Megan Brandow-Faller - Childhood by Design - Toys and The Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-Present-Bloomsbury Publishing USA (2018)

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
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First published in the United States of America 2018
© Megan Brandow-Faller and Contributors, 2018
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Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xix constitute an extension

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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

ePub: 978-1-5013-3203-6
ePDF: 978-1-5013-3204-3
Series: Material Culture of Art and Design
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To Lotte and Otto
Contents
List of Figures xi
Notes on Contributors xvi
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction: Materializing the History of Childhood and Children

Megan Brandow-Faller 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 31
2 Transitional Pandoras: Dolls in the Long Eighteenth
Century Ariane Fennetaux 47
3 The (Play)things of Childhood: Mass Consumption and Its Critics
in Belle Epoque France Sarah A. Curtis 67
4 Building Kids: LEGO and the Commodification of Creativity
Colin Fanning 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 113
6 The Unexpected Victory of Character-Puppen: Dolls, Aesthetics,
and Gender in Imperial Germany Bryan Ganaway 133
7 Work Becomes Play: Toy Design, Creative Play, and Unlearning
in the Bauhaus Legacy Michelle Millar Fisher 153
8 Simply Child’s Play? Toys, Ideology, and the Avant-Garde in
Socialist Czechoslovakia before 1968 Cathleen M. Giustino 173
9 Reconstructing Domestic Play: The Kaleidoscope House
Karen Stock and Katherine Wheeler 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 215
11 Making Paper Models in 1860s New Zealand: An Exploration of
Colonial Culture through Child-Made Objects Lynette Townsend 235
12 Toys for Empire? Material Cultures of Children in Germany and
German Southwest Africa, 1890–1918 Jakob Zollmann 255
13 Public Nostalgia and the Infantilization of the Russian Peasant:
Early Soviet Reception of Folk Art Toys Marie Gasper-Hulvat 273
14 The “Appropriate” Plaything: Searching for the New Chinese Toy,
1910s–1960s Valentina Boretti 293
Index316
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 39
2.1 Trade Token for J. Kirk, Toy-man, Victoria & Albert Museum,
London, inv: B.77-1996. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London 51
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 52
2.3 Ellen Mahon’s Sampler Book, 1852–1854, Victoria & Albert
Museum, London, inv: V&A T.123-1958, © Victoria & Albert
Museum, London 56
2.4 Doll with wax head, painted features and glass bead eyes c. 1800,
Museum of London, inv: MOL.A.25315, © Museum of London 60
3.1 Catalog cover, Samaritaine department store, December 1901.
Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Éphémères 71
3.2 Palais du Père Noël, Louvre department store catalog, December
1913. Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris,
Éphémères 72
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 79
3.4 Advertisement, Au Printemps department store catalog, December
1913. Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Éphémères 80
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 93
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 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 98
4.4 “Architecture Studio” set, 2013. LEGO is a trademark of the LEGO
Group of Companies. © 2018 The LEGO Group. Image used by
permission 102
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 116
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 116
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 117
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 119
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 126
6.1 Marion Kaulitz Character Dolls, c. 1910–1911. In Westermanns
Monatshefte, Volume 111/II (Dec 1911), 616 140
6.2 Käthe Kruse Character Doll, c. 1924. In Der Universal-Spielwaren-
Katalog, Vol. I (Hamburg: Hess, 1924) 142
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 156
7.2 Bauhaus Kite Festival, September 25, 1921, Ilse Fehling (left)
and Nicol Wassilieff (right), 1921. Image courtesy Bauhaus
Archiv Berlin 159
7.3 Eberhard Schrammen, Gerd Schrammen with Play Horse “Hansi”
made of colored painted wood, c. 1947, silver gelatin paper.
Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin 165
List of Figures xiii
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. 11 ¾ × 8 ¼ in. (30 × 21cm). The Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Jan Tschichold Collection, gift of Philip Johnson 167
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 179
8.2 Children Playing with “Collective Toys.” Tvar Vol. 4 (1952): 295.
Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague 181
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 185
8.4 “Tomcat” designed by Libuše Niklová. Tvar Vol. 16 (1965): 275.
Image courtesy of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague 187
9.1 Kaleidoscope House, Laurie Simmons and Peter Wheelwright
for Bozart Toys, Co., 2001. Image courtesy of Peter Wheelwright.
Photo by Laurie Simmons 194
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 197
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 203
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 206
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 # 30.120.123 216
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 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 224
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 224
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) 236
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) 243
11.3 John Waring Saxton, Nelson, 1842, lithograph, paper,
240 × 432 mm. Te Papa (1992-0035-1732) 245
12.1 Colonial German and African tin soldiers, manufacturer
unknown, c. 1900, Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 79/12 259
12.2 Negerpuppe (gollywog) with bisque head. Manufaktur Heubach-
Köppelsdorf, c. 1920. Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 75/31 262
13.1 Alisa Poret, page 1 of Ch’i Eto Igrushki? (Whose Toys Are These?),
detail, 1930. Courtesy Russian State Children’s Library 277
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 278
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 280
13.4 Konstantin Kuznetsov, page 8 of My Lepim (We Sculpt), 1931.
Courtesy Russian State Children’s Library 285
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 296
14.2 “Xiao baobao xihuan wan de wujian—Zhongxing sailuluochang
chupin” (Objects the Baby Likes to Play With—Zhongxing
List of Figures xv
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 298
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 300
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 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 Nineteenth-
Century 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 design-
based 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
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 nineteenth-
century 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
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 eighteenth-
century 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 twentieth-
century 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
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.
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
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 over-
consumption—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 “child-
as-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 co-
dependence 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
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 mass-
produced 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 open-
endedness. 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.
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 small-
scale 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 pre-
existing 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-of-
the-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
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 low-
status, 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
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
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.
10 Brookshaw, “The Material Culture of Children and Childhood,” 381.
11 John Brewer, “Childhood Revisited: The Genesis of the Modern Toy,” History Today
30, no. 2 (1980): 32–39.
12 Karen Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood,
1600–1900 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 47.
13 Ibid., 48; Brewer, “Childhood Revisited,” 33.
14 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.
15 Calvert, Children in the House, 7.
16 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.
17 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.
18 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).
19 Cross, Kids’ Stuff, 14.
20 Mary Rogers, Barbie Culture (London: Sage, 1999); Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer
Accessories (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).
21 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: Twentieth-
Century 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).
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
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.
55 Tamar Zinguer, Architecture in Play: Imitations of Modernism in Architectural Toys
(Charlottesville and London: The University of Virginia Press, 2015), 62.
56 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.
57 Howard Shubert, “Toys and the Modernist Tradition,” in Toys and the Modernist
Tradition (Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 1993), 18.
58 Shubert, Toys and the Modernist Tradition, 28.
59 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 1–2.
60 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 27
Brussels 1900, ed. Helga Mittelbauer and Piet Defraeye (Leiden: Brill Academic
Press, Forthcoming in 2018).
61 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.
62 See Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 201–244.
63 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).
64 Chin, “Ethnically Correct Dolls,” 311–313.
65 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,
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 well-
trained 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
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 self-
regulating 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.
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
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 self-
styled 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
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 woollen-
drapers.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
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
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.
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 top-
stitched 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
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.
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.
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 Eighteenth-
Century 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.
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).
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
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 trade-
cards 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
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 Play-
things 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
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
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 eighteenth-
century dollhouses made in England. In Nostell Priory in Yorkshire is an early
Georgian dollhouse which minutely reproduces Chippendale chairs, hallmarked
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
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
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
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
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:
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 eighteenth-
century 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 Nineteenth-
Century 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.
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 Nineteenth-
Century 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.
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
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, middle-
class 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,
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
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
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
(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,
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’Auto-
Catastrophe 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
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
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
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,
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, child-
sized 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
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.
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
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 baby-
faced 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.
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,
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
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 Middle-
Class 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.
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.
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
30 Le Journal, December 18, 1896, Coupures de Press, BHVP, Actualités: Série 120
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
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.
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
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 Anker-
Steinbaukasten (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
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
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
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
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 child-
development 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, large-
scale 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.
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 near-
ruin 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, company-
designed narrative rather than the somewhat subtler genre cues of the earlier
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
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.
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 community-
organized 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 non-
licensed 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
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
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/lego-
group/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.
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).
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 multi-
language 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.
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-to-
construction-play (accessed November 15, 2016).
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-architecture-
studio-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
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-a-
lego-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/lego-
golden-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
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
Figure 5.1 Walter Crane, “Here stately Figure 5.2 Walter Crane, “Here Lords
lilies …,” in Flora’s Feast: A Masque of and Ladies …,” in Flora’s Feast: A
Flowers (London: Cassell & Company Masque of Flowers (London: Cassell
Limited, 1889). Courtesy Bruce Peel & Company Limited, 1889). Courtesy
Special Collections Library, University Bruce Peel Special Collections Library,
of Alberta. University of Alberta.
the Progress of Taste in Dress in Relation to Art Education” for the Union’s short-
lived 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
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
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,
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.
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 “riding-
hood,” 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
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
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
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,
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,
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.
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
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 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).
2 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.
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
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.
18 Walter Crane, “Art and Industry,” in The Claims of Decorative Art (London:
Lawrence & Bullen, 1892), 172.
19 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.
20 Art Workers’ Guild, Beauty’s Awakening, a Masque of Winter and of Spring
(London: The Studio, 1899).
21 Crane, “On the Progress of Taste in Dress in Relation to Art Education,” 186.
22 Bernstein, “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race,” 163.
23 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.
24 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.
25 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.
26 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
Self-Culture: Physical, Intellectual, Moral and Spiritual (Boston: James R. Osgood

and Company, 1880; reprinted 1882), 381, 383.
27 Groos, The Play of Animals, xx.
28 Ibid., 290.
29 Groos, The Play of Man (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901), 135.
30 Ibid., 138, 377.
31 James Sully, The Teacher’s Handbook of Psychology (London: Longmans, Green, &
Co., 1886), 212, 217.
32 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.
33 Groos, Play of Man, 188 and Baldwin, Elementary Psychology and Education, 142.
34 Alexander Bain, Education as a Science (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1879), 128.
35 Sully, The Teacher’s Handbook of Psychology, 229, 224. See also Bain, Education as
a Science, 128.
36 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.
37 Crane, Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New, 130.
38 Crane, “Work of Walter Crane,” 5.
39 Ibid. Crane did allow that a few “happy [adults] … remain children in these
respects through life.”
40 Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
41 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.
42 Ibid., 72.
43 Crane, “Notes on My Own Books for Children,” 85.
44 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.
45 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
University Press, 2004); online edn, January 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com.

login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/view/article/32616 (accessed February 11, 2017).
46 Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences, 192.
47 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.
48 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.
49 Crane and Crane, The Procession of the Months, unpaginated.
50 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.
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
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 open-
ended 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 God-
given 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
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
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-year-
old 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.
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]
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
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
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-Spielwaren-

Katalog, Vol. I (Hamburg: Hess, 1924).
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 nineteenth-
century 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
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.”
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 nineteenth-
century 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
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
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.
4 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.
5 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.
6 Sabine Reinelt, Käthe Kruse: Leben und Werk (Weingarten: Kunstverlag
Weingarten, 1984), 40–42.
7 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.
8 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
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.
9 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).
10 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).
11 Berliner Morgenpost (November 29, 1908).
12 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).
13 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.
14 Tony Schumacher, Was ich als Kind erlebt (Stuttgart: Levy & Müller, 1901), 230;
quoted in Weber-Kellermann, Die Kindheit, 196–197.
15 Fanny Lewald, Im Vaterhause, Band I (Berlin: O. Janke, 1861), 75 quoted in
Deutsche Kindheiten: Autobiographische Zeugnisse 1700–1900, ed. Irene Hardach-
Pinke and Gerd Hardach (Frankfurt am Main Athenäum Verlag, 1978), 301–302.
16 A. Caswell Ellis and G. Stanley Hall, “A Study of Dolls,” The Pedagogical Seminary
IV, (1896–1897): 137, 146–147, 148–149.
17 Hartl Mitius, “Münchner Künstlerpuppen,” Illustrirte Zeitung no. 3444 (July 1,
1909): 43; “Illustrirte Rundschau,” Velhagen & Klasings Monatshefte XXV, no. 1
(December 1910): 637–640.
18 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.
19 Boehn, Dolls and Puppets, 181–183; Dröscher, Die grosse Puppenwelt, 174–176.
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 Frauen-
Ausstellung,” 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.
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
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 working-
class 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
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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 Hirschfeld-
Mack. 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
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
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
theater workshop, a lynchpin of the school and the professional home of her
husband, Walter Siedhoff. Siedhoff-Buscher made a toy theater, the stand-
alone 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. Siedhoff-
Buscher 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
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
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,
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.
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):
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.
27 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.
28 Richard Bromfield, “The Use of Puppets in Play Therapy,” Child and Adolescent
Social Work Journal 12, no. 6 (1994): 435–444.
29 “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.
30 See Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1997).
31 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.”
32 Michael Siebenbrodt, ed., Alma Siedhoff-Buscher: A New World for Children
(Weimar: Bauhaus-Museum and The Weimar Classics Foundation and Art
Collections, 2004), 17.
33 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.
34 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.
35 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).
36 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.”
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 avant-
garde.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
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 avant-
garde. 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
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 toy-
making 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
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
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 well-
detailed, 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
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
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,
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 ball-
shaped 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
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 Machačová-
Dostálová, 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
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
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-
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.
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
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).
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 far-
away lands into other rooms, paying a toll at the threshold of mother’s room.
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
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.
2 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.
3 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.
4 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.
5 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).
6 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).
7 Color photos of Podhajská’s and Sutnar’s toys are in Froněk, Artěl, 154–165.
8 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.
9 Jindřich Halabala, “Význam a činnost poradního sboru pro hračky,” Tvar 4, no. 10
(1952): 310–312.
10 Ibid.
11 V. Komárková, “K otázce nových hraček na mateřských školách,” Předškolní
výchova 5, no. 6 (1950–1951): 187–189.
12 Halabala, “Význam a činnost poradního sboru pro hračky.”
13 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).
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
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
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
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.
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:
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.
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
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
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 load-
bearing 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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: Wiley-
Academy, 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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 well-
established 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
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
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.
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
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 do-
it-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 middle-
class German housewife that could involve creativity and self-expression.
In cooking, raw materials are transformed into finished dishes that serve a
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 stand-
alone 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
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
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 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).
2 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.
3 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.
4 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.
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.
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.
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-founders-
collection-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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 nineteenth-
century 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
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
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.
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
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).
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,
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
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-
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
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 child-
made or makeshift “invented toys”—commonly discarded or worn out through
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 hand-
colored 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
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
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.
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
9 Laura Ishiguro, “Material Girls: Daughters, Dress and Distance in the Trans-
Imperial 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.
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.
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).
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).
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 non-
European 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 hand-
colored 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
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
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
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 animal-
themed 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
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-white-
striped 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 twentieth-
century 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
Figure 12.2 Negerpuppe (gollywog) with bisque head. Manufaktur Heubach-

Köppelsdorf, c. 1920. Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 75/31.
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 black-
colored 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
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
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
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 mixed-
parentage 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.
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”
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
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.
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 Lineol-
Figuren,” 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
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.
21 Insa Focken, Puppen– heimliche Menschenflüsterer: Ihre Wiederentdeckung als
Spielzeug und Kulturgut (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 15.
22 Fraser, History of Toys, 160.
23 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.
24 “[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.
25 Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, SPG 88/7 Leather doll, c. 1st half nineteenth century.
26 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. Heubach-
Köppelsdorf).
27 Stadtmuseum Berlin, Depot, II 97/231, schwarze Badepuppe, c. 1900.
28 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to
Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 196.
29 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.”
30 Bettina Hoffmann, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Germany: A Children’s Classic,”
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 53 (2005): 353–368 (p. 360).
31 Ibid., 353.
32 Hans Dambrowski, Herzog Friedrich Wilhelm zu Mecklenburg: Lebensbild eines
deutschen Seeoffiziers, (Berlin: Paetel, 1898), 4.
33 Karen Horney, The Adolescent Diaries of Karen Horney (New York: Basic, 1980),
17; see also Bernard Paris, Karen Horney. A Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-
Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
34 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:
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).
35 Münchener Bilderbogen-Nr. 1039, Knecht Ruprecht in Kamerun (Munich: Braun &
Schneider, 1891).
36 Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), Nachlass Hintrager N 1037/9, Statistische
Materialien, Gesamtbevölkerung 1912.
37 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.
39 Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien
(Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 55–77.
40 BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Family, 8.2.1906, 1.
42 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.
43 BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Sister, 13.6.1906, 1.
44 Ibid., 2.
45 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of
Late Colonialism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4.
46 BAK N 1408, Claire Rohrbach to Sister, 13.6.1906, 2.
53 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 mass-
reproduced 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
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 toy-
making 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 adult-
scale 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
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 toy-
making 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
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
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
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 state-
funded 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
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.
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,
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 Viatka-
inspired city dolls. Nonetheless, the folk art toy is imagined here emblematizing
peasant identity.
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 peasant-
crafted, 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
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
(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.
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
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
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 Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985),
219–220.
2 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
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.
3 Alois Riegl, Volkskunst, Hausfleiss und Hausindustrie (Folk Art, Domestic Labor
and House Industry) (Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1894).
4 Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia, 86.
5 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).
6 Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia,
1917–1932 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 133.
7 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.
8 Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), 77.
9 Ibid., 267.
10 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.
11 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).
12 David Khait, “Sovietskii Niurenberg (Soviet Nuremberg),” Krasnaia Nov’ (Red
Virgin Soil) (1932): 7.
13 Semen Fomin, “U Bogorodskikh Kustarei (At Home with the Kustars of
Bogorodskoie),” Sovietskoe Iskusstvo 42, no. 180 (September 15, 1932): 2.
14 David Shterenberg, Moi Igrushki (My Toys) (Moscow: Gosudarsvennoe Izdatel’stvo,
1930). A. Olsuf ’eva and Lidiia Popova, Igrushki (Toys) (Moscow: Gosudarsvennoe
Izdatel’stvo, 1928), http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/p2676z298 (accessed

December 28, 2016).
15 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).
16 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.
17 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.”
18 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.
19 Lev Dintses, Russkaia Glinianaia Igrushka (The Russian Clay Toy) (Leningrad:
Academii Nauk, 1936), 5–9, 107.
20 Isaac Babel, Konarmiia (Red Cavalry), 3rd edn (Moscow, Leningrad:
Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1928).
21 Tseretelli, Russkaia Krest’ianskaia Igrushka. Dintses, Russkaia Glinianaia Igrushka.
Ivan Evdokimov, Russkaia Igrushka (The Russian Toy) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
Izdatel’stvo, 1925).
22 Evdokimov, Russkaia Igrushka (The Russian Toy) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
Izdatel’stvo, 1925), 41–42.
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 pre-
Revolutionary 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.
41 Dintses, Russkaia Glinianaia Igrushka, 16–21, 107.

42 Orshanskii, Khudozhestvennaia i Kustarnaia Promyshlennost’ SSSR, 34–35.
43 Chetverikov and Mitrokhin, Kustarnyi Larek, 8.
44 Bartram and Ovchinnikova, Muzei Igrushki, 15.
45 Bakushinskii, Abramov, and Den’shin, Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka, 3, pl. 12, 14.
46 Papernaia, Karnaukhova, and Poret, Ch’i Eto Igrushki?, 1.
47 Dintses, Russkaia Glinianaia Igrushka, 96–103, figs. 46–48.
48 Kelly, “Shaping the ‘Future Race,’” 270.
49 M. D. and Kuznetsov, My Lepim.
50 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.
51 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).
52 Ibid., 13.
53 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).
54 Sarah Pankenier Weld, Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian
Avant-Garde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 21.
55 Bakushinskii, Abramov, and Den’shin, Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka, 1.
56 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
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 nation-
building 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
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.
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 baby-
doll 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
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.
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
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.
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
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 Chinese-
ness, 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 factory-
made 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
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
“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:
“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 near-
identical 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
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
“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.
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,
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,
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:
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.
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.
(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.
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
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.
38 “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.
39 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.
40 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).
41 “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.
42 “Wanju” (Toys), Renmin huabao no. 6 (1956): 32–33; “Suliao” (Plastic), Renmin
huabao no. 7 (1958): 27.
43 Fan Er, “Wei haizimen fuwu de gongchang” (The Factory that Serves Children),
Ertong shidai no. 12 (1956): 4–5.
44 “Kexue wanju” (Scientific Toys), Ertong shidai no. 6 (1960): back cover.
45 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.
46 Joseph W. Esherick, Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 238.
47 Chen Huiqin, Daughter of Good Fortune: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant
Memoir (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 72.
48 Wen Xin, “Wanju shi wo rensheng de diyi jiyi” (A Toy is the First Memory of My
Life), Wanju shijie no. 3 (2007): 49.
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.
50 “Ertong wanju chenlieguan zai Jing kaimu” (Toy Exhibition Hall Opens in Beijing),
Renmin ribao 21.03.1956: 3.
51 Hung Chang-tai, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
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.
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 Almqvist, Birgitta 91, 106 n.11
accounting 34 Altonaer Museum, Hamburg 223
Adam, Robert 9 American Girl Dolls (AGD) 13–14
Adlová, Alena 190 n.5 anatomical dolls 62 n.2
adult fans of LEGO (AFOLs) 103 Anker Building Block Set
adulthood, material culture of 5 (Ankersteinbaukasten) 16, 26
adult-made toys 3–4, 173 n.56, 91
The Adventures of a Pincushion (Kilner) Anschütz, Rudolf 147 n.3
56–7, 64 n.33 antique toys 77
advertising 10, 12, 13. See also marketing architectural building toys 15, 16. See also
children as targets 68, 69 LEGO
in Christmas period 68, 69, 70 with stud-and-socket mechanisms 91
of dolls 47, 50–1, 136–7, 143 Ariès, Philippe 2, 21 n.5, 62 n.1
in France 68–9 art for the child movement 17
middle class targets 68, 69 Art Nouveau 76, 220
Advisory Council for Toys, Art Workers’ Guild 118, 129 n.20
Czechoslovakia 176, 177, 178 Artěl Cooperative, Czechoslovakia
Aesthetes 115, 118 (1908) 173
Aesthetic Movement 113 art-historical and design-based studies of
aesthetics 16–17, 113–31 childhood 3
aesthetic education, early 76 artisans 9
aesthetic standards in France 14, 68, artistic inventions in toy design 16–17
82, 83 Arts and Crafts Movement 17, 113, 141
aesthetic way of seeing, cultivating Attfield, Judy 104, 109 n.64
123–4 Austria, designers in 17, 83
child as author, maker and giver 123, authenticity of toys 4
124–7 automobiles, toy 73
dress 115–18, 128 n.14 avant-garde 17, 123, 139
Flora’s Feast 115–24 artists 17, 157, 190 n.8
interiors 127 Communist 18
interrelationship with critics 221
commercialism 79 Czechoslovakia (pre 1968) 173, 174,
African-American consumers 147 175, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189
AGD (American Girl Dolls) 13–14 interwar 184, 186, 188, 191 n.28
Aglaia (journal) 116 post-First World War 153
Albers, Josef 200 post-war design 175
Albrecht V of Bavaria, Duke 9, 195 potential 173
Alcott, Louisa May 115 Soviet Union, Former (USSR) 297
Alexandre, Arsène 78, 87 n.51 toy design 174
Index 317
avatars, miniature 95 Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (German

Avenarius, Ferdinand 221 publication) 139
Bernstein, Robin 25 n.52, 114, 120, 128
Babel, Isaac 277 n.6, 271 n.28
Baby Houses 195 Beruf (true calling, of girls) 136
Bachelard, Gaston 199, 204, 208 Bestelmeyer, Georg Hieronymus 215–16
The Poetics of Space 217, 230 n.10 Blasche, Bernhard Heinrich 240–1
Badepuppen (bathdolls) 263 Bochner, Mel 205
Bain, Alexander 122, 130 n.34 Boehn, Max von 7, 22 n.18
Bakushinskii, Anatolii 279, 282, 284, 290 Boesch, Hans 138
n.18 Bogart, Leo 133, 146
Baldwin, Joseph 122, 130 n.32 Böhm, Adolf 174
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 35 Boileau, Daniel 240
Barbie doll 8, 13, 204, 211 n.46 Bon Marché department store 70, 71
black/multi-ethnic 20, 147 Bonetti, Carlo 177
Bard Graduate Center in New York books, children’s 82, 113–14
(2015/16) 21 n.7 fairy tales 118
Barker, Cicely Mary 115, 128 n.13 illustrating 122
Barr, Alfred H. 164 “impossibility” of children’s fiction 17,
Barthes, Roland 92, 106 n.17 113, 114
Barton, Christopher 27 n.63 picture books 17, 113, 114, 115, 124, 127
Bartram, Nikolai 281, 289 n.11 pocket books 14, 33–6
Bauhaus (German art school, 1919–33) “possible” children’s literature 114, 123,
17, 153–72. See also Germany 126
color theory 200 toy-books 38–40, 42, 115
financial state 163–4 Victorian children’s literature 121
kite festival (1921) 159 Boretti, Valentina 20
and play 153–4 Bosworth, Matilda 41
prototype production 161, 162 Bozart Toys 18
puppet-making 164, 167 brand loyalty 13
toy design 160–1, 164, 168–9 Brandow-Faller, Megan 26 n.60, 169 n.4,
toy production 154 190 n.6
Bauhäusler 153, 168 Bratz Dolls 133
Bäumer, Gertrude 144 Braunschvig, Marcel 76, 86 n.44
Bauspiel Schiff (play construction ship) Brendel, Erich 161
153, 156, 161, 162 Breuer, Marcel 162, 163
Bavarian National Museum, Munich Brewer, John 5, 22 n.11, 22 n.14
(2014/15) 21 n.7 Brewster, Sir David 200, 210 n.29
Bavarian Trade Museum (1904) 139 Brick Kicks (1987–1990) 98
Beauty’s Awakening, a Masque of British Museum 64 n.15
Winter and of Spring (theatrical Broglie, Comtesse de (née Pauline Pange)
production) 118–19 75, 86 n.38
Belich, James 235 Brookshaw, Sharon 4, 247
Beneš, Edvard 190 n.13 Broomhall, Sharon 9, 23 n.25
Benjamin, Walter 1–2, 21 n.4, 59, 65 n.41, Brougére, Giles 24 n.41
193, 208 n.3 Bryan, James 18–19, 195
Berlin Museum 258, 259, 261 Buckingham, David 11, 24 n.35, 24 n.41,
Berlin Zoo 259 103, 109 n.62
318 Index
Burman, Barbara 65 n.43 and fashion dolls 7, 47

Burton, Anthony 21 n.6 innocence (see innocence, childhood)
invention of as a specific stage of
Caasmann, Albert 259 development 2, 3, 5, 49, 85 n.15
cabinet houses 53 material culture of (see material culture
cabinets of curiosity 47, 51–2 of childhood)
Caillois, Roger 48, 51–2, 54, 63 n.7 socio-cultural constructions of 13
Calvert, Karen 22 n.12, 22 n.15 childhood studies 114
Canadian Center for Architecture in children. See also child consumers;
Montreal (1993/94) 21 n.7 childhood; material culture of
capitalism, industrial 123 childhood
Carnegie Mellon, Human-Computer attitudes to 2, 3, 6, 84 n.2
Interaction department 155 becoming “adultified” 11
cars, toy 74 consumption for and by 7
cartoons 11 and creativity 89
catalogs, toy sales 69, 70, 72 developmental life phases 13
Centuries of Childhood (Ariès) 2 material culture of 4, 49, 236–7
Century of the Child: Growing By Design minds of 31
1900–2000 exhibition, MoMA “pester power” 12
(2012) 154 tabula rasa theory of mind 6, 31–2
chaos (paidia) 48, 54, 58 as targets of advertising 68, 69
character dolls (Character-Puppen) 12, 17, Chin, Elizabeth 8, 20, 146, 151 n.38
135, 138, 142, 143 China
origins of character-doll movement appropriateness discourse 295–303,
141 298
Chase, Martha 135 Communist era “appropriate” toys for
Chéret, Jules 70 the “successors” 305–8
child consumers 7, 10 critiques of toys 301–2
and dolls 36, 37, 40, 53–4 folk toys 303, 310
economic literacy 33–6 industrial progress and mass heritage
emergence of child as a consumer 308–10
13, 14 modern toys and “national character”
in France 67–8, 69 303–5
idealized 32, 38 “new China” 305, 308
pocket books 14, 33–6 Republican era 294
recognition of child as a consumer 32 search for new toy (1910s to 1960s)
toys and materials 36–42 293–315
training 14–15, 31–45 China Children’s Products Society 304
Child Nurture and Activity Institute, Chippendale, Thomas 9, 53
Blankenburg (Prussia) 157 Christiansen, Godtfred (son of Ole) 91,
child-centered pedagogy 4 106 n.14
childhood. See also child consumers; Christiansen, Kjeld (grandson of Ole) 95
children Christiansen, Ole Kirk (LEGO founder)
commercialized world of 10, 133 90–1, 94
commodification of in the eighteenth Christmas, impact of 68, 69, 70–1, 74
century 49 and toy kitchens 228–9
and consumer culture 3, 10, 13, 50, chromolithography 115, 241
133, 147 Claretie, Jules 72–3, 81, 85 n.14, 85 n.17
Index 319
Claretie, Léo 70, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82 Cross, Gary 7, 12, 24 n.40, 96, 220, 227,
clothing 231 n.26
aesthetic dress 117–18, 128 n.14 The Cute and the Cool 69, 84 n.6, 232
of children 4, 6 n.57
of dolls 40–1, 42, 53, 55, 59, 60 Crowston, Clare 149 n.10
male fashion 119 Crystal Chain 202
mismatched 61 curiosity cabinets 47, 51–2
picture books (Flora’s Feast) 120–1 The Cute and the Cool (Cross) 69, 84 n.6,
theatrical presentations 118–19 232 n.57
collecting practices, institutional 4 Czechoslovakia (pre 1968) 173–91
colonialism 4, 19 adult-made toys 173
German 255, 257, 258, 259 Advisory Council for Toys 176, 177,
color theory 200 178
commercialized world of childhood 10, artistic and political reform agendas 18
133 avant-garde 173, 174, 175, 182, 184,
Christmas, impact of 69, 70–1, 74 186, 188, 189
commodification of childhood 49, 133. Center of Folk and Artistic
See also commercialized world of Manufacture 177
childhood Communist Party ideology,
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia 175 internalization 175
Concours Lépine 81 folk-inspired toys 173, 181–2, 190 n.3
construction play 96, 100, 104, 108 n.53. interwar period 174, 190 n.5
See also LEGO Ministry of Consumer Industry 182
toys 16, 89, 91 Ministry of Forests and the Wood
consumer culture 2, 4, 6, 13. See also child Industry 176
consumers, training Prague Spring (1968) 173, 175, 189
in Central Europe 135 Předškolni vychova (Preschool
and childhood 3, 10, 13, 50, 133, 147 Education) 176, 177
complexity 133 reform commission 182–8
critics 10 socialist realism 182
defining 133 toys during the Thaw 182–8, 185
and dolls 17, 49, 136, 138, 145, 146 toys in late Stalinist period 175–82
and German mothers 135 Tvar (Form), official industrial-design
nineteenth century 144 journal 173–7, 179, 188
consumer society, birth of 32, 49
Cook, Clarence 127 n.1 d’Ache, Caran 77
Cook, Daniel Thomas 23 n.31 d’Allemagne, Henri 82, 87 n.71
cradles 6 D’Houville, Gérard 76
Crane, Beatrice 124–5, 131 n.47 Damm, Olaf 96
Crane, Walter 17, 113–19, 123, 126–7, 127 “Dandanah” (construction toy) 16
n.1, 127 n.2, 128 n.15, 128 n.17, 130 Darwin, Charles 121, 130 n.36
n.36, 130 n.39, 130 n.44, 131 n.48. De, Zhu 309
See also Flora’s Feast: A Masque of decorative arts 68, 81, 86 n.48
Flowers (Cassell and Company) department stores, France 14, 68, 69, 70–1,
creativity 15, 89 80–1, 84 n.3
imaginative looking 114–15, 120–4 deregulation of advertising and children’s
and LEGO bricks 89–90, 94, 95 programming 12
cribs 6 A Description of All Trades 49
320 Index
developmental life phases 13 Czechoslovak 181

dialogues, enacting 37–8 designing, women best suited to 142
Dialogues on Morality (Kilner) 58 as disciplinary instruments 47
didactic literature 56, 57 domesticity/domestic management,
didactic toys 32–3, 42 as preparation for 54–8, 60, 61–2,
Dintses, Lev 276–7, 279, 282, 283, 290 136–8
n.19 eighteenth-century 14, 15, 47–65
The Disappearance of Childhood example of nineteenth-century doll’s
(Postman) 11 gown 40–1
disciplinary methods 3 factory-produced 141, 143
Divéky, Josef 139 fashion (Pandora) 58–9, 60, 61–2
Doesburg, Theo van 200 and advertising 47, 50–1
doll-doctors 137 alternatives to 13–14
dollhouses 2, 8, 9, 47. See also dolls; Barbie 8, 13, 20, 147, 204, 211 n.46
Kaleidoscope House (2001); French 8, 51
miniatures; Nuremberg kitchens, origins of term “Pandora” 62 n.3
nineteenth century plastic 7, 8, 13
gender and domesticity 18 postwar 7, 8
history 195–6 uses of, fluctuating 58–9
kitchen 204–5, 219–20 French 8, 51, 67
mass-produced 196 and gender 17, 54, 133–51
in Nostell Priory, Yorkshire 9, 52–3 girlhood, redefinition as an object
owned by adult women 47 associated exclusively with 14, 48,
pedagogical importance 55 136
doll-motherhood 137 golden age of 260
dolls. See also figurines; mannequins; toys historical accuracy 78
adult features 50 housewife 206
adult use 5, 7, 47, 51, 62 n.2 in Imperial Germany (see Imperial
advertising of 47, 50–1, 136–7, 143 Germany, dolls in)
and aesthetics/gender, in Imperial individualized 14, 135, 138, 139, 142,
Germany 133–51 143, 146
African features 261, 262, 264 material culture of childhood 47
alternative 13, 135, 138, 147 mechanical 135
anatomical 62 n.2 miniaturized 136–7
“babies,” misnomer of, in eighteenth and multiculturalism 14
century 49–50 mutilation by girls 138
bathdolls 263 and needlework skills 48, 55–7, 59, 64
black/multi-ethnic 20, 147, 261, 262, n.29
264 nurturing, and character dolls 134,
Bratz Dolls 133 135–6, 138, 142
character 12, 17, 135, 138, 141, 142, 143 as in-between objects 48, 49–54
and child consumer 36, 37, 40, 53–4 origins 5, 7
Chinese 306–7 paper 38, 39, 42, 223, 249
clothing 40–1, 42, 53, 55, 59, 60 pedagogical importance 47, 48, 54,
mismatched 61 55, 57
collection of 51, 53, 59 physiognomy 14, 50, 138, 139, 142,
and consumer culture 17, 49, 136, 138, 143, 146, 261
145, 146 postmodernist studies 8
Index 321
prices 137 Toys and the Modernist Tradition

rebellious forms of doll play 138 exhibition, Canadian Center for
reform 17, 135, 143–4 Architecture, Montreal (1994) 154
subversive role 17, 49, 61, 62, 63 n.5, “Woman’s Life and Calling” exhibition,
136, 145, 204 Berlin (1912) 144–5
technological 145–6 EXPO 58 182, 183, 184
as transitional objects between Ezuchevskyi, Mikhail 286
childhood and womanhood 14,
48, 53 Facebook 133
wax 59, 60 factory-produced toy production 2, 4, 36
Domino House 202 dolls 141, 143
drawings, children’s 17 fairy tales 118
Dubček, Alexander 182 fancy, flights of 122–3
duCille, Ann 8, 19–20, 147, 271 n.26 Fanning, Colin 11, 14
Dürer, Albrecht 269 n.5 fantasy 1, 96
Dyer, Serena 14 fashion dolls. See also dolls
Feininger, Lyonel 17, 164, 168
Eames, Ray and Charles 16 female entrepreneurs and artists 17, 135, 136
economic literacy 31, 33–6 feminism
Edgeworth, Maria 31, 32, 36–7, 38, 41, 42, doll studies 8, 49
43 n.1, 54–5 idealism 135
Practical Education 35, 36 maternal feminists 134, 135, 138
“The Purple Jar” 38–9 relational 135
Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 31, 43 n.1 Fenn, Eleanor 37, 38
elites 5, 9, 144 Fennetaux, Ariane 14, 63 n.13, 65 n.43
elite women 52 Feuillet, Valérie 74
Ellis, Alexander Caswell 137–8, 149 n.16 fiction, children’s, “impossibility” of 17,
embroidery 243. See also needlework 113, 114
Emile (Rousseau) 155–6 figurines 7, 258, 304. See also dolls
“empowered child” paradigm 10, 11 African 258, 261
Enlightenment 5–6, 134–5 animal/zoological 79, 258, 261, 301
pre-Enlightenment children’s clay 303, 312 n.18
furniture 6 decapitated 137
entertainment, and advertising 12 father figure 207
Erector Set 16 folk toys, Soviet Union 310
evolution theory 121, 130 n.36 gods 299
exhibitions 2, 4, 21 n.7, 54, 139 Kaulitz’s 139
In and Around the House (2003) 198–9, minzu 308
209 n.20 “shocking”/inhuman 296, 297
Century of the Child: Growing By Design wooden 77, 164
1900–2000, MoMA (2012) 154 Fisher, Michelle Millar 17
“exploited child” paradigm 10, 11 Fixl, Viktor 183, 184, 191 n.27
Kunst, Ein Kinderspiel, Schirn Fleming, Dan 8, 23 n.22, 24 n.45
Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2004) 154 Flerina, E. A. 180
Kunstschau Exhibition, Vienna (1908) Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (Cassell
174 and Company). See also aesthetic
L’Art pour l’Enfance (Paris exhibition, way of seeing, cultivating; Crane,
1913) 77–8, 83 Walter
322 Index
aesthetic taste 115 Friedrich Wilhelm of Mecklenburg, Duke

and Beauty’s Awakening 119 263–4
chrysanthemums, description of 118 Froebel, Friedrich 157, 221, 241
Dover edition 129 n.24 Fronek, Jiří 190 n.5
iconographic meanings 114, 115–19 Fuller, S. and J. 42
imaginative looking 114–15, 120–4 Furnese, Arabella 50
interpreting 121 furniture
narrative 118 children’s 4, 6
as not a child’s book 124 German peasant 219
performing 120–4 Kaleidoscope House (2001) 205
flowers, personified (theme of, in picture
books) 115 Ganaway, Bryan 17, 271 n.23
folk toys Garments. See clothing
assimilating toy makers and toy users Gasper-Hulvat, Marie 20
281–2 Gebrüder Bing 216
China 303, 310 gender considerations. See also feminism
Czechoslovakia 173, 181, 190 n.3 dolls/dollhouses 17, 18, 54, 133–51,
early Soviet folk art toy culture 275–80 142
Soviet Union 20, 273–92 domesticity/domestic management,
Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan, peasants as preparation for 54–8, 60,
and toys under 283–6 61–2, 136–8, 219, 220, 226–7
Forman-Brunell, Miriam 8, 23 n.23, 63 female entrepreneurs and artists 17,
n.5, 135, 148 n.5, 218, 230 n.15 135, 136
Fournier, Edouard 69, 84 n.7 and LEGO products 100–1, 107 n.32
France patriarchal ideals 8
advertising targets 68–9 Georgian Britain 6, 9, 51, 52–3, 55, 63 n.9
aesthetic standards 14, 68 German Southwest Africa (GSWA) 19,
child consumers 67–8, 69 255, 256
commercialization of Christmas in 69, childhood and material culture in 265–9
70–1, 74 mixed marriages, banning of 266
decorative arts 68, 81, 86 n.48 Germany. See also Bauhaus (German
department stores 68, 69, 70, 71–2, art school, 1919–33); Nuremberg
80–1 kitchens, nineteenth century
fashion dolls 8, 51 anthropology, nineteenth-century 271
French versus German toys 68, 82–3 n.24
Lozère region 78 Bavarian National Museum, Munich
mass consumption in 15, 67–87, 84 n.3 (2014/15) 21 n.7
national identity, toys as sites of 68 Bavarian Trade Museum (1904) 139
nineteenth century 67–8 Berlin Museum 258, 259, 261
Paris, rebuilding (1850s and 1860s) 69 Berlin Zoo 259
Paris Autumn Salon 77, 79 colonialism 255, 257, 258, 259
product placement 67 designers in 83
proliferation of consumer items for dolls, eighteenth-century 48
sale 68, 69, 83 feminist movement 134
Renault car 74 German Southwest Africa (see German
Franco-Prussian War 68, 74 Southwest Africa (GSWA))
Franco-Russian alliance 74 German versus French toys 68, 82–3
free play 15 Imperial (see Imperial Germany)
Index 323
imperialism 260 Hartwig, Josef 153

LEGO periodicals 98 Headland, Isaac Taylor 296, 297
material cultures of children in Healthy and Artistic Dress Union 116
(1890–1918) 255–72 Hellé, André 77, 78, 79, 80, 83
misogynist society, Imperial Germany Heqin, Chen 303
143 Hermann Tietz Department Store, Berlin
Playmobil toys 96 139
“Scramble for Africa” and toy Heyl, Hedwig 144
production in the German Hicks, Ann 41
metropolis 256–65, 262 high chairs 6–7, 18
toys in 68, 81, 82 Hildebrandt, Paul 138, 221
Weimar Republic (1919–33) 155, 160 Hilpert, Johann 258
Werkbund movement 139 Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig 161–4, 170 n.23
Werkstätte postcard series 139 history of children, childhood and
Wilhelmine 135, 136, 258, 263 material world 1–27. See also toys
“Woman’s Life and Calling” exhibition, attitudes to children 2, 3, 6, 84 n.2
Berlin (1912) 144–5 historical periods studied 4–5
Youth Welfare Law (1922) 155 pre-eighteenth century toys 5
Gesell, Arnold 18 A History of Doll Houses (Jacobs) 216, 221,
Giddings, Seth 99, 108 n.41 230 n.6
Gillis, John R. 133, 147 n.2 The History of Little Fanny (moralistic
Giustino, Cathleen 18, 191 n.23 children’s tale) 38–40, 42
glass architecture 201, 202 The History of Miss Wildfire (Sanders
Goldstein, Jeffrey 24 n.41 Wilson) 42
“gollywog” 261, 263 Hlaváček, Jaroslav 184, 186, 191 n.29
Gopnik, Alison 123, 130 n.41 hobbyhorses 5, 301
Gossler, Gustav von 255 Hodgson Burnett, Frances 62, 65 n.45
Gottwald, Klement 175, 182 Hollein, Max 154
Grand Palais in Paris (2011/12) 21 n.7 Horáková, Milada 177
The Gray Cloth (Scheerbart) 201 The House Beautiful (Cook) 127 n.1
Grenby, Matthew 44 n.12 housewife doll 206
Gröber, Karl 1, 2, 21 n.1, 194, 196, 208 n.4, Howard, Jan 209 n.19
229 n.2 Huizinga, Johan 48, 63 n.6, 170 n.18
Groos, Karl 121, 122, 129 n.26 Human-Computer Interaction
Gropius, Walter 158, 159–60, 162–3, 170 department, Carnegie Mellon 155
n.12, 170 n.15 Huret, Adelaide 8
Grosschen Toy Store 137
Grus, Vít 177, 183, 191 n.14 imagination/imaginative looking 114–15,
GSWA. See German Southwest Africa 120–4. See also creativity; Flora’s
(GSWA) Feast: A Masque of Flowers (Cassell
and Company)
H. G. Clarke & Co 238, 239 Imperial Furniture Depot in Vienna
Halabala, Jindřich 176 (2006/07) 21 n.7
Hall, G. Stanley 137–8, 149 n.16, 281 Imperial Germany, dolls in (1871–1918)
Ham, Elizabeth 56, 64 n.32 134
Hamiro (Czechoslovak toy manufacturer) and gender 17, 133–51
176 reform of dolls 136–47
Hamlin, David 221, 231 n.30 verisimilitude 134, 135, 136, 139, 145
324 Index
imperialism 4, 19, 260 Kiddicraft 91, 105 n.7

The Important Pocket Book (1760s) 33, 34 Kilner, Dorothy 57, 58, 65 n.35
improvised toys 36–7 Kilner, Mary Ann 56–7, 64 n.33
In and Around the House (exhibition, Kindergarten movement 157
2003) 198–9, 209 n.20 Kinderzimmer (children’s play
incentive marketing programs 13 environment, theatre within)
individuality, notion of 89 164–5, 166, 168, 257
Industrial Magazine of China 294 King, Constance Eileen 22 n.18, 217,
Ingels, Bjarke 104 230 n.7
Inness, Sherrie 8 Kirk, J. 50, 51
innocence, childhood 4, 10, 11, 12, 123 Kirschenbaum, Lisa 274, 289 n.6
interdisciplinary literature 2 Klee, Paul 164, 168, 200
interpretive play 120 Klimt Group 174
Ishiguro, Laura 240 Kline, Stephen 97, 108 n.42
Itten, Johannes 17, 158, 200 Knatchbull, Fanny (née Austen Knight)
35
Jackson, Mary 35 Köferlin, Anna 9, 54, 220
Jackson, Valerie 217 Kolonialwarenläden (colonial warehouses)
Jacobs, Flora Gill 23 n.30, 216, 221, 230 264
n.6 Komárková, V. 177
Jacobson, Lisa 25 n.46, 44 n.23, 97, 107 Korda, Andrea 16–17
n.36 Koss, Juliet 168, 172 n.37
James, Allison 24 n.36 Kroha, Jiří 188–9, 191 n.35
Jammes, Francis 75, 86 n.39 Kruger, Barbara 205
Jaroš, Václav 178, 179 Kruse, Käthe (née Simon) 17, 134, 135,
Jenkins, Henry 11 138, 140–6
Jingpu, Wang 308 Kruse, Max 141, 143, 150 n.21
Jiuru, Zhang 299 Kruse, Sophie (daughter of Käthe) 141
Johnson, Derek 26 n.54, 101, 109 n.54 Kubát, Václav 183
Johnson, Samuel 5 Kubiová, Eva 180, 191 n.21
Journal des Debats 73, 74, 85 n.19, 86 n.33 Kunst, Ein Kinderspiel exhibition, Schirn
Jumeau, Pierre 8 Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2004) 154
Kunstschau Exhibition, Vienna (1908)
Kaiserreich (German Empire) 17, 19, 134, 174
141, 255, 257, 263 Kunz, Johanna 217, 230 n.8
Kaleidoscope House (2001) 193–211. See
also dollhouses La Poupee Modele (French magazine) 67
in and around 204–7 La Reine des Poupees (Queen of the Dolls)
furniture 205 (children’s book) 82
as a modern utopia 200–4 L’Art dans Tout (Art in Everything) 76
Kämmer & Reinhardt (German company) L’Art et l’enfant (Braunschvig) 76, 86 n.44
146 L’Art et l’enfant (review) 76, 77, 85 n.14, 86
Kandinsky, Wassily 157, 164, 200 n.47, 86 n.49, 87 n.51, 87 n.52
Kaulitz, Marion 17, 135, 138–40, 142, 143, L’Art pour l’Enfance (Paris exhibition,
145 1913) 77–8, 83
Kemble, Fanny 57–8, 65 n.37 L’Art pour Tout (Art for Everyone) 76
Keqing, Kang 309 L’Auto-Catastrophe (toy) 74
Khrushchev, Nikita 175, 182 L’Automobile-Accident (toy) 74
Index 325
L’Education d’une poupee (A Doll’s “City” (post-2003) 100

Education) (children’s book) 82 “Dimensions” (2015) 101
Le Corbusier 200 DUPLO (1979) 97
Domino House 202 “Friends” (2011) 101
Five Points of Architecture 202 “Star Wars” (1999) 100, 108 n.45
Le Figaro 74 “Technic” (1977) 97
Le Journal 74, 85 n.30 postwar play 15, 90–4
Le Paradis des Enfants (French toy store) Samsonite, licensing agreement with 92
70, 73, 81 Scandinavian wooden toy maker
Le Petit Journal 82 paradigm 90, 92, 105 n.5
Le Soleil (French newspaper) 74 “Self-Locking Bricks” 91
LEGO 26 n.54, 89–109 stratification of product line 97
adaptation to changing child 102 System of Play 91, 95
adult fans 103 ten principles of play 94
“Architecture Series” 103 Town Plan 91, 92, 100
“Automatic Binding Bricks” 91 Leighton House Museum 127 n.1
brand loyalty 97 leisure, attitudes to 5
building themes 15 Lenéru, Marie 75
children’s culture, moving beyond 102–3 Lenin, Vladimir, death of (1924) 273
classic system 15 Les Mères et les enfants 75
corporate rebranding 15 Lessons for Children (Barbauld) 35
early products 89, 91, 100–1 Levin, Golan 155
fantasy settings 96 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 286
financial crisis (2003) 100, 101 Lewald, Fanny 137, 149 n.15
first plastic bricks 90 Lhotský, Miroslav 182, 183
founding of company 90 L’Humanité (socialist newspaper) 78
fragmentation of product line 102 Lilienthal, Gustav 16
and gender 15, 25–6 n.54, 100–1, 107 Lindencrona, Brigitte 9, 23 n.24
n.32 Linn, Susan 10
“good toys” discourse 90–4 A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (Newbery)
intellectual property rights 105 n.7 33, 34
leadership and organizational changes Locke, John 14, 34, 36, 37, 42, 64 n.24
(2003) 100 Some Thoughts Concerning Education
LEGO Mania Magazine 97, 98, 99 6, 31–2, 43 n.5
LEGO Maniac 97–8 The Works of John Locke 44 n.18
The LEGO Movie 103–4 “Locke Blocks” 6
licensed designs 100 locomotive toys 73
marketing 92 Löffler, Henriette 226, 233 n.61
mediatization of 101 Louvre department store, France 70, 72
middle classes, selling to 92–3, 100 Lozère region, France 78
minifigures 95, 101 Lux, Joseph August 221
narrative play 95–9, 100, 104
North American distribution, taking Machačová-Dostálová, Božena 182
over (1972) 92 magazine advertisements, “child-as-
origin story 90–1 lobbyist” 13
periodicals 97, 98, 99 Magritte, René 218
play themes (system within a system) Mahlberg, Blanche 211 n.58
95–9, 100–1 Mahon, Ellen 64 n.30
326 Index
Maier, Otto 163 Meccano (engineering set) 16

Makarenko, Anton S. 180 mechanical toys 68, 75, 135
Maleuvre, Didier 208 media 5, 10, 11, 15, 133
Mangel, Larry 193 Media Lab Lifelong Kindergarten
mannequins 7, 62 n.2 program, Massachusetts Institute of
manuals, pedagogical 57 Technology 155
manufactured toys 2, 4, 36, 68 Mehring, Christine 154
Marc, Franz 157 Melniková-Papoušková, Nadĕžda 186, 190
marketing. See also advertising n.3, 191 n.30
incentive marketing programs 13 meta-narratives 12
by LEGO 92, 97 Michaud, Louis-Gabriel 62 n.3
postwar 4–5 middle classes
“tween” marketing 13 dolls and female middle-class identity
Märklin 216 134
Marshall, Elizabeth 25 n.50 LEGO products sold to 92–3, 100
Martin, Fernand 73 as targets of advertising 68, 69
Martin, Zélie 74–5, 86 n.35 Millhauser, Steven 217
mass consumption mind of child 31
critique of mass produced toys 68, 83 Mingjiu, Shao 304
in France 15, 67–87, 84 n.3 miniature garments, dolls 40–1
in New Zealand 241 miniatures 2, 4, 5. See also Kaleidoscope
when toys untainted by 2 House (2001); Nuremberg kitchens,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nineteenth century
Media Lab Lifelong Kindergarten dollhouses 53, 54, 208, 211 n.54
program 155 dolls 136–7
material culture of childhood. See also figurines 7, 139
history of children, childhood and National Association of Miniature
material world Enthusiasts 209 n.14
adult cultural references permeating 7 powers of miniaturization 217–18
and adulthood, blurring of 5 pure 53
artifact constellations surrounding 6 The Minor’s Pocket Book (1790s–1840s) 34
creativity and children 89 Mitchell, Timothy 270 n.10
and dolls 47 Mitius, Hartl 139–41, 149 n.17
in eighteenth century 49 Mitrokhin, Dmitrii 276
and examples of children’s material Modernist movement 15, 16, 17–18, 123,
culture 236–7 154, 207
exhibitions 21 n.7 and Czechoslovakia 173–4
in German Southwest Africa 265–9 and LEGO bricks 79, 83
and material culture of children 4 monographs 2
as potential instrument of female moralistic children’s tales 38–40, 42
emancipation 48–9, 61 Moritz Gottschalk 216
studies 2, 3 Morris, William 113
theory 3 Morrison, Jasper 205
toys as objects of 146 Moscow Toy Museum 275
maternal feminists 134, 135, 138 multi-media conglomerates 15
Mattel 12, 14, 20, 147, 204 Musée Galliera exhibition, Paris 77
Mazdaznanism (neo-Zoroastrian belief Museo Picasso in Malaga (2010/11) 21 n.7
system) 158 museum exhibitions. See exhibitions
Index 327
Museum of Childhood, London 248 Novotný, Antonín 182

Museum of London 40, 59 Nuremberg kitchens, nineteenth century
Museum of Modern Art, New York 9, 18–19, 215–33
21 n.7, 154 all-white 220
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa children’s views of 218–19
Tongarewa 235 configurations 223
My Lepim (Soviet children’s book) 284, 286 contents 225
cooking paraphernalia 227–8
narrative play 95–9 design 222–3
and construction play 96, 104 didactic purpose 221–2
National Association of Miniature furniture 219
Enthusiasts 209 n.14 gadgets, miniaturized 225–6
National Library of New Zealand Te Puna history 215–17
Matauranga 237 and homemaking 219, 220, 226–7
needlework 235, 242, 243 hygienic features 219–20
and eighteenth-century dolls 48, 55–7, metal stoves 219, 226
59, 64 n.29 miniaturization, powers of 217–18
French seamstresses 149 n.10 as one-room dollhouse 215
Negerpuppen (African-type doll) 261, 262, passed down the line 223–4
263, 264 woodwork 220
Nekrasov, Alexei 278 nursery and furniture design 4
Netherlands nurturing 58, 142, 157, 221
eighteenth-century dolls 48, 51–2 and character dolls 134, 135–6, 138, 142
LEGO periodicals 98 Nutt, Betsy 41
New Sixpenny Toy Books (Routledge) 113
New Year’s Day 69, 72 O’Neill, Morna 118, 129 n.19
New Year’s Eve 69–70 O’Neill, Rose 135
New York Toy Fair (1962) 92 objects
New Zealand (1860s) child-made 251
historical value of objects 246–50 in-between, dolls as 48, 49–54
Nelson 242, 246, 251 historical value 246–50
paper models in 19, 235–53 material, of remembrance 1
pedagogical influences in colonial New transitional 14, 48, 53
Zealand 240–4 Ogata, Amy F. 27 n.61, 93, 106 n.15, 158,
Saxton family 237, 239, 240, 242, 244, 169 n.11, 190 n.4
245 Olsuf ’eva, A. 276
Saxton model village 235–42 On Longing (Stewart) 217, 230 n.12
Newbery, John 14, 33, 37, 42 Oortman, Petronella 52
Newson, Marc 205 open-ended play 15, 49
Nielsen, Fred 25 n.51 Opsvik, Peter 18
Nikl, Petr 188 order (ludus) 48, 54, 58
Niklová, Libuše 186–7, 188 originality, notion of 89
“no toy” culture 5–6 Orshanskii, Lev 279, 282, 291 n.24
Noah’s ark designs 77, 79 Ottlinger, Eva 22 n.17
nostalgia 1, 2, 21 n.2 Owen, Robert 241
Nostell Priory, Yorkshire 9, 52–3
novelty toys/stores 12, 69, 74 Page, Hilary 91, 106 n.10
and tradition 89 Palais Galliera 79, 80
328 Index
Pandora dolls. See also dolls themes (LEGO) 95–9, 100–1

paper dolls 38, 39, 42, 223, 249 work as 17, 153–72
paper models The Play of Animals (Groos) 121
as activity for boys and girls 242–3 The Play of Man (Groos) 122
in New Zealand (see New Zealand play pens 7
(1860s)) play theory 48
origins 241 playthings. See toys
in the United Kingdom 240 Playtime in the First Five Years 91
Paris Autumn Salon 77, 79 PLCs (Program-Length Commercials)
Parker, Rozsika 63 n.9 12, 13
Pasierbska, Halina 217 Pleasant Company 14
passions of child 31 Plothow, Anna 143
Pedagogical Seminary 137 Plumb, John Harold 6, 32, 43.n.8, 49
Peers, Juliette 22 n.21 pocket books 14, 33–6
Pellisson-Fontanier, Paul 62 n.3 balls or pincushions sold with 33–4
Pennant, Caroline 41 Podhajská, Minka 174, 190 n.6, 190 n.7
People’s Pictorial (China) 309 Popova, Lidiia 276
personal memoirs 137 popular culture 10, 11, 15
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 241 and LEGO 103, 104
“pester power” 12 poster artists 70
Peukert, Detlev 155, 169 n.6 Postman, Neil 11
Pevsner, Dieter 166, 171 n.34 postmodernist doll studies 8
Pevsner, Nikolaus 166, 171 n.34 postwar marketing 4–5
The Philosophical Baby (Gopnik) 123, 130 postwar television programming 13
n.41 Powell, Laetitia (née Clark) 51, 53
picture books 17, 113, 115, 124, 127 Practical Education (Edgeworth) 35, 36
Pinypons 133 Prague Spring (1968) 173, 175, 189
Pistorius, Jan (Czechoslovak toy designer) Pre-Raphaelites 118
177–8, 191 n.15 Pretty Little Pocket Book (Newbery) 14
plastic paradox 8 Prevost, Marcel 74, 77
play “priceless” child 12
Bauhaus 153–4 print advertising campaigns 13
and child consumer 31 Printemps (Au) department store 70,
construction 96 71–2, 80, 81
defining 48 Program-Length Commercials (PLCs)
engagement with toys through 37 12, 13
imaginative 114–15, 120–4 Pugh, Allison 11
interpretive 120 Puppenküchen (dolls’ kitchens). See
narrative 95–9, 104 Nuremberg kitchens, nineteenth
open-ended nature 15, 49 century
pedagogical importance 6 puppet-making 164, 167
postwar play and “good toys” discourse
90–4 Qing empire, China 294, 296
pre-modern European attitudes to 5 Qiucao, Chen 307
reformist attitudes to 6 Queyrat, Frédéric 75–6
significance of 207–8
subversive role 59 Rabier, Benjamin 77
ten principles of 94 race, concept of 261
Index 329
racism, institutionalized 19 Saxton model village, New Zealand

radio clubs 13 235–42
Rand, Erica 8 construction and design 238–40
Rashid, Karim 205 paper model 238
Rational Sports in Dialogues Passing Scandinavian wooden toy making
Among the Children of a Family paradigm 90, 92, 105 n.5
(Fenn) 37 Scheerbart, Paul 200–1, 202, 203, 207, 210
reform dolls 17, 135, 143–4 n.37, 210 n.39
Regnault, Claire 243, 252 n.15 Schlemmer, Oskar 153, 164, 168
Reinelt, Sabine 215, 229 n.1, 231 n.25 Schlereth, Thomas 21 n.9, 248
relational feminism 135 Schmidt, Paul Ferdinand 157
Renault car 74 Schor, Juliet B. 10, 24 n.34, 100, 107 n.35,
retail roles, learning through toys 37–8 133, 147 n.1
Richmond, Vivienne 64 n.29 Schramm, Manuel 190 n.2
Richter (German firm) 91, 106 n.12, 162 Schrammen, Eberhard 161, 165
Riello, Giorgio 247, 252 n.7 Schröder-Schräder Haus (1923–24) 164
Rietveld, Gerrit 18, 164, 202 Schuldenfrei, Robin 155, 169 n.5
Rogers, Mary 22 n.20 Schumacher, Tony 137
Rohl, Karl Peter 164 Schumann, Robert 257
Rohrbach, Claire 266, 267, 268 Schutztruppen (protection forces) 258
Rohrbach, Hans 266, 267 scientific motherhood 135
Rohrbach, Justus 266, 267, 268 scientific toys 68, 76
Rohrbach, Nina 266, 268 Scudéry, Madeleine de 62 n.3
Rohrbach, Paul 266 seasonal sales catalogs 69
Rose, Jacqueline 17, 26 n.59, 113, 114, Segard, Achille 78
128 n.4 Seiter, Ellen 11, 24 n.32, 24 n.35, 24 n.39,
Rosenbaum, Eric 155 24 n.41, 43 n.7, 253 n.27
Rosenblum, Robert 155, 158, 169 n.10 Sendak, Maurice 155
Rountree, Susan Hight 217 sentimentality 1
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 36, 40, 55, 157 sewing, eighteenth-century girls’
Emile 155–6 engagement with 41
Routledge (publisher) 113, 114 Sherman, Cindy 197
Rowland, Anna 170 n.22 Shindana Toys, Los Angeles 147
Rowland, Pleasant 13–14 Shliapnikov, Alexander 284
Rundschau uber Spielwaren (German toy Shterenberg, David 275, 286, 287, 289 n.14
trade journal) 145 Shubert, Howard 26 n.57
Runge, Philip Otto 155, 157 Siedhoff, Walter 166
Russkaia Narodnaia Igrushka (Russian Siedhoff-Buscher, Alma 17, 163, 164–5,
Folk Toys) (Abramov) 279, 280, 281 166, 168
Bauspiel Schiff (play construction ship)
sales catalogs 69 153, 156, 161, 162
Saletnik, Jeffrey 155, 169 n.5 Silver, Jay 155
Samaritaine, La (department store) 70, 71 Simmons, Laurie 18, 193, 196–9, 200, 202,
Sanders Wilson, Ann 42 203, 207, 208, 208 n.2
Saxton, John 237, 244, 245, 246 In and Around the House (2003) 198–9,
Saxton, Priscilla 237, 242 209 n.20
Saxton family, New Zealand 237, 239, 240, Untitled (Woman’s Head) 206
242, 244, 245 simplicity 1–2, 68
330 Index
Sleeping Beauty 118 Sutnar, Ladislav 174, 190 n.7

social media 133 Sutton-Smith, Brian 222, 231 n.32, 235,
socialization, family 11, 12 252 n.2
Societe de l’Art à l’école (Society for Art in swaddling clothes 6
Schools) 76
Societe des amateurs de jouets et de jeux tabula rasa theory of mind 6, 31–2
anciens (Society of Amateurs of Taut, Bruno 16, 201–2, 207, 211 n.58
Antique Toys and Games) 76 Te Papa, New Zealand 242, 249, 250
Societe Francaise de Fabrications de Bebes teaching, toys enabling 37
et Jouets 82 technological dolls 145–6
socio-historical invention of childhood television 12
2, 3, 5 Terry, Ellen 113, 128 n.3
Sold Separately (Seiter) 24 n.32, 24 n.35, Tiersten, Lisa 81, 84 n.3, 84 n.5
24 n.39, 24 n.41, 43 n.7, 253 n.27 timelessness 1, 21 n.2
soldiers, toy 2, 7, 68, 78, 258, 259, 267 tin soldiers. See soldiers, toy
Some Thoughts Concerning Education toddlers 13
(Locke) 6, 31–2, 43 n.5 Tofa Semily (Czechoslovak toy
Somerville, Kyle 27 n.63 manufacturer) 176
Somes, Joseph 244 torpedo boats, toy 73–4
Soviet Union, Former (USSR) Towner, Margaret 217
1917 October Revolution 280 Townsend, Lynette 4, 11, 19
early folk art toy culture 275–80 “The Toy” (construction toy) 16
folk toys (see folk toys, Soviet Union) toy displays 70–1
infantilization of peasantry 20, 273 toy reformers 9
kustar (cottage industry) 274 toy-books 38–40, 42, 115
peasant workshops 274 toy-men 49, 50
Spadaccini-Day, Barbara 62 n.3 toys. See also dolls; LEGO; miniatures;
specialty toy shops 14, 69 soldiers, toy; toys in specific cultures
spinning tops 162 adult-made 3–4, 173
Spock, Benjamin 18 antique 77
Stalin, Josef architectural building 15, 16
death of (1953) 174, 178, 182 attitudes to children, mirroring 3
First Five-Year Plan, peasants and toys as authentic artifacts of childhood 4
under 283–6, 287 character 12, 17, 135
Great Purge (1936) 273 collection of 51, 59, 78, 153
late Stalinist period 175–82, 188 commercially manufactured 2, 4, 36
standing stool 6 construction 16
Steinberg, Shirley 10 creative 94
Stetten, Paul von (the Younger) 220–1 critique of mass produced toys 68, 83
Stewart, Susan 53, 194, 209 n.6 didactic 32–3, 42
On Longing 217, 230 n.12 educational 4, 6, 47, 48, 54, 55, 57, 91
Stille, Eva 215, 218, 227, 229 n.3, 233 n.62 engagement with, through play 37
Stock, Karen 18 ephemerality 4
Stölzl, Gunta 153, 158, 159–60, 170 n.14, “good toys” discourse and postwar play
170 n.20 90–4
stoves, miniature 219 improvised 36–7
Studies of Childhood (Sully) 281 invention of modern toy 4, 5–21
Sully, James 122, 281 mass consumption in France 67–87
Index 331
mechanical 68, 75, 135 LEGO periodicals 98

modern 77 Museum of Modern Art, New York 21
newfangled 68, 73, 75, 83 n.7, 154
novelty 12, 69, 74, 89 New York Toy Fair (1962) 92
as objects of material culture 146 Washington Dolls’ House and Toy
origins as adult amusements 10 Museum 231 n.24
scientific 68, 76 Universal Exposition, Paris (1900) 73, 74,
simple, universal preferences for 1–2 75
specialty toy shops 14 universal preferences 1–2
transportation-themed 73–4 Upton, Florence 261
usage fluctuating between childhood
and adulthood 7 Varennes, Robert de 7
when untainted by mass Vatagin, Vasilii 286
consumption 2 verisimilitude 73, 134, 297, 310
wider political and cultural issues 83 and dolls, Imperial Germany 134, 135,
Toys and the Modernist Tradition 136, 139, 145
exhibition, Canadian Center for Verne, Jules 75
Architecture, Montreal (1994) 154 Victoria and Albert Museum 59, 64 n.30
trade cards/tokens 49, 50, 51 Vienna Secessionists 17
tramways, electric (toy) 73 Viennese Women’s Academy 174
transitional objects 14, 48, 53 Vitra Design Museum at Weill am Rhein
transportation-themed toys 73–4 (1997/98) 21 n.7
The Treachery of Images (Magritte) 218 Voltz, Johann Michael 227
Trimmer, Sarah 57, 65 n.36
Tripp Trapp high chair 18 Wakefield, Edward Jerningham 244
Troy, Nancy 83, 87 n.74 Washington Dolls’ House and Toy
Tseretelli, Nikolai 277, 279, 283, 289 n.5, Museum 231 n.24
290 n.21 Weber, Susan 190 n.4
Tucker, Adam Reed 103 Weeton, Ellen 57, 65 n.34
Tvar (Form), Czechoslovak official Weimar Republic (1919–33) 155, 160
industrial-design journal 173–7, Wells, H. G. 58
179, 188 Werkbund (Svaz českeho dila),
“tween” marketing 13 Czechoslovakia (1908) 173
Werkbund movement, Germany 139
ÚLUV (Czech design studio) 177 Wheeler, Katherine 18
Union of Czechoslovak Visual Artists 186 Wheelwright, Peter 18, 193, 200, 202, 203,
United Kingdom 207, 208
dolls, eighteenth-century 48, 49, 51, 53 Wiencek, Henry 96
elite women, England 52 Wiener Werkstätte, Austria, 26 n.60
feminist movement 134 postcard series 139
Georgian Britain 6, 9, 51, 52–3, 55, Wilde, Oscar 124–5
63 n.9 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 255
LEGO periodicals 98 Winn, Lady Susannah 9, 53
paper models in 240 Winn, Sir Rowland 53
United States Winnicot, Donald 48
commercialization of Christmas in 69 Wolf, Mark J. P. 25 n.53
feminist movement 134 Wolk-Ranger, Andrea 118
LEGO Mania Magazine 97, 98, 99 Wollstonecraft, Mary 55, 64 n.27
332 Index
“Woman’s Life and Calling” exhibition, Youell, Harriet 36

Berlin (1912) 144–5
Woolf, Virginia 198, 209 n.21 Zelizer, Viviana 10, 24 n.33
work, as play 17, 153–72 Zhuo, Gu 302
The Works of John Locke (Locke) 44 n.18 Zig-Zag chair 18
World’s Fair, Brussels (1958) 182, 184, Zikai, Feng 302, 303
185 Zinguer, Tamar 16, 26 n.56
Wulf, Eric 145, 150 n.35 Zollmann, Jakob 4, 19, 20
Zonglin, Zhang 305, 308
Xuemen, Zhang 304 Zuoren, Zhou 302

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Childhood by Design

Material Culture of Art and Design

Material Culture of Art and Design is devoted to scholarship that brings

The series encompasses material culture in its broadest

First published in the United States of America 2018

© Megan Brandow-Faller and Contributors, 2018

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xix constitute an extension

Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3202-9

Series: Material Culture of Art and Design

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Introduction: Materializing the History of Childhood and Children

Part 1 Inventing the Material Child: Childhood, Consumption,

1 Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys, and Learning to Shop

Part 2 Child’s Play? Avant-Garde and Reform Toy Design

5 Cultivating Aesthetic Ways of Looking: Walter Crane, Flora’s Feast,

Part 3 Toys, Play, and Design Culture as Instruments of Political and

10 Material Culture in Miniature: Nuremberg Kitchens as

4.3 “Mania Madness” feature, January/February 1999 LEGO

10.3 Toy Kitchen, German, Schleswig-Holstein, c. 1830–1840,

Celluloid Factory Products), Meishu shenghuo no. 6 (1934),

Valentina Boretti is Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African

Megan Brandow-Faller (Ph.D., Georgetown University), Associate Professor

James E. Bryan (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Associate Professor

Sarah A. Curtis is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. She is

Serena Dyer is Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture

Colin Fanning is a doctoral student in Decorative Arts, Design History, and

Ariane Fennetaux is Assistant Professor at the University of Paris Diderot,

Michelle Millar Fisher is a doctoral candidate in architectural history at The

Bryan Ganaway completed his Ph.D. in Modern European History at the

Marie Gasper-Hulvat is Assistant Professor of Art History at Kent State

Cathleen M. Giustino (Ph.D., Modern Central European History, University

Andrea Korda is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Augustana Faculty

Karen Stock is Professor of Art History at Winthrop University. She received

Katherine Wheeler is Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Miami

Childhood by Design is indebted to the support, guidance, and interest of a

Notions of sentimentality, nostalgia and timelessness cling to toys and the

Containing material objects of remembrance for the immaterial, lived experience

of elaborate, factory-produced technological miniatures entirely unsuited to

material culture theory, recent scholarship on the material culture of childhood

Inventing the modern toy: Childhood by design

In contrast to earlier conceptual fluidity between playthings, luxury miniatures,

magnification.25 Indeed, as Brigitte Lindencrona has recently argued with regard

Compounding toys’ problematic origins as adult amusements, the late

experience, and buying power to act as rational consumers. Providing children

twentieth-century notions of the “priceless” child, increased expenditures on

fictional historical characters (the mid-nineteenth-century Swedish immigrant

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a dynamic relationship

children’s picture books illustrated by artist and socialist Walter Crane.

creativity became popularized through progressive educational playthings and

Puppenküche (or Nuremberg Kitchen), a distinct subcategory of dollhouse

routinely associated with their disciplinary home base. As tangible artifacts

Childhood: Museum Representations of Children’s Cultural Heritage,” and Rhian

22 Dan Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester

Inventing the Material Child:

Training the Child Consumer: