How Our Christmas Toys are Made.

Evening Star, Issue 8719, 11 January 1892, Page 4

How Our Christmas Toys are Made.

One of the largest toy-dealers in Paris is named Raymond. Asked by a visitor if there were any novelties being prepared in toydom this year for the colonies, he replied:— Oh, yes, there is always something new springing up in toydom, especially at this Christmas season of tho year. Here, for instance, is one of our latest novelties ; it is the talking doll, which Mr Edison has recently introduced. Its linguistic accomplishments surpass of our ordinary dolls, whose vocabulary is limited to the words 11 papa ” and ” mamma. How it works ? Well, you see, each puppet contains a concealed phonograph that reproduces as many as thirty words, which have been recorded upon a narrow metal cylinder. This wheel is revolved by means of a spring, and the sounds are delivered by the usual method, the mouthpiece being hidden under the clothing of the doll, just below the neck. The effects produced are fairly satisfactory, hut the illusion would be more complete if the apparatus were applied to stuffed parrots, for there is a marked tendency to a croak in tho tone of the phonograph. It is, however, too expensive an aiticle to find ready buyers in every household. Speaking of dolls, have you noticed the great change that has come over our French dolls within the last few years? For a long time the English taste was better than ours. An English doll is always an imitation of a child, while ours was the counterfeit of a very much over-dressed and ultra-fashion-able young lady. Our object was to give the budding mind a toy which would serve as a model of fashion ; bat this was a mistake, as the doll was often nothing else than merely out-of-date samples of the follies of grown-up people. That series of dolls you see there in the window, fat and chubby little creatures in their chemisettes, took theprizi at the show last year on the Champ de Mars. They are known as the hibii parlants or speaking babies, and are both articulating and unbreakable. Then, again, they are French, the work of French hands, and this to day is a great point with purchasers. The public will no longer buy those stiff, staring, ungraceful dolls with white leather or salmon-colored bodies, tightly stuffed with bran or hay ; they are all of German make, come from Nuremberg, and are as *' dull" as they can be. Nobody wants them. Some years ago all the dolls’ heads in hollow porcelain, with or without red hair, came from beyond the Rhine. Many French manufacturers of cheap earthenware have since the war gone into this branch of trade, and turn out charmingly pretty heads, which are a great improvement on the old Prussian trash, which delighted our mothers and grandmothers in their juvenile years. Sculptors of acknowledged merit are not ashamed to furnish models of polices ii M\s ceramiques, or dolls with porcelain heads, the best class of which have, in leaving the potters’ hands, no skull. This want is supplied by the insertion of a cork, to which a wig is attached. Tho workgirls employed in the manufacture of these dolls earn a good livelihood. They get on an average three francs, or sixty cents, a day, which is considered fair wages for a woman in Paris. One of the most noted manufacturers of French dolls isM Jutneau, who opened his factory in Montremi in 1878, and now turns out 500 hibes in a day, or upward of 180,000 in a year. He employs a thousand hands, and not only supplies to a large extent the French and European markets, but exports his wares to China, Australia, Java, and New Zealand, The dolls’ clothes ore the work of milliners and doll makers. The sizes of onr dolls being all numbered, and their shoes, clothes, and hats numbered to correspond, the little girl who requires a new doll’s mantle or pair of shoes has only to go to the toy shop and state the number of her doll to obtain something exactly fitting it. Onr great quarrel with Germany for some time past arose leas from the loss of Alsace and Lorraine than on account of the playthings that are sold in Pari?. That a child’s toy should be made a bone of contention between two powerful nations may not at first sight seem clear. But when I tell you that, until quite recently, large quantities of the cheap toys sold in France were manufactured in Prussia, you will at once understand the cause of our dispute. Why not undersell the importers of these wares? Well, that is exactly what we wets aiming at and what we have done, Nuremberg was formerly the great storehouse for toys, French industry nowadays has cut Nnremburg clean out of the market, and even Mannheim has been superseded. The wood and bone carvings of Saint Claude, in the department of the Jura, have in part helped to nonplus the latter. We do not object to English toys, for there arc no better and cheaper rocking-horses, toy engines, and steamboats than those from over the Channel. A large Industry developed in England also is the manufacture of indiarubber toys. “Old Englan d" has opened within the last three years a large shop on the Boulevards, where at Christmas a genuine English display is to be seen. The English productions are, however, almost wholly confined to a few special types of goods, England excels not only in the articles I have just mentioned, but in balls of every kind and in painted wooden marionettes, to say nothing of the instruments required for her national games. A hundred years ago, when tennis was still the favorite pastime of French noblemen, a racket, to be good, must have borne the mark of Blois upon it; to-day such a thing as a French-made racket is not to be found ; and though croquet was adopted here as scon as it was discarded in England, we are atill obliged to get {ill our croquet boxes from over the Channel. We, however, surpass England and every other country in the making of dolls and dolls dresses, in fashioning animals out of cardboard, and in all mechanical toys ; that is, toys which are worked by some simple contrivance other than steam. Onr kitchens, grocery stores, stables, forts, bedroom arrangementa, on a small scale for boys and girls, are another specialty. The dolls aro sometimes placed in a sort of tableau arrangemenfc* every part of which Is minutely perfect. For instance, here is a drawing room in which the mimic upholstery fa of the richest description; the toy ladies are supposed to be drinking coffee from a diminutive set of real Sevres porcelain ; th’e dook upon the mantel she»f has a tiny mechanism that makes it go j and tj>,e pianoforte, small as it appears, is no dumb show when the keys are touphed. Toy boats, which in their construction go through a dozen different hands, are very cheap, though the whole of tho work is done by hand. In one Paris manufactory out in the Marais quarter, where most of the Paris toys are made, as many as 10,000 sailing boats are turned out every year.

Each country no doubt has its own specialty in the fabrication of playthings; so that all Europe, in a way, must bo laid under contribution to stock a good toy shop. Until quite recently the best leaden soldiers ome from Saxony, the best humming-tops from Holland; Northern Italy makes squeaking Puaehss and drumming rabbits, while Switzerland and Southern Tyrol have a practical monopoly of animals carved out of wood. The manufacture of thesp latter toys mav bo considered a monopoly of thp flourishing little village of St. Ulrlob, in Southern Tyrol. I have been there. It is the gve&t storehouse from which the chief toy traders draw their inexhaustible supplies. The art ip said to have been introduced into the valley auout the beginning of the last century. As soon as the boys and girls can handle a knife they begin to carve the form of some animal or toy which is the peculiar line of the family. This, one of the odd facts in connection with the trade, Each family has its own special line, from which it does not swerve. Soma carve, some paint, spme gild. The painters often work only in one particular color. They use no models, and work entirely by rule of thumb. Long practice enables them to turn out the tiny objects, everyone as much alike as if it had been oast in a mould. Some will out out lions, tigers, camels, and elephants; others sheep, ojeen, and deer; others, again, chiefly birds} while another family will produce the queerly-dressed men and women popularly supposed to represent Hogb and his seven hnman companions. There are several warehouses where the articles thus made are sold; but there are two leading merchants who act as wholesale exporters, buying the oarvpd work either from the

people themselves or from minor agents, who realise a small profit by acting as middlemen. It is the funniest place 1 have ever seen. Here all the numerous toys of that class mostly spring into being: Noah’s arks, armies of wooden soldiers (on horseback and on foot), farmyards of every size, dolls’ furniture of every shape, sets of teacups and saucers, all kinds of domestic utensils, and little wooden horses, little wooden carts, etc. The trees from which the things are made are a soft pine, very easily worked. They grow in abundance in the district. So cheaply are these toys made that animals about five inches in height, and very artistically, if roughly, carved, are now sold in Paris at a cent apiece. Of course we cannot compete with a market like this, nor shall we ever attempt to do so. A large number of our cheap toys are, however, manufactured in French prisons, and nearly all those sold in the public bazaars are from this source.

Toys should be educational. Not that a child should look upon his play as a lesson, or it will altogether cease to be play. Certain toys, if well selected, will impart a vast amount of instruction without any mental strain. Give a tot five or six years old a box of these constructive blocks and he will puzzle over it for days, try every sort of arrangement, and unwittingly acquire some important mechanical methods. What is true of the box of bricks is also true of a number of other toys. Of these I may mention magnetic fish, hydrostatic toys with water wells and fountains, the kaleidoscope, the magnetic wheel, and more. All these involve scientific laws which a child may understand with little difficulty. A genuine bona fide cooking stove is an excellent toy to put into the hands of a young girl. Pretending to cook is largely played at by children of all countries. These stoves, though on a small scale, are made large enough to be capable of dressing a small dinner. By a course of instruction in play-cooking, or by simply imitating the more serious work of the cordon bleu, a most useful game may bo introduced into many households. Indiarubber balls are now in a measure replaced by an article manufactured out of celimose, which bounds beautifully, and is sold dirt cheap. The navigable balloon (which doesn’t navigate at all, with its model aeronauts), the orchestrion, and the torpedo boat are still favorites. Punch, of course, still reigns supreme in the innocent hearts of little monsieur and mamselle. Ho is aged, he is hideous, with long hooked nose and deeply farrowed visage, he wears a grotesque costume, made up of manycolored patches. His legs aro twisted, and he has a formidable hump on his back, while his breast bone protrudes in most ungainly fashion. Yet our French children delight in his deformity, and every boy and girl you meet hugs Punchinello in a close embrace. Then there is the bossu guiri — the hunchback cured. This is a great favorite among the people. It represents a doctor in cocked hat and scarlet coat, armed with a carpenter’s plane, hard at work planing down his ipatient’s hump. The work begins; the ■patient, laid upon the carpenter’s bench, utters a plaintive squeak each time the tool is placed over his deformity, at which the children go into a fit of laughter. Politics are finding their way into this season’s toys. Tho crashing defeat of the has brought out again a brass girncrack entitled “ What has become of him ?” Him, of course, is tho general. He stands in full military uniform by the side of a large soup tureen, which he contemplates with a chop-fallen countenance. Soon as tho question which gives its name to the toy is put, you touch a spring in the handle, when France’s whilom hero topples over and plunges head-foremost into a huge piece of porcelain ware. Boulanger’s partizans retaliate with a mechanical toy too expensive to be sold by the hawker?. It is a long, thin, blonde figuro-of a whiskered lawyer, dressed in the black gown of a magistrate, with spectacles on his nose and a glass of w'ater on the desk before him. This is the redoubtable M. Quesnay De Beaurepaire, the general advocate, who took such a leading part in the provocation of the general before the high court of justice. He is represented in the act of reading tne famous indictment which brought about the condemnation and sudden departure of the former friend of the Dachesse d’Uzea.