[Illustration]
MEMOIRS OF
A LONDON DOLL
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: Mr. Punch Tossed the Baby Out of the Window.]
MEMOIRS
OF
A LONDON DOLL
Written by Herself
EDITED BY MRS. FAIRSTAR
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
CLARA WHITEHILL HUNT
AND
ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMMA L. BROCK
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and printed. Published August, 1922.
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.
[Illustration]
TO BOYS AND GIRLS WHO LIKE GOOD STORIES
When I was a girl, taking many a long journey in the land of
storybooks, my favorite stories were of two kinds. One was about
boys and girls who lived in the country, spending long, happy days
wading in rollicking brooks, riding on fragrant loads of hay, picking
blueberries, playing in the great barn, making pets of turtles and
field mice and all sorts of creatures. The reason I dearly loved these
stories was because, in summer, I was a country girl myself, on the
beautiful Massachusetts farm of my great-great-grandfathers. I loved to
hear my mother tell stories of her girlhood, about her good times with
the boys and girls of the little red schoolhouse, about singing school
and cattle show and sugaring off and endless pleasures delightfully
unlike those of my own experience. The queer, old-fashioned clothes
that we children found, on rainy days in grandmother’s attic, the
spinning wheels and candle molds and quilting frames, the quaint
cradle, the hair trunk, the “till chest,” the yellowed diary and
account books in the brass-handled desk, all made us children feel very
close to those bygone days which our elders told about on evenings when
nearby uncles and aunts and cousins gathered in grandmother’s sitting
room. How small and quiet we children tried to make ourselves those
evenings in the sweet summer dark, hoping our parents would forget to
say “Bed-time for the young fry,” and drive us away from their jolly
and thrilling reminiscences of old times. Our best-loved story was
one about plucky great-grandmother and how she frightened a bear away
without a gun. And how we envied our parents when we heard that they
had played Indian and early settler in the ruins of the very blockhouse
which our forbears and their neighbors had built for refuge from King
Philip’s redskins back in the sixteen-seventies.
You see, it was quite natural that stories of old times, both of
country and city life, should have a special charm for me.
My other favorite storybooks were about English children. “A Sea
Change,” “A York and a Lancaster Rose,” “The Story of a Short Life,”
“Merrie England” were among those I read again and again. As for “The
Prince and the Pauper,” it would take a volume larger than this one if
I were to try to tell you how I felt about that beautiful story.
One of the queer things about grown-ups which boys and girls do not
often suspect is that, while we seem so different from you, with our
grey heads and bald heads and glasses, our shortness of breath when we
run for the train, our strange preference for an easy-chair and a book
by the fire rather than the chance to dance all night or to skate all
day, inside of us there is something that never grows up. And because
a part of us always stays “boy” or “girl,” what we particularly loved
when we were children we keep on particularly loving as long as we live.
So, when I am hunting for books for the children’s room shelves of
our public libraries, although I try to find those on every kind of
interesting subject--because reading in ruts is bad for any one, young
or old--I confess to keen delight when I come upon first-rate stories
of the sort that were my favorites when I was a girl.
A few years ago an old Brooklyn library was preparing to move from its
ancient quarters into a spick-and-span new building. Going over the
dusty shelves one day, I found a shabby little book in faded red covers
with funny, old-fashioned pictures among the yellowed pages. The title
of the book at once caught my fancy, “Memoirs of a London Doll.”
In two seconds I was miles and miles away from the dusty shelves of the
prosaic library on the clattering, commonplace Brooklyn street. I was
up in the Sprats’ garret room, under the eaves of the dingy tenement
on the dusky London street where the Sprat family, father, mother,
and three children, ate and slept and worked at their trade of making
jointed, wooden dolls. I followed with absorbed interest the fortunes
of what must have been the most remarkable doll ever turned out by the
Sprats, the one whose first little mother named her “Maria Poppet.”
Maria Poppet was a doll of character who kept her eyes open and who
never neglected an opportunity to learn from every event of her varied
life; who was not puffed up by association with rank and wealth nor
cast down by harrowing experiences; who valued loving hearts above
jewels and titles and the glitter and show of fashion.
Maria Poppet had fine gifts as a story-teller too. If she had been
required by one of her little mothers’ governesses to write a
composition, the task would have offered no difficulties to her. What
she saw in the London of nearly a hundred years ago she makes us
see--the Twelfth-night customs, the Lord Mayor’s Show, Punch and Judy,
the Christmas Pantomime, the Zoo, the life of little Lady Flora, waited
upon by governess and maids and powdered footmen, and the lives of the
little milliner girls, driven by cruel Aunt Sharpshins from six o’clock
in the morning until eight o’clock at night.
How delightfully puzzling are some of the quaint old words Maria Poppet
uses. She speaks of the “turbans” worn by the ladies of her day. Did
you think turbans belonged to “Arabian Nights” characters only? Maria
wore “a frock and trousers” and “stays”--or no, she wore “a small
under-bodice of white jean instead of stays”; her frock was made of
“lemon-colored merino”; her little mother pattered about the room in
“list” shoes. And Maria’s mothers did not go to the dry-goods store
nor the grocer’s, nor did they buy pies at the baker’s. They visited
the “draper’s” and the “green-grocer’s” and bought “raspberry tarts”
at the “pastry-cook’s.” And what do you suppose a “teetotum” is? And a
“tinkerum”? If you have a great-grandmother perhaps she can tell you;
and she may sing, as did my grandmother, the quaint old tunes, “They’re
all nodding” and “Cherry ripe” and others which Maria heard the London
street organ play.
Sometimes boys and girls look rather scornfully upon old-fashioned
things. They think that nothing which is not “up to date” can possibly
be as fine as modern shows. Well, I, for one, never saw a Fifth Avenue
window display--and I love to gaze into Fifth Avenue shops--more
dazzling than the pastry-cook’s window on Twelfth-night; nor a more
gorgeous parade than the Lord Mayor’s; nor a play more enchanting
than the New Grand Christmas Pantomime which the London Doll saw at
Drury-Lane Theatre in the “old-fashioned” days of the story. And I do
not believe that any American child, visiting one of our enormous,
bewildering toy departments at Christmas time, sees treasures more
truly satisfying than Lady Flora found in the London toyshops years and
years ago.
You will not wonder that when I finished reading Maria Poppet’s most
entertaining “Memoirs” I was eager to find copies of her story to place
in all our Brooklyn children’s libraries. I searched the shops in vain.
The little book had been “out of print” for many years, the book-trade
people reported.
So I treasured in my office the shabby copy I had found in the old
library, hoping that some day something would happen that would
give to all our children the fun of reading the charming story. That
something has happened at last.
Miss Seaman, as delighted as I with the London Doll’s “Memoirs,” has
persuaded The Macmillan Company to bring out a new edition of the old
story; and to make everything as nice as possible the new volume is
to be of the same size as the original book and its pages are to be
printed in the same type. Only the pictures will be different, and very
much prettier than the old pictures. I feel certain that Maria would
approve of the new dress in which her story appears.
I expect that when boys glance at the title they will immediately
decide that this story cannot possibly be interesting to them. They
will miss some good entertainment if they make that mistake. Maria
Poppet was no ordinary, coddled baby-girl doll, but a young person who
saw more interesting sights in a short time than falls to the lot of
one boy in a thousand.
I am quite sure that whoever reads this story to the last page will
close the book eager to read at once “Memoirs of a Country Doll” which
Maria hoped would sometime be made public. Alas! I fear no search in
the bookshops of London or New York would bring to light that story. I
suspect that the Country Doll, like many people we know, was better at
telling a story to her friends than in setting it down on paper.
CLARA WHITEHILL HUNT
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
Chapter I MY MAKING 1
“ II MY FIRST MAMMA 11
“ III TWELFTH-NIGHT 23
“ IV THE LITTLE MILLINERS 35
“ V MY FIRST FROCK AND TROUSERS 41
“ VI THE LITTLE LADY 51
“ VII THE WEST END OF THE TOWN 60
“ VIII A NARROW ESCAPE 67
“ IX DOLL’S LETTERS 79
“ X PLAYING WITH FIRE 88
“ XI THE PORTRAIT PAINTER 97
“ XII PUNCH AND JUDY 104
“ XIII THE CITY 111
“ XIV THE LORD MAYOR’S SHOW 124
“ XV THE LOST BRACELET 134
“ XVI THE NEW GRAND CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME 143
“ XVII CONCLUSION 166
[Illustration]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Mr. Punch Tossed the Baby out of the Window _Frontispiece_
PAGE
I Was so Frightened! I Thought He Would Break Something
Off Me 7
The Old Gentleman, Pastry-Cook and Great Cake-Maker Himself 31
And These I Always Had On When We Went Out 53
I Fell Straight into It 75
They Worked as Long as They Could See _Opposite page_ 48
Off We Went to the Tune of “I’d Be a Butterfly” 119
His Walk and Air Were Like All the Pride of Earth Put into
One Chemist’s Bottle 155
[Illustration]
Memoirs of a London Doll
CHAPTER I
MY MAKING
In a large, dusky room, at the top of a dusky house in one of the dusky
streets of High Holborn, there lived a poor doll-maker, whose name was
Sprat. He was an extremely small man for his age, and not altogether
unlike a sprat in the face. He was always dressed in a sort of tight
pinafore and trousers, all in one, that fitted close to his body; and
this dress was nearly covered with dabs of paint, especially white
paint, of which he used most in his work. His family consisted of his
wife and three children--two boys and a girl.
This poor family had but one room, which was at the top of the house.
It had no ceiling, but only beams and tiles. It was the workshop by
day, and the bedroom at night. In the morning, as the children lay
in bed, looking up, they could see the light through the chinks in
the tiles; and when they went to bed in the evening, they could often
feel the wind come down, and breathe its cool breath under their
night-caps. Along the wall on one side of the room, farthest from the
windows, the beds were laid upon the floor; the largest was for the
poor, sprat-faced doll-maker and his wife; the next largest was for
the two boys, and the smallest, up in the corner, was for the little
girl. There were two windows opposite; and a wooden bench, like a long
kitchen dresser, extended from one side of the room to the other, close
to these windows. Here all the work was done.
This bench was covered with all manner of things--such as little wooden
legs and arms, and wooden heads without hair, and small bodies, and
half legs and half arms, which had not yet been fitted together in the
joints, and paint pots and painting brushes, and bits of paper and rags
of all colors; and there were tools for cutting and polishing, and very
small hammers, and several old pill-boxes full of little wooden pegs,
and corners of scouring paper, and small wooden boxes and trays full of
little glass eyes, and glue pots and bits of wax and bits of leather,
and a small red pipkin for melting wax, and another for melting India
rubber, and a broken teacup for varnish, and several tiny, round
bladders, and tiny, tin boxes, all full of things very precious to Mr.
Sprat in his business.
All the family worked at doll-making, and were very industrious. Mr.
Sprat was of course the great manager and doer of most things, and
always the finisher, but Mrs. Sprat was also clever in her department,
which was entirely that of the eyes. She either painted the eyes, or
else, for the superior class of dolls, fitted in the glass ones. She,
moreover, always painted the eyebrows, and was so used to it, that
she could make exactly the same sort of arch when it was late in the
evening and nearly dark, before candles were lighted. The eldest boy
painted hair, or fitted and glued hair on to the heads of the best
dolls. The second boy fitted half legs and arms together, by pegs at
the joints. The little girl did nothing but paint rosy cheeks and lips,
which she always did very nicely, though sometimes she made them rather
too red, and looking as if very hot, or blushing extremely.
Now Mr. Sprat was very ingenious and clever in his business as a
doll-maker. He was able to make dolls of various kinds, even of wax,
or of a sort of composition; and sometimes he did make a few of such
materials; but his usual business was to make jointed dolls--dolls that
could move their legs and arms in many positions--and these were of
course made of wood. Of this latter material I was manufactured.
The first thing I recollect of myself was a kind of a pegging, and
pushing, and scraping, and twisting, and tapping down at both sides of
me, above and below. These latter operations were the fitting on of my
legs and arms. Then I passed into the hands of the most gentle of all
the Sprat family, and felt something delightfully warm laid upon my
cheeks and mouth. It was the little girl, who was painting me a pair of
rosy cheeks and lips; and her face, as she bent over me, was the first
object of life that my eyes distinctly saw. The face was a smiling
one, and as I looked up at it I tried to smile too, but I felt some
hard material over the outside of my face, which my smile did not seem
able to get through, so I do not think the little girl perceived it.
[Illustration: I Was So Frightened! I Thought He Would Break Something
Off Me!]
But the last thing done to me was by Mr. Sprat himself, whose funny,
white face and round eyes I could now see. He turned me about and about
in his hands, examining and trying my legs and arms, which he moved
backwards and forwards, and up and down, to my great terror, and fixed
my limbs in various attitudes. I was so frightened! I thought he would
break something off me. However, nothing happened, and when he was
satisfied that I was a complete doll in all parts, he hung me up on a
line that ran along the room overhead, extending from one wall to the
other, and near to the two beams that also extended from wall to wall.
I hung upon the line to dry, in company with many other dolls, both
boys and girls, but mostly girls. The tops of the beams were also
covered with dolls, all of whom, like those on the lines, were waiting
there till their paint or varnish had properly dried and hardened. I
passed the time in observing what was going on in the room under my
line, and also the contents of the room, not forgetting my numerous
little companions, who were smiling and staring, or sleeping, round
about me.
Mr. Sprat was a doll-maker only; he never made doll’s clothes. He said
that was not work for an artist like him. So in about a week, when I
was properly dry, and the varnish of my complexion thoroughly hardened
and like enamel, Mr. Sprat took me down--examined me all over for the
last time--and then, nodding his head to himself several times, with
a face of seriousness and satisfaction, as much as to say, ‘You are a
doll fit in all respects for the most polished society,’--he handed me
to his wife, who wrapped me up in silver paper, all but the head, and
laying me in a basket among nine others, papered up in the same way,
she carried me off to a large doll-shop not far from the corner of New
Turnstile in High Holborn.
[Illustration]