HISTORY IN DOLLS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 48, 26 February 1937, Page 14

HISTORY IN DOLLS

LIVERPOOL COLLECTION

PERIODS REPRESENTED

In the Children's Corner of Liverpoors Public Museum a collection of dolls is being made which promises to be the best thing of its kind outside London, states the "Manchester Guardian." Most museums have primitive puppets, or dolls that once belonged to distinguished persons, but it would be difficult,, except in London, to find a more representative array than has already been got together here. Even so, the authorities believe the collection has only to be made more widely known for fresh and valuable additions to be contributed. Many of the dolls of the Victorian and Edwardian period have been presented to the museum for safe keeping by women who, for perhaps half a century or more, have treasured these relics of their, nursery days, hesitating to hand them over to a generation which, reared in the doctrine of non-repression, might .do irreparable damage to delicate waxen faces. Most of these dolls are beautifully and correctly dressed in period costumes which furnish a valuable commentary for the art • student and others on manners and modes of bygone days.

Apart from the dolls, the museum is getting together a collection of dolls' dresses representative of different periods, and ■ these are now being classified for exhibition. Many, in addition to their historical value, are specimens of fine needlework such as is rarely employed on dolls' dresses nowadays, when some of the most popular dresses take the form of knitted woollen pullovers—soft and pleasant to the •uvenile embrace, but limited in their appeal to the antiquarian and student of design.

An official of. the museum has observed that these dolls are more popular with adults tuan with the children in whose "Corner" they occupy such an important , place.. Children: it seems, prefer toys which they, can handle, or, if they cannot handle, which give them scope for arranging and rearranging in their minds' eye. To the child dolls in showcases simply stand and stare. But to the adtSlt the dolls whisk the , imagination back a hundred, two hundred, years or more. VICTORIANS. A doll dressed according to the fashion for little girls, in 1880 recalls the impossibly good children who were the heroes and heroines of certain Victorian books for children The doll, in addition to the prim bonnet and tightly-fitting clothes, wears the solemn, self-satisfied expression that one associates with such heroines It is a relief to turn to the candid vanity expressed in the face of a young lady doll of the Edwardian era, complete in cream taffeta gown with 'the hem and train embroidered in brown. She wears a feather toque and carries^ a lace parasol. She looks like a charming young woman who has married well and is a leader of fashion in her neighbourhood. Dolls of the* later Edwardian period lose personality, and when we come to the one in a r pink dress and a green hat, given by the late Queen Alexandra in 1910 to be raffled for charity and treasured in the family of the winner until handed over to the museum, we find it is just a doll and nothing more—agreeable in feature, but characterless.'

Another.showcase is devoted to dolls from China, Madeira, India, Bolivia, Africa,. Canada, Spain, Sweden, and elsewhere, some of them belonging to past generations. In these, too,'expressions are so individual that one feels that the Edwardian era, when the fashion for the china doll was so popular, was also the! era of greatest monotony in dolls. In recent years'we seem to have become more artistic in our manufacture .of dolls,, the variety arid originality in'their faces and types being' a veritable: interpretation '•of, the freedom of our age.- :