Colonial Dolls and Toys

       In the year 1695 Mr. Higglnson wrote from Massachusetts to his brother in England, that if toys were imported in small quantity to America they would sell. In very small quantity, we fancy, though the influence of crown and court began to be felt in New England, and many articles of luxury were exported to that colony as they were to Virginia.
       According to our present ideas, playthings for children in colonial time were few in number, save the various ones they manufactured for themselves. They played more games, and had fewer toys than modern children. In 1712, on the list of rich goods brought into Boston by a privateersman and sold there, were "Boxes of Toys." In 1743 the Boston News Letter advertised "Dutch and English Toys for Children," and Mr. Ernst says Boston had a flourishing toy shop at that date. Other towns did not, as we know from many shipping orders.
       The Toy Shop or Sentimental Preceptor, one of Newberry's books, gives a list of toys which the young English scholar sought; they are a looking glass, a "spying glass," a " fluffed dog," a pocket-book, a mask, a drum, a doll, a watch, a pair of scales. Few of these articles named would really be termed toys. Some of the games such as top-spinning, hoop-rolling, and the various games of ball, required toys to carry them on.
       I have often been asked whether the first childish girl emigrants to this solemn new world had the comfort of dolls. They certainly had something in the semblance of a doll, though far removed from the radiant doll creatures of this day; little puppets, crude and shapeless, yet ever beloved symbols of maternity, have been known to children in all countries and all ages; dolls are as old as the world and human life. In the tombs of Attica are found classic dolls, of ivory and terracotta, with jointed legs and arms. Sad little toys are these; for their human guardians are scattered dust. Dolls were called puppets in olden times, and babies. In the Gentleman's Magazine London, September, 1751, is an early use of the word doll, ''Several dolls with different dresses made in St. James Street have been sent to the Czarina to show the manner of dressing at present in fashion among English ladies." This circulation of dressed dolls as fashion transmitters was a universal custom. Fashion plates are scarce more than than a century old in use. Dolls were sent from house to house, from town to town, from country to country, and even to a new continent. 

       These babies for fashion models came to be made in large numbers for the use of milliners; and as the finest ones came from the Netherlands, they were called "Flanders babies." To the busy fingers of Dutch children, English and American children owed many toys besides these dolls.

Two tiny dolls standing only a few inches tall with dollhouse furnishings from the Colonial Period.

"What the children of Holland take pleasure in making.
The children of England take pleasure in breaking."

       Fashions changed, and the modish raiment grew antiquated and despised; but still the " Flanders babies " had a cherished old age. They were graduated from milliners' boxes and mantua-makers' show rooms to nurseries and play-rooms where they reigned as queens of juvenile hearts. There are old ladies still living who recall the dolls of their youth as having been the battered fashion dolls sent to their mammas.
       The best dolls in England were originally sold at Bartholomew Fair and were known as "Bartholomew babies." The English poet, Ward, wrote:

"Ladies d'y want fine Toys
For Misses or for Boys"
Of all sorts I have Choice
And pretty things to tease ye.
I want a little Babye
As pretty a one as may be
With head-dress made of Feather."

       In Poor Robins Almanack, 1655 is a reference to a "Bartholomew baby trickt up with ribbons and knots "; and they were known at the time of the landing of the Pilgrims. Therefore it is not impossible that some Winslow or Winthrop maid, some little miss of Bradford or Brewster birth, brought across seas a Bartholomew baby and was comforted by it.
       A pathetic interest is attached to the shapeless similitude of a doll named Bangwell Putt (shown at bottom). It is in the collection at Deerfield Memorial Hall. It was cherished for eighty years by Clarissa Field of Northfield, Massachusetts, who was born blind, and whose halting but trusting rhymes of longing for the clear vision of another world are fastened to the plaything she loved in youth and in old age.
       The "White House Doll" (shown above) spent the days of her youth in the White House at Washington, with the children of the President, John Quincy Adams, and is still cherished by his descendants.

Left, A doll's wicker coach. Center, a Chinese coach and horses. Right, an old tin toy horse and buggy.

       Skillful jack-knives could manufacture homemade dolls' furniture. Birch bark was especially adaptable to such uses. The wicker cradles and "chaises" of babies were copied in miniature for dolls. Tin toys were scarce, for tin was not much used for domestic utensils. A tin horse and chaise over a hundred years old is shown above, and a quaint plaything it is. The eternal desire of a child for something suggestive of a horse found satisfaction in home-made hobby-horses ; and, when American ships wandered over the world in the India trade, they brought home to American children strange coaches and chariots of brilliant colors and strange woods; these were often comical copies of European shapes, sometimes astonishingly crude, but ample for the ever active imagination of a child to clothe with beautiful outlines. An old coach is pictured above, with the box in which it was originally packed. It is marked Leghorn, but is doubtless Chinese.
       The word "jack " as a common noun and in compound words has been held to be a general term applied to any contrivance which does the work of a boy or servant, or a simple appliance which is subjected to common usage. In French the name Jacques was a term for a young man of menial condition. The term "country jake " is of kindred sense. Jack lord, jack meddler, jackanapes, Jack Tar, smoke-jack, jack-o'-lantern, black-jack, jack-rabbit, the term jack applied to the knave in playing cards, and the expressions jack-at-a-pinch, jack in office, jack in bedlam, jack in a box, jack of all trades, and many others show the derivative meaning. Hence jack-knife may mean a boy's knife. In English dialect the word was jack-lag-knife, also jack-a-legs, in Scotch, jock-te-leg - these by a somewhat fanciful derivation said to be from Jacques de Liege, the celebrated cutler.
       A good jack-knife was the most highly desired possession of a boy. Days of weary work and hours of persistent pleading were gone through with in hundreds of cases before the prize was secured. Barlow knives had a century of popularity. Some now in Deerfield Memorial Hall are here shown. Note the curved end, a shape now obsolete, but in truth an excellent one for safe pocket carriage. Knives of similar shape have been found that are known to be a century and a half old. I have never seen in America any of the old knives used as lovers' tokens, with mottoes engraved on them, referred to by Shakespeare. The boy's stock of toys was largely supplied by his own jack-knife: elder pop-guns, chestnut and willow whistles, wind-mills, water-wheels, box-traps, figure 4 traps. Toy weapons have varied little from the Christian era till today. Clubs, slings, bows and arrows, air-guns, are as old as the year One. Ere these were used as toys, they had been formidable weapons. They were weapons still, for some years of colonial life. In 1645 court of Massachusetts ordered that all boys from ten to sixteen years old should be exercised with bows and arrows.
       Skating is an ancient pastime. As early as the thirteenth century Fitzstephen tells of young Londoners fastening the leg-bones of animals to the soles of the feet, and then pushing themselves on the ice by means of poles shod with sharp iron points.
       Pepys thought skating " a very pretty art " when he saw it in 1662, but it was then a novelty to him, and he was characteristically a little afraid of it; justly disturbed, too, that the Duke of York would go" though the ice was broken and dangerous, yet he would go slide upon his scates which I did not like - but he slides very well."
       Wooden skates shod with iron runners were invented in the Low Countries. Dutch children in New Netherlands all skated, just as their grandfathers had in old Batavia. The first skates that William Livingstone had on the frozen Hudson were made of beef bones, as were those of mediaeval children. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, skating was among the many Dutch ways and doings practised by English folk in the new world. The Plymouth Pilgrims brought these Dutch customs to the new world through their long and intimate sojourn in Holland; the New Haven and Connecticut Valley settlers learned them through their constant trade and companionship with  their neighbors, the Dutch of Manhattan; but the Massachusetts Bay settlers of Boston and Salem had known these Dutch ways longer, - they brought them from England across seas, from the counties of Essex and Suffolk, where the Dutch had gone years before and married with the English.
       New England boys in those early days went skating on thin ice and broke through and were drowned, just as New England boys and girls are today, alas! Judge Sewall wrote in his diary on the last day in November, in 1696, that many scholars went to "scate" on Fresh Pond, and that two boys, named Maxwell and Eyre, fell in and were drowned.
       Advertisements of men's and boys' skates and of "Best Holland Scates of Different Sizes," show a constant demand and use. In an invoice of "sundry merchandise " to Weathersfield, Connecticut, in the year 1763, are twelve pair "small brass scates,"

'Tis true it looks exceeding nice
To see boys gliding on the ice.
And to behold so many feats
Perform' d upon the sliding skates.
But before you venture there
Wait until the ice will bear.
For want of this both young and old
Have tumbled in, - got wet and cold."

       It was not until October, 1771, that a pleasure- filled item appeared, "Boys' Marbles." In The Pretty Little Pocket Book are these lines: 

MARBLES
"Knuckle down to your Taw.
Aim well, shoot away.
Keep out of the Ring,
You'll soon learn to Play.

MORAL
"Time rolls like a Marble,
And drives every State.
Then improve each Moment,
Before its too late."

       Boys played with them precisely as boys do now. The poet Cowper in his Tirocinium says of the
games of his school life: 

" The little ones unbutton'd, glowing hot
Playing our games and on the very spot
As happy as we once, to kneel and draw
The chalky ring, and knuckle down at taw."

       The terms used were the same as those heard today in school yards: taws, vent, back-licks, rounces, dubs, alleys, and alley-taws, agates, bull's-eyes, and commoneys. Jackstones was an old English game known in Locke's day as dibstones. Other names for the game were chuckstones, chuckie-stones, and clinches. The game is precisely the same as was played two centuries ago; it was a girl's game then - it is a girl's game now. Battledores and Shuttles were advertised for sale in Boston in 1761; but they are far older than that. Many portraits of children show battledores, as that of Thomas Aston Coffin. All books of children's games speak of them. It was, in fact, a popular game, and deemed a properly elegant exercise for decorous young misses to indulge in. (from Child Life In Colonial Days by Earle, 1899)

Left, Bangwell Putt Doll. Right, skates from Colonial America.

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