 104, 109 n.64 Austria, designers in 17, 83 authenticity of toys 4 automobiles, toy 73 avant-garde 17, 123, 139 artists 17, 157, 190 n.8 Communist 18 critics 221 Czechoslovakia (pre 1968) 173, 174, 175, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189 interwar 184, 186, 188, 191 n.28 post-First World War 153 post-war design 175 potential 173 Soviet Union, Former (USSR) 297 toy design 174

Index avatars, miniature 95 Avenarius, Ferdinand 221 Babel, Isaac 277 Baby Houses 195 Bachelard, Gaston 199, 204, 208 The Poetics of Space 217, 230 n.10 Badepuppen (bathdolls) 263 Bain, Alexander 122, 130 n.34 Bakushinskii, Anatolii 279, 282, 284, 290 n.18 Baldwin, Joseph 122, 130 n.32 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 35 Barbie doll 8, 13, 204, 211 n.46 black/multi-ethnic 20, 147 Bard Graduate Center in New York (2015/16) 21 n.7 Barker, Cicely Mary 115, 128 n.13 Barr, Alfred H. 164 Barthes, Roland 92, 106 n.17 Barton, Christopher 27 n.63 Bartram, Nikolai 281, 289 n.11 Bauhaus (German art school, 1919–33) 17, 153–72. See also Germany color theory 200 financial state 163–4 kite festival (1921) 159 and play 153–4 prototype production 161, 162 puppet-making 164, 167 toy design 160–1, 164, 168–9 toy production 154 Bauhäusler 153, 168 Bäumer, Gertrude 144 Bauspiel Schiff (play construction ship) 153, 156, 161, 162 Bavarian National Museum, Munich (2014/15) 21 n.7 Bavarian Trade Museum (1904) 139 Beauty’s Awakening, a Masque of Winter and of Spring (theatrical production) 118–19 Belich, James 235 Beneš, Edvard 190 n.13 Benjamin, Walter 1–2, 21 n.4, 59, 65 n.41, 193, 208 n.3 Berlin Museum 258, 259, 261 Berlin Zoo 259

317

Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (German publication) 139 Bernstein, Robin 25 n.52, 114, 120, 128 n.6, 271 n.28 Beruf (true calling, of girls) 136 Bestelmeyer, Georg Hieronymus 215–16 Blasche, Bernhard Heinrich 240–1 Bochner, Mel 205 Boehn, Max von 7, 22 n.18 Boesch, Hans 138 Bogart, Leo 133, 146 Böhm, Adolf 174 Boileau, Daniel 240 Bon Marché department store 70, 71 Bonetti, Carlo 177 books, children’s 82, 113–14 fairy tales 118 illustrating 122 “impossibility” of children’s fiction 17, 113, 114 picture books 17, 113, 114, 115, 124, 127 pocket books 14, 33–6 “possible” children’s literature 114, 123, 126 toy-books 38–40, 42, 115 Victorian children’s literature 121 Boretti, Valentina 20 Bosworth, Matilda 41 Bozart Toys 18 brand loyalty 13 Brandow-Faller, Megan 26 n.60, 169 n.4, 190 n.6 Bratz Dolls 133 Braunschvig, Marcel 76, 86 n.44 Brendel, Erich 161 Breuer, Marcel 162, 163 Brewer, John 5, 22 n.11, 22 n.14 Brewster, Sir David 200, 210 n.29 Brick Kicks (1987–1990) 98 British Museum 64 n.15 Broglie, Comtesse de (née Pauline Pange) 75, 86 n.38 Brookshaw, Sharon 4, 247 Broomhall, Sharon 9, 23 n.25 Brougére, Giles 24 n.41 Bryan, James 18–19, 195 Buckingham, David 11, 24 n.35, 24 n.41, 103, 109 n.62

318 Burman, Barbara 65 n.43 Burton, Anthony 21 n.6 Caasmann, Albert 259 cabinet houses 53 cabinets of curiosity 47, 51–2 Caillois, Roger 48, 51–2, 54, 63 n.7 Calvert, Karen 22 n.12, 22 n.15 Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal (1993/94) 21 n.7 capitalism, industrial 123 Carnegie Mellon, Human-Computer Interaction department 155 cars, toy 74 cartoons 11 catalogs, toy sales 69, 70, 72 Centuries of Childhood (Ariès) 2 Century of the Child: Growing By Design 1900–2000 exhibition, MoMA (2012) 154 chaos (paidia) 48, 54, 58 character dolls (Character-Puppen) 12, 17, 135, 138, 142, 143 origins of character-doll movement 141 Chase, Martha 135 Chéret, Jules 70 child consumers 7, 10 and dolls 36, 37, 40, 53–4 economic literacy 33–6 emergence of child as a consumer 13, 14 in France 67–8, 69 idealized 32, 38 pocket books 14, 33–6 recognition of child as a consumer 32 toys and materials 36–42 training 14–15, 31–45 Child Nurture and Activity Institute, Blankenburg (Prussia) 157 child-centered pedagogy 4 childhood. See also child consumers; children commercialized world of 10, 133 commodification of in the eighteenth century 49 and consumer culture 3, 10, 13, 50, 133, 147

Index and fashion dolls 7, 47 innocence (see innocence, childhood) invention of as a specific stage of development 2, 3, 5, 49, 85 n.15 material culture of (see material culture of childhood) socio-cultural constructions of 13 childhood studies 114 children. See also child consumers; childhood; material culture of childhood attitudes to 2, 3, 6, 84 n.2 becoming “adultified” 11 consumption for and by 7 and creativity 89 developmental life phases 13 material culture of 4, 49, 236–7 minds of 31 “pester power” 12 tabula rasa theory of mind 6, 31–2 as targets of advertising 68, 69 Chin, Elizabeth 8, 20, 146, 151 n.38 China appropriateness discourse 295–303, 298 Communist era “appropriate” toys for the “successors” 305–8 critiques of toys 301–2 folk toys 303, 310 industrial progress and mass heritage 308–10 modern toys and “national character” 303–5 “new China” 305, 308 Republican era 294 search for new toy (1910s to 1960s) 293–315 China Children’s Products Society 304 Chippendale, Thomas 9, 53 Christiansen, Godtfred (son of Ole) 91, 106 n.14 Christiansen, Kjeld (grandson of Ole) 95 Christiansen, Ole Kirk (LEGO founder) 90–1, 94 Christmas, impact of 68, 69, 70–1, 74 and toy kitchens 228–9 chromolithography 115, 241 Claretie, Jules 72–3, 81, 85 n.14, 85 n.17

Index Claretie, Léo 70, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82 clothing aesthetic dress 117–18, 128 n.14 of children 4, 6 of dolls 40–1, 42, 53, 55, 59, 60 male fashion 119 mismatched 61 picture books (Flora’s Feast) 120–1 theatrical presentations 118–19 collecting practices, institutional 4 colonialism 4, 19 German 255, 257, 258, 259 color theory 200 commercialized world of childhood 10, 133 Christmas, impact of 69, 70–1, 74 commodification of childhood 49, 133. See also commercialized world of childhood Communist Party of Czechoslovakia 175 Concours Lépine 81 construction play 96, 100, 104, 108 n.53. See also LEGO toys 16, 89, 91 consumer culture 2, 4, 6, 13. See also child consumers, training in Central Europe 135 and childhood 3, 10, 13, 50, 133, 147 complexity 133 critics 10 defining 133 and dolls 17, 49, 136, 138, 145, 146 and German mothers 135 nineteenth century 144 consumer society, birth of 32, 49 Cook, Clarence 127 n.1 Cook, Daniel Thomas 23 n.31 cradles 6 Crane, Beatrice 124–5, 131 n.47 Crane, Walter 17, 113–19, 123, 126–7, 127 n.1, 127 n.2, 128 n.15, 128 n.17, 130 n.36, 130 n.39, 130 n.44, 131 n.48. See also Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (Cassell and Company) creativity 15, 89 imaginative looking 114–15, 120–4 and LEGO bricks 89–90, 94, 95 cribs 6

319

Cross, Gary 7, 12, 24 n.40, 96, 220, 227, 231 n.26 The Cute and the Cool 69, 84 n.6, 232 n.57 Crowston, Clare 149 n.10 Crystal Chain 202 curiosity cabinets 47, 51–2 The Cute and the Cool (Cross) 69, 84 n.6, 232 n.57 Czechoslovakia (pre 1968) 173–91 adult-made toys 173 Advisory Council for Toys 176, 177, 178 artistic and political reform agendas 18 avant-garde 173, 174, 175, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189 Center of Folk and Artistic Manufacture 177 Communist Party ideology, internalization 175 folk-inspired toys 173, 181–2, 190 n.3 interwar period 174, 190 n.5 Ministry of Consumer Industry 182 Ministry of Forests and the Wood Industry 176 Prague Spring (1968) 173, 175, 189 Předškolni vychova (Preschool Education) 176, 177 reform commission 182–8 socialist realism 182 toys during the Thaw 182–8, 185 toys in late Stalinist period 175–82 Tvar (Form), official industrial-design journal 173–7, 179, 188 d’Ache, Caran 77 d’Allemagne, Henri 82, 87 n.71 D’Houville, Gérard 76 Damm, Olaf 96 “Dandanah” (construction toy) 16 Darwin, Charles 121, 130 n.36 De, Zhu 309 decorative arts 68, 81, 86 n.48 department stores, France 14, 68, 69, 70–1, 80–1, 84 n.3 deregulation of advertising and children’s programming 12 A Description of All Trades 49

320 developmental life phases 13 dialogues, enacting 37–8 Dialogues on Morality (Kilner) 58 didactic literature 56, 57 didactic toys 32–3, 42 Dintses, Lev 276–7, 279, 282, 283, 290 n.19 The Disappearance of Childhood (Postman) 11 disciplinary methods 3 Divéky, Josef 139 Doesburg, Theo van 200 doll-doctors 137 dollhouses 2, 8, 9, 47. See also dolls; Kaleidoscope House (2001); miniatures; Nuremberg kitchens, nineteenth century gender and domesticity 18 history 195–6 kitchen 204–5, 219–20 mass-produced 196 in Nostell Priory, Yorkshire 9, 52–3 owned by adult women 47 pedagogical importance 55 doll-motherhood 137 dolls. See also figurines; mannequins; toys adult features 50 adult use 5, 7, 47, 51, 62 n.2 advertising of 47, 50–1, 136–7, 143 and aesthetics/gender, in Imperial Germany 133–51 African features 261, 262, 264 alternative 13, 135, 138, 147 anatomical 62 n.2 “babies,” misnomer of, in eighteenth century 49–50 bathdolls 263 black/multi-ethnic 20, 147, 261, 262, 264 Bratz Dolls 133 character 12, 17, 135, 138, 141, 142, 143 and child consumer 36, 37, 40, 53–4 Chinese 306–7 clothing 40–1, 42, 53, 55, 59, 60 mismatched 61 collection of 51, 53, 59 and consumer culture 17, 49, 136, 138, 145, 146

Index Czechoslovak 181 designing, women best suited to 142 as disciplinary instruments 47 domesticity/domestic management, as preparation for 54–8, 60, 61–2, 136–8 eighteenth-century 14, 15, 47–65 example of nineteenth-century doll’s gown 40–1 factory-produced 141, 143 fashion (Pandora) 58–9, 60, 61–2 and advertising 47, 50–1 alternatives to 13–14 Barbie 8, 13, 20, 147, 204, 211 n.46 French 8, 51 origins of term “Pandora” 62 n.3 plastic 7, 8, 13 postwar 7, 8 uses of, fluctuating 58–9 French 8, 51, 67 and gender 17, 54, 133–51 girlhood, redefinition as an object associated exclusively with 14, 48, 136 golden age of 260 historical accuracy 78 housewife 206 in Imperial Germany (see Imperial Germany, dolls in) individualized 14, 135, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146 material culture of childhood 47 mechanical 135 miniaturized 136–7 and multiculturalism 14 mutilation by girls 138 and needlework skills 48, 55–7, 59, 64 n.29 nurturing, and character dolls 134, 135–6, 138, 142 as in-between objects 48, 49–54 origins 5, 7 paper 38, 39, 42, 223, 249 pedagogical importance 47, 48, 54, 55, 57 physiognomy 14, 50, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146, 261 postmodernist studies 8

Index prices 137 rebellious forms of doll play 138 reform 17, 135, 143–4 subversive role 17, 49, 61, 62, 63 n.5, 136, 145, 204 technological 145–6 as transitional objects between childhood and womanhood 14, 48, 53 wax 59, 60 Domino House 202 drawings, children’s 17 Dubček, Alexander 182 duCille, Ann 8, 19–20, 147, 271 n.26 Dürer, Albrecht 269 n.5 Dyer, Serena 14 Eames, Ray and Charles 16 economic literacy 31, 33–6 Edgeworth, Maria 31, 32, 36–7, 38, 41, 42, 43 n.1, 54–5 Practical Education 35, 36 “The Purple Jar” 38–9 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 31, 43 n.1 elites 5, 9, 144 elite women 52 Ellis, Alexander Caswell 137–8, 149 n.16 embroidery 243. See also needlework Emile (Rousseau) 155–6 “empowered child” paradigm 10, 11 Enlightenment 5–6, 134–5 pre-Enlightenment children’s furniture 6 entertainment, and advertising 12 Erector Set 16 evolution theory 121, 130 n.36 exhibitions 2, 4, 21 n.7, 54, 139 In and Around the House (2003) 198–9, 209 n.20 Century of the Child: Growing By Design 1900–2000, MoMA (2012) 154 “exploited child” paradigm 10, 11 Kunst, Ein Kinderspiel, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2004) 154 Kunstschau Exhibition, Vienna (1908) 174 L’Art pour l’Enfance (Paris exhibition, 1913) 77–8, 83

321

Toys and the Modernist Tradition exhibition, Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal (1994) 154 “Woman’s Life and Calling” exhibition, Berlin (1912) 144–5 EXPO 58 182, 183, 184 Ezuchevskyi, Mikhail 286 Facebook 133 factory-produced toy production 2, 4, 36 dolls 141, 143 fairy tales 118 fancy, flights of 122–3 Fanning, Colin 11, 14 fantasy 1, 96 fashion dolls. See also dolls Feininger, Lyonel 17, 164, 168 female entrepreneurs and artists 17, 135, 136 feminism doll studies 8, 49 idealism 135 maternal feminists 134, 135, 138 relational 135 Fenn, Eleanor 37, 38 Fennetaux, Ariane 14, 63 n.13, 65 n.43 Feuillet, Valérie 74 fiction, children’s, “impossibility” of 17, 113, 114 figurines 7, 258, 304. See also dolls African 258, 261 animal/zoological 79, 258, 261, 301 clay 303, 312 n.18 decapitated 137 father figure 207 folk toys, Soviet Union 310 gods 299 Kaulitz’s 139 minzu 308 “shocking”/inhuman 296, 297 wooden 77, 164 Fisher, Michelle Millar 17 Fixl, Viktor 183, 184, 191 n.27 Fleming, Dan 8, 23 n.22, 24 n.45 Flerina, E. A. 180 Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (Cassell and Company). See also aesthetic way of seeing, cultivating; Crane, Walter

322

Index

aesthetic taste 115 and Beauty’s Awakening 119 chrysanthemums, description of 118 Dover edition 129 n.24 iconographic meanings 114, 115–19 imaginative looking 114–15, 120–4 interpreting 121 narrative 118 as not a child’s book 124 performing 120–4 flowers, personified (theme of, in picture books) 115 folk toys assimilating toy makers and toy users 281–2 China 303, 310 Czechoslovakia 173, 181, 190 n.3 early Soviet folk art toy culture 275–80 Soviet Union 20, 273–92 Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan, peasants and toys under 283–6 Forman-Brunell, Miriam 8, 23 n.23, 63 n.5, 135, 148 n.5, 218, 230 n.15 Fournier, Edouard 69, 84 n.7 France advertising targets 68–9 aesthetic standards 14, 68 child consumers 67–8, 69 commercialization of Christmas in 69, 70–1, 74 decorative arts 68, 81, 86 n.48 department stores 68, 69, 70, 71–2, 80–1 fashion dolls 8, 51 French versus German toys 68, 82–3 Lozère region 78 mass consumption in 15, 67–87, 84 n.3 national identity, toys as sites of 68 nineteenth century 67–8 Paris, rebuilding (1850s and 1860s) 69 Paris Autumn Salon 77, 79 product placement 67 proliferation of consumer items for sale 68, 69, 83 Renault car 74 Franco-Prussian War 68, 74 Franco-Russian alliance 74 free play 15

Friedrich Wilhelm of Mecklenburg, Duke 263–4 Froebel, Friedrich 157, 221, 241 Fronek, Jiří 190 n.5 Fuller, S. and J. 42 Furnese, Arabella 50 furniture children’s 4, 6 German peasant 219 Kaleidoscope House (2001) 205 Ganaway, Bryan 17, 271 n.23 Garments. See clothing Gasper-Hulvat, Marie 20 Gebrüder Bing 216 gender considerations. See also feminism dolls/dollhouses 17, 18, 54, 133–51, 142 domesticity/domestic management, as preparation for 54–8, 60, 61–2, 136–8, 219, 220, 226–7 female entrepreneurs and artists 17, 135, 136 and LEGO products 100–1, 107 n.32 patriarchal ideals 8 Georgian Britain 6, 9, 51, 52–3, 55, 63 n.9 German Southwest Africa (GSWA) 19, 255, 256 childhood and material culture in 265–9 mixed marriages, banning of 266 Germany. See also Bauhaus (German art school, 1919–33); Nuremberg kitchens, nineteenth century anthropology, nineteenth-century 271 n.24 Bavarian National Museum, Munich (2014/15) 21 n.7 Bavarian Trade Museum (1904) 139 Berlin Museum 258, 259, 261 Berlin Zoo 259 colonialism 255, 257, 258, 259 designers in 83 dolls, eighteenth-century 48 feminist movement 134 German Southwest Africa (see German Southwest Africa (GSWA)) German versus French toys 68, 82–3 Imperial (see Imperial Germany)

Index imperialism 260 LEGO periodicals 98 material cultures of children in (1890–1918) 255–72 misogynist society, Imperial Germany 143 Playmobil toys 96 “Scramble for Africa” and toy production in the German metropolis 256–65, 262 toys in 68, 81, 82 Weimar Republic (1919–33) 155, 160 Werkbund movement 139 Werkstätte postcard series 139 Wilhelmine 135, 136, 258, 263 “Woman’s Life and Calling” exhibition, Berlin (1912) 144–5 Youth Welfare Law (1922) 155 Gesell, Arnold 18 Giddings, Seth 99, 108 n.41 Gillis, John R. 133, 147 n.2 Giustino, Cathleen 18, 191 n.23 glass architecture 201, 202 Goldstein, Jeffrey 24 n.41 “gollywog” 261, 263 Gopnik, Alison 123, 130 n.41 Gossler, Gustav von 255 Gottwald, Klement 175, 182 Grand Palais in Paris (2011/12) 21 n.7 The Gray Cloth (Scheerbart) 201 Grenby, Matthew 44 n.12 Gröber, Karl 1, 2, 21 n.1, 194, 196, 208 n.4, 229 n.2 Groos, Karl 121, 122, 129 n.26 Gropius, Walter 158, 159–60, 162–3, 170 n.12, 170 n.15 Grosschen Toy Store 137 Grus, Vít 177, 183, 191 n.14 GSWA. See German Southwest Africa (GSWA) H. G. Clarke & Co 238, 239 Halabala, Jindřich 176 Hall, G. Stanley 137–8, 149 n.16, 281 Ham, Elizabeth 56, 64 n.32 Hamiro (Czechoslovak toy manufacturer) 176 Hamlin, David 221, 231 n.30

323

Hartwig, Josef 153 Headland, Isaac Taylor 296, 297 Healthy and Artistic Dress Union 116 Hellé, André 77, 78, 79, 80, 83 Heqin, Chen 303 Hermann Tietz Department Store, Berlin 139 Heyl, Hedwig 144 Hicks, Ann 41 high chairs 6–7, 18 Hildebrandt, Paul 138, 221 Hilpert, Johann 258 Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig 161–4, 170 n.23 history of children, childhood and material world 1–27. See also toys attitudes to children 2, 3, 6, 84 n.2 historical periods studied 4–5 pre-eighteenth century toys 5 A History of Doll Houses (Jacobs) 216, 221, 230 n.6 The History of Little Fanny (moralistic children’s tale) 38–40, 42 The History of Miss Wildfire (Sanders Wilson) 42 Hlaváček, Jaroslav 184, 186, 191 n.29 hobbyhorses 5, 301 Hodgson Burnett, Frances 62, 65 n.45 Hollein, Max 154 Horáková, Milada 177 The House Beautiful (Cook) 127 n.1 housewife doll 206 Howard, Jan 209 n.19 Huizinga, Johan 48, 63 n.6, 170 n.18 Human-Computer Interaction department, Carnegie Mellon 155 Huret, Adelaide 8 imagination/imaginative looking 114–15, 120–4. See also creativity; Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (Cassell and Company) Imperial Furniture Depot in Vienna (2006/07) 21 n.7 Imperial Germany, dolls in (1871–1918) 134 and gender 17, 133–51 reform of dolls 136–47 verisimilitude 134, 135, 136, 139, 145

324 imperialism 4, 19, 260 The Important Pocket Book (1760s) 33, 34 improvised toys 36–7 In and Around the House (exhibition, 2003) 198–9, 209 n.20 incentive marketing programs 13 individuality, notion of 89 Industrial Magazine of China 294 Ingels, Bjarke 104 Inness, Sherrie 8 innocence, childhood 4, 10, 11, 12, 123 interdisciplinary literature 2 interpretive play 120 Ishiguro, Laura 240 Itten, Johannes 17, 158, 200 Jackson, Mary 35 Jackson, Valerie 217 Jacobs, Flora Gill 23 n.30, 216, 221, 230 n.6 Jacobson, Lisa 25 n.46, 44 n.23, 97, 107 n.36 James, Allison 24 n.36 Jammes, Francis 75, 86 n.39 Jaroš, Václav 178, 179 Jenkins, Henry 11 Jingpu, Wang 308 Jiuru, Zhang 299 Johnson, Derek 26 n.54, 101, 109 n.54 Johnson, Samuel 5 Journal des Debats 73, 74, 85 n.19, 86 n.33 Jumeau, Pierre 8 Kaiserreich (German Empire) 17, 19, 134, 141, 255, 257, 263 Kaleidoscope House (2001) 193–211. See also dollhouses in and around 204–7 furniture 205 as a modern utopia 200–4 Kämmer & Reinhardt (German company) 146 Kandinsky, Wassily 157, 164, 200 Kaulitz, Marion 17, 135, 138–40, 142, 143, 145 Kemble, Fanny 57–8, 65 n.37 Keqing, Kang 309 Khrushchev, Nikita 175, 182

Index Kiddicraft 91, 105 n.7 Kilner, Dorothy 57, 58, 65 n.35 Kilner, Mary Ann 56–7, 64 n.33 Kindergarten movement 157 Kinderzimmer (children’s play environment, theatre within) 164–5, 166, 168, 257 King, Constance Eileen 22 n.18, 217, 230 n.7 Kirk, J. 50, 51 Kirschenbaum, Lisa 274, 289 n.6 Klee, Paul 164, 168, 200 Klimt Group 174 Kline, Stephen 97, 108 n.42 Knatchbull, Fanny (née Austen Knight) 35 Köferlin, Anna 9, 54, 220 Kolonialwarenläden (colonial warehouses) 264 Komárková, V. 177 Korda, Andrea 16–17 Koss, Juliet 168, 172 n.37 Kroha, Jiří 188–9, 191 n.35 Kruger, Barbara 205 Kruse, Käthe (née Simon) 17, 134, 135, 138, 140–6 Kruse, Max 141, 143, 150 n.21 Kruse, Sophie (daughter of Käthe) 141 Kubát, Václav 183 Kubiová, Eva 180, 191 n.21 Kunst, Ein Kinderspiel exhibition, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2004) 154 Kunstschau Exhibition, Vienna (1908) 174 Kunz, Johanna 217, 230 n.8 La Poupee Modele (French magazine) 67 La Reine des Poupees (Queen of the Dolls) (children’s book) 82 L’Art dans Tout (Art in Everything) 76 L’Art et l’enfant (Braunschvig) 76, 86 n.44 L’Art et l’enfant (review) 76, 77, 85 n.14, 86 n.47, 86 n.49, 87 n.51, 87 n.52 L’Art pour l’Enfance (Paris exhibition, 1913) 77–8, 83 L’Art pour Tout (Art for Everyone) 76 L’Auto-Catastrophe (toy) 74 L’Automobile-Accident (toy) 74

Index L’Education d’une poupee (A Doll’s Education) (children’s book) 82 Le Corbusier 200 Domino House 202 Five Points of Architecture 202 Le Figaro 74 Le Journal 74, 85 n.30 Le Paradis des Enfants (French toy store) 70, 73, 81 Le Petit Journal 82 Le Soleil (French newspaper) 74 LEGO 26 n.54, 89–109 adaptation to changing child 102 adult fans 103 “Architecture Series” 103 “Automatic Binding Bricks” 91 brand loyalty 97 building themes 15 children’s culture, moving beyond 102–3 classic system 15 corporate rebranding 15 early products 89, 91, 100–1 fantasy settings 96 financial crisis (2003) 100, 101 first plastic bricks 90 founding of company 90 fragmentation of product line 102 and gender 15, 25–6 n.54, 100–1, 107 n.32 “good toys” discourse 90–4 intellectual property rights 105 n.7 leadership and organizational changes (2003) 100 LEGO Mania Magazine 97, 98, 99 LEGO Maniac 97–8 The LEGO Movie 103–4 licensed designs 100 marketing 92 mediatization of 101 middle classes, selling to 92–3, 100 minifigures 95, 101 narrative play 95–9, 100, 104 North American distribution, taking over (1972) 92 origin story 90–1 periodicals 97, 98, 99 play themes (system within a system) 95–9, 100–1

325

“City” (post-2003) 100 “Dimensions” (2015) 101 DUPLO (1979) 97 “Friends” (2011) 101 “Star Wars” (1999) 100, 108 n.45 “Technic” (1977) 97 postwar play 15, 90–4 Samsonite, licensing agreement with 92 Scandinavian wooden toy maker paradigm 90, 92, 105 n.5 “Self-Locking Bricks” 91 stratification of product line 97 System of Play 91, 95 ten principles of play 94 Town Plan 91, 92, 100 Leighton House Museum 127 n.1 leisure, attitudes to 5 Lenéru, Marie 75 Lenin, Vladimir, death of (1924) 273 Les Mères et les enfants 75 Lessons for Children (Barbauld) 35 Levin, Golan 155 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 286 Lewald, Fanny 137, 149 n.15 Lhotský, Miroslav 182, 183 L’Humanité (socialist newspaper) 78 Lilienthal, Gustav 16 Lindencrona, Brigitte 9, 23 n.24 Linn, Susan 10 A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (Newbery) 33, 34 Locke, John 14, 34, 36, 37, 42, 64 n.24 Some Thoughts Concerning Education 6, 31–2, 43 n.5 The Works of John Locke 44 n.18 “Locke Blocks” 6 locomotive toys 73 Löffler, Henriette 226, 233 n.61 Louvre department store, France 70, 72 Lozère region, France 78 Lux, Joseph August 221 Machačová-Dostálová, Božena 182 magazine advertisements, “child-aslobbyist” 13 Magritte, René 218 Mahlberg, Blanche 211 n.58 Mahon, Ellen 64 n.30

326 Maier, Otto 163 Makarenko, Anton S. 180 Maleuvre, Didier 208 Mangel, Larry 193 mannequins 7, 62 n.2 manuals, pedagogical 57 manufactured toys 2, 4, 36, 68 Marc, Franz 157 marketing. See also advertising incentive marketing programs 13 by LEGO 92, 97 postwar 4–5 “tween” marketing 13 Märklin 216 Marshall, Elizabeth 25 n.50 Martin, Fernand 73 Martin, Zélie 74–5, 86 n.35 mass consumption critique of mass produced toys 68, 83 in France 15, 67–87, 84 n.3 in New Zealand 241 when toys untainted by 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab Lifelong Kindergarten program 155 material culture of childhood. See also history of children, childhood and material world adult cultural references permeating 7 and adulthood, blurring of 5 artifact constellations surrounding 6 creativity and children 89 and dolls 47 in eighteenth century 49 and examples of children’s material culture 236–7 exhibitions 21 n.7 in German Southwest Africa 265–9 and material culture of children 4 as potential instrument of female emancipation 48–9, 61 studies 2, 3 theory 3 toys as objects of 146 maternal feminists 134, 135, 138 Mattel 12, 14, 20, 147, 204 Mazdaznanism (neo-Zoroastrian belief system) 158

Index Meccano (engineering set) 16 mechanical toys 68, 75, 135 media 5, 10, 11, 15, 133 Media Lab Lifelong Kindergarten program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 155 Mehring, Christine 154 Melniková-Papoušková, Nadĕžda 186, 190 n.3, 191 n.30 meta-narratives 12 Michaud, Louis-Gabriel 62 n.3 middle classes dolls and female middle-class identity 134 LEGO products sold to 92–3, 100 as targets of advertising 68, 69 Millhauser, Steven 217 mind of child 31 Mingjiu, Shao 304 miniature garments, dolls 40–1 miniatures 2, 4, 5. See also Kaleidoscope House (2001); Nuremberg kitchens, nineteenth century dollhouses 53, 54, 208, 211 n.54 dolls 136–7 figurines 7, 139 National Association of Miniature Enthusiasts 209 n.14 powers of miniaturization 217–18 pure 53 The Minor’s Pocket Book (1790s–1840s) 34 Mitchell, Timothy 270 n.10 Mitius, Hartl 139–41, 149 n.17 Mitrokhin, Dmitrii 276 Modernist movement 15, 16, 17–18, 123, 154, 207 and Czechoslovakia 173–4 and LEGO bricks 79, 83 monographs 2 moralistic children’s tales 38–40, 42 Moritz Gottschalk 216 Morris, William 113 Morrison, Jasper 205 Moscow Toy Museum 275 multi-media conglomerates 15 Musée Galliera exhibition, Paris 77 Museo Picasso in Malaga (2010/11) 21 n.7 museum exhibitions. See exhibitions

Index Museum of Childhood, London 248 Museum of London 40, 59 Museum of Modern Art, New York 21 n.7, 154 Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 235 My Lepim (Soviet children’s book) 284, 286 narrative play 95–9 and construction play 96, 104 National Association of Miniature Enthusiasts 209 n.14 National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga 237 needlework 235, 242, 243 and eighteenth-century dolls 48, 55–7, 59, 64 n.29 French seamstresses 149 n.10 Negerpuppen (African-type doll) 261, 262, 263, 264 Nekrasov, Alexei 278 Netherlands eighteenth-century dolls 48, 51–2 LEGO periodicals 98 New Sixpenny Toy Books (Routledge) 113 New Year’s Day 69, 72 New Year’s Eve 69–70 New York Toy Fair (1962) 92 New Zealand (1860s) historical value of objects 246–50 Nelson 242, 246, 251 paper models in 19, 235–53 pedagogical influences in colonial New Zealand 240–4 Saxton family 237, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245 Saxton model village 235–42 Newbery, John 14, 33, 37, 42 Newson, Marc 205 Nielsen, Fred 25 n.51 Nikl, Petr 188 Niklová, Libuše 186–7, 188 “no toy” culture 5–6 Noah’s ark designs 77, 79 nostalgia 1, 2, 21 n.2 Nostell Priory, Yorkshire 9, 52–3 novelty toys/stores 12, 69, 74 and tradition 89

327

Novotný, Antonín 182 Nuremberg kitchens, nineteenth century 9, 18–19, 215–33 all-white 220 children’s views of 218–19 configurations 223 contents 225 cooking paraphernalia 227–8 design 222–3 didactic purpose 221–2 furniture 219 gadgets, miniaturized 225–6 history 215–17 and homemaking 219, 220, 226–7 hygienic features 219–20 metal stoves 219, 226 miniaturization, powers of 217–18 as one-room dollhouse 215 passed down the line 223–4 woodwork 220 nursery and furniture design 4 nurturing 58, 142, 157, 221 and character dolls 134, 135–6, 138, 142 Nutt, Betsy 41 O’Neill, Morna 118, 129 n.19 O’Neill, Rose 135 objects child-made 251 in-between, dolls as 48, 49–54 historical value 246–50 material, of remembrance 1 transitional 14, 48, 53 Ogata, Amy F. 27 n.61, 93, 106 n.15, 158, 169 n.11, 190 n.4 Olsuf ’eva, A. 276 On Longing (Stewart) 217, 230 n.12 Oortman, Petronella 52 open-ended play 15, 49 Opsvik, Peter 18 order (ludus) 48, 54, 58 originality, notion of 89 Orshanskii, Lev 279, 282, 291 n.24 Ottlinger, Eva 22 n.17 Owen, Robert 241 Page, Hilary 91, 106 n.10 Palais Galliera 79, 80

328

Index

Pandora dolls. See also dolls paper dolls 38, 39, 42, 223, 249 paper models as activity for boys and girls 242–3 in New Zealand (see New Zealand (1860s)) origins 241 in the United Kingdom 240 Paris Autumn Salon 77, 79 Parker, Rozsika 63 n.9 Pasierbska, Halina 217 passions of child 31 Pedagogical Seminary 137 Peers, Juliette 22 n.21 Pellisson-Fontanier, Paul 62 n.3 Pennant, Caroline 41 People’s Pictorial (China) 309 personal memoirs 137 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 241 “pester power” 12 Peukert, Detlev 155, 169 n.6 Pevsner, Dieter 166, 171 n.34 Pevsner, Nikolaus 166, 171 n.34 The Philosophical Baby (Gopnik) 123, 130 n.41 picture books 17, 113, 115, 124, 127 Pinypons 133 Pistorius, Jan (Czechoslovak toy designer) 177–8, 191 n.15 plastic paradox 8 play Bauhaus 153–4 and child consumer 31 construction 96 defining 48 engagement with toys through 37 imaginative 114–15, 120–4 interpretive 120 narrative 95–9, 104 open-ended nature 15, 49 pedagogical importance 6 postwar play and “good toys” discourse 90–4 pre-modern European attitudes to 5 reformist attitudes to 6 significance of 207–8 subversive role 59 ten principles of 94

themes (LEGO) 95–9, 100–1 work as 17, 153–72 The Play of Animals (Groos) 121 The Play of Man (Groos) 122 play pens 7 play theory 48 playthings. See toys Playtime in the First Five Years 91 PLCs (Program-Length Commercials) 12, 13 Pleasant Company 14 Plothow, Anna 143 Plumb, John Harold 6, 32, 43.n.8, 49 pocket books 14, 33–6 balls or pincushions sold with 33–4 Podhajská, Minka 174, 190 n.6, 190 n.7 Popova, Lidiia 276 popular culture 10, 11, 15 and LEGO 103, 104 poster artists 70 Postman, Neil 11 postmodernist doll studies 8 postwar marketing 4–5 postwar television programming 13 Powell, Laetitia (née Clark) 51, 53 Practical Education (Edgeworth) 35, 36 Prague Spring (1968) 173, 175, 189 Pre-Raphaelites 118 Pretty Little Pocket Book (Newbery) 14 Prevost, Marcel 74, 77 “priceless” child 12 print advertising campaigns 13 Printemps (Au) department store 70, 71–2, 80, 81 Program-Length Commercials (PLCs) 12, 13 Pugh, Allison 11 Puppenküchen (dolls’ kitchens). See Nuremberg kitchens, nineteenth century puppet-making 164, 167 Qing empire, China 294, 296 Qiucao, Chen 307 Queyrat, Frédéric 75–6 Rabier, Benjamin 77 race, concept of 261

Index racism, institutionalized 19 radio clubs 13 Rand, Erica 8 Rashid, Karim 205 Rational Sports in Dialogues Passing Among the Children of a Family (Fenn) 37 reform dolls 17, 135, 143–4 Regnault, Claire 243, 252 n.15 Reinelt, Sabine 215, 229 n.1, 231 n.25 relational feminism 135 Renault car 74 retail roles, learning through toys 37–8 Richmond, Vivienne 64 n.29 Richter (German firm) 91, 106 n.12, 162 Riello, Giorgio 247, 252 n.7 Rietveld, Gerrit 18, 164, 202 Rogers, Mary 22 n.20 Rohl, Karl Peter 164 Rohrbach, Claire 266, 267, 268 Rohrbach, Hans 266, 267 Rohrbach, Justus 266, 267, 268 Rohrbach, Nina 266, 268 Rohrbach, Paul 266 Rose, Jacqueline 17, 26 n.59, 113, 114, 128 n.4 Rosenbaum, Eric 155 Rosenblum, Robert 155, 158, 169 n.10 Rountree, Susan Hight 217 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 36, 40, 55, 157 Emile 155–6 Routledge (publisher) 113, 114 Rowland, Anna 170 n.22 Rowland, Pleasant 13–14 Rundschau uber Spielwaren (German toy trade journal) 145 Runge, Philip Otto 155, 157 Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka (Russian Folk Toys) (Abramov) 279, 280, 281 sales catalogs 69 Saletnik, Jeffrey 155, 169 n.5 Samaritaine, La (department store) 70, 71 Sanders Wilson, Ann 42 Saxton, John 237, 244, 245, 246 Saxton, Priscilla 237, 242 Saxton family, New Zealand 237, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245

329

Saxton model village, New Zealand 235–42 construction and design 238–40 paper model 238 Scandinavian wooden toy making paradigm 90, 92, 105 n.5 Scheerbart, Paul 200–1, 202, 203, 207, 210 n.37, 210 n.39 Schlemmer, Oskar 153, 164, 168 Schlereth, Thomas 21 n.9, 248 Schmidt, Paul Ferdinand 157 Schor, Juliet B. 10, 24 n.34, 100, 107 n.35, 133, 147 n.1 Schramm, Manuel 190 n.2 Schrammen, Eberhard 161, 165 Schröder-Schräder Haus (1923–24) 164 Schuldenfrei, Robin 155, 169 n.5 Schumacher, Tony 137 Schumann, Robert 257 Schutztruppen (protection forces) 258 scientific motherhood 135 scientific toys 68, 76 Scudéry, Madeleine de 62 n.3 seasonal sales catalogs 69 Segard, Achille 78 Seiter, Ellen 11, 24 n.32, 24 n.35, 24 n.39, 24 n.41, 43 n.7, 253 n.27 Sendak, Maurice 155 sentimentality 1 sewing, eighteenth-century girls’ engagement with 41 Sherman, Cindy 197 Shindana Toys, Los Angeles 147 Shliapnikov, Alexander 284 Shterenberg, David 275, 286, 287, 289 n.14 Shubert, Howard 26 n.57 Siedhoff, Walter 166 Siedhoff-Buscher, Alma 17, 163, 164–5, 166, 168 Bauspiel Schiff (play construction ship) 153, 156, 161, 162 Silver, Jay 155 Simmons, Laurie 18, 193, 196–9, 200, 202, 203, 207, 208, 208 n.2 In and Around the House (2003) 198–9, 209 n.20 Untitled (Woman’s Head) 206 simplicity 1–2, 68

330

Index

Sleeping Beauty 118 social media 133 socialization, family 11, 12 Societe de l’Art à l’école (Society for Art in Schools) 76 Societe des amateurs de jouets et de jeux anciens (Society of Amateurs of Antique Toys and Games) 76 Societe Francaise de Fabrications de Bebes et Jouets 82 socio-historical invention of childhood 2, 3, 5 Sold Separately (Seiter) 24 n.32, 24 n.35, 24 n.39, 24 n.41, 43 n.7, 253 n.27 soldiers, toy 2, 7, 68, 78, 258, 259, 267 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke) 6, 31–2, 43 n.5 Somerville, Kyle 27 n.63 Somes, Joseph 244 Soviet Union, Former (USSR) 1917 October Revolution 280 early folk art toy culture 275–80 folk toys (see folk toys, Soviet Union) infantilization of peasantry 20, 273 kustar (cottage industry) 274 peasant workshops 274 Spadaccini-Day, Barbara 62 n.3 specialty toy shops 14, 69 spinning tops 162 Spock, Benjamin 18 Stalin, Josef death of (1953) 174, 178, 182 First Five-Year Plan, peasants and toys under 283–6, 287 Great Purge (1936) 273 late Stalinist period 175–82, 188 standing stool 6 Steinberg, Shirley 10 Stetten, Paul von (the Younger) 220–1 Stewart, Susan 53, 194, 209 n.6 On Longing 217, 230 n.12 Stille, Eva 215, 218, 227, 229 n.3, 233 n.62 Stock, Karen 18 Stölzl, Gunta 153, 158, 159–60, 170 n.14, 170 n.20 stoves, miniature 219 Studies of Childhood (Sully) 281 Sully, James 122, 281

Sutnar, Ladislav 174, 190 n.7 Sutton-Smith, Brian 222, 231 n.32, 235, 252 n.2 swaddling clothes 6 tabula rasa theory of mind 6, 31–2 Taut, Bruno 16, 201–2, 207, 211 n.58 Te Papa, New Zealand 242, 249, 250 teaching, toys enabling 37 technological dolls 145–6 television 12 Terry, Ellen 113, 128 n.3 Tiersten, Lisa 81, 84 n.3, 84 n.5 timelessness 1, 21 n.2 tin soldiers. See soldiers, toy toddlers 13 Tofa Semily (Czechoslovak toy manufacturer) 176 torpedo boats, toy 73–4 Towner, Margaret 217 Townsend, Lynette 4, 11, 19 “The Toy” (construction toy) 16 toy displays 70–1 toy reformers 9 toy-books 38–40, 42, 115 toy-men 49, 50 toys. See also dolls; LEGO; miniatures; soldiers, toy; toys in specific cultures adult-made 3–4, 173 antique 77 architectural building 15, 16 attitudes to children, mirroring 3 as authentic artifacts of childhood 4 character 12, 17, 135 collection of 51, 59, 78, 153 commercially manufactured 2, 4, 36 construction 16 creative 94 critique of mass produced toys 68, 83 didactic 32–3, 42 educational 4, 6, 47, 48, 54, 55, 57, 91 engagement with, through play 37 ephemerality 4 “good toys” discourse and postwar play 90–4 improvised 36–7 invention of modern toy 4, 5–21 mass consumption in France 67–87

Index mechanical 68, 75, 135 modern 77 newfangled 68, 73, 75, 83 novelty 12, 69, 74, 89 as objects of material culture 146 origins as adult amusements 10 scientific 68, 76 simple, universal preferences for 1–2 specialty toy shops 14 transportation-themed 73–4 usage fluctuating between childhood and adulthood 7 when untainted by mass consumption 2 wider political and cultural issues 83 Toys and the Modernist Tradition exhibition, Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal (1994) 154 trade cards/tokens 49, 50, 51 tramways, electric (toy) 73 transitional objects 14, 48, 53 transportation-themed toys 73–4 The Treachery of Images (Magritte) 218 Trimmer, Sarah 57, 65 n.36 Tripp Trapp high chair 18 Troy, Nancy 83, 87 n.74 Tseretelli, Nikolai 277, 279, 283, 289 n.5, 290 n.21 Tucker, Adam Reed 103 Tvar (Form), Czechoslovak official industrial-design journal 173–7, 179, 188 “tween” marketing 13 ÚLUV (Czech design studio) 177 Union of Czechoslovak Visual Artists 186 United Kingdom dolls, eighteenth-century 48, 49, 51, 53 elite women, England 52 feminist movement 134 Georgian Britain 6, 9, 51, 52–3, 55, 63 n.9 LEGO periodicals 98 paper models in 240 United States commercialization of Christmas in 69 feminist movement 134 LEGO Mania Magazine 97, 98, 99

331

LEGO periodicals 98 Museum of Modern Art, New York 21 n.7, 154 New York Toy Fair (1962) 92 Washington Dolls’ House and Toy Museum 231 n.24 Universal Exposition, Paris (1900) 73, 74, 75 universal preferences 1–2 Upton, Florence 261 Varennes, Robert de 7 Vatagin, Vasilii 286 verisimilitude 73, 134, 297, 310 and dolls, Imperial Germany 134, 135, 136, 139, 145 Verne, Jules 75 Victoria and Albert Museum 59, 64 n.30 Vienna Secessionists 17 Viennese Women’s Academy 174 Vitra Design Museum at Weill am Rhein (1997/98) 21 n.7 Voltz, Johann Michael 227 Wakefield, Edward Jerningham 244 Washington Dolls’ House and Toy Museum 231 n.24 Weber, Susan 190 n.4 Weeton, Ellen 57, 65 n.34 Weimar Republic (1919–33) 155, 160 Wells, H. G. 58 Werkbund (Svaz českeho dila), Czechoslovakia (1908) 173 Werkbund movement, Germany 139 Wheeler, Katherine 18 Wheelwright, Peter 18, 193, 200, 202, 203, 207, 208 Wiencek, Henry 96 Wiener Werkstätte, Austria, 26 n.60 postcard series 139 Wilde, Oscar 124–5 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 255 Winn, Lady Susannah 9, 53 Winn, Sir Rowland 53 Winnicot, Donald 48 Wolf, Mark J. P. 25 n.53 Wolk-Ranger, Andrea 118 Wollstonecraft, Mary 55, 64 n.27

332 “Woman’s Life and Calling” exhibition, Berlin (1912) 144–5 Woolf, Virginia 198, 209 n.21 work, as play 17, 153–72 The Works of John Locke (Locke) 44 n.18 World’s Fair, Brussels (1958) 182, 184, 185 Wulf, Eric 145, 150 n.35 Xuemen, Zhang 304

Index Youell, Harriet 36 Zelizer, Viviana 10, 24 n.33 Zhuo, Gu 302 Zig-Zag chair 18 Zikai, Feng 302, 303 Zinguer, Tamar 16, 26 n.56 Zollmann, Jakob 4, 19, 20 Zonglin, Zhang 305, 308 Zuoren, Zhou 302