Paper dolls can be high quality, sophisticated toys or the simplest cut-out shapes. They can represent royalty and famous celebrities or children’s imagined playmates. They can be prized items in national collections or just scrap material to be thrown away.
Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood has around 100 examples of paper dolls. These range from one of the earliest, Little Fanny, published in London in 1809, to the dolls on the back of 1970s Bunty comics, to the Royal Wedding William & Kate Dress-Up Dolly Book of 2011.
Yet the most fascinating dolls are the unique, handmade versions. One such set in the Museum consists of five cardboard dolls including a woman, two boys, and two girls. The figures are painted with indoor and outdoor clothes and each doll has additional outfits to attach on top, making a total of 31 pieces–including some spare heads! Sadly, we don’t know who made these dolls, or exactly when, though the fashions are evocative of the 1930s and ’40s. I wonder if it’s significant that there’s no ‘father’ figure; perhaps the dolls belonged to children whose father was in the armed forces during the Second World War? It was certainly a time when toys were in short supply and many families made their own from whatever spare material they had at home.
We know much more about the set of dolls made for Dorothy and Kate Sherrin by their grandmother, Elizabeth Rust, in 1886. They are accompanied by a story written by Elizabeth describing how the dolls were made from unfashionable paper sold as scrap. They are of a distinctive pleated construction, which Elizabeth explains is the way she made paper dolls during her own 1820s childhood.
They certainly weren’t made for reasons of economy. Kate and Dorothy were the daughters of a famous and wealthy architect, George Sherrin, and lived at The Gate House in Essex, a ten-bedroomed Arts & Crafts property with a tennis lawn and a lake in the garden. No doubt Kate and Dorothy had a good number of toys to play with and these must have included other paper dolls since Elizabeth’s story mentions that the girls have “a paper creche” that the new dolls can join.
These two sets of paper dolls are not just attractive items but are evidence of the different ways that children acquire and play with toys. It’s amazing that such fragile items survive to tell their stories.
Susan Gardner has worked as a curator at the Museum of Childhood (Museums Galleries Edinburgh) for 30 years. During this time she has built up extensive knowledge of the collection which includes treasures from British childhoods past and present including toys, games, dolls, books, costume, photographs and objects representing life at home and school.
