CHILDREN'S TOYS
_Behold the child, by nature's kindly law
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder but as empty quite._
--_Essay on Man. Alexander Pope, 1732._
In the year 1695 Mr. Higginson 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.
[Illustration: An Old Doll]
_The Toy Shop or Sentimental Preceptor_, one of Newbery'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 already alluded to, such as top-spinning, hoop-rolling, and
the various games of ball, required toys to carry them on; but they
seemed to fall into classification more naturally in the chapter on
games than in this one.
[Illustration: An Old Doll]
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 terra-cotta, 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 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.
[Illustration: French Doll]
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. It was a rhymed reproach to the latter that--
"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 Robin's Almanack_, 1695, 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 facing page 370. 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.
Nothing more absurd could be fancied than the nomenclature "French"
attached to the two shapeless, inelegant creatures, a century old,
shown on pages 364 and 367. Yet gawky as they are, they show signs
of hard usage, which proves them to have had a more beloved life
than the case of elegant Spanish dolls, on page 389, which were
evidently too fine ever to be touched. The "White House Doll" 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.
[Illustration: French Doll]
Skilful jackknives could manufacture home-made 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 on page
373, 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 gay 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 shown on page 369,
with the box in which it was originally packed. It is marked
Leghorn, but is doubtless Chinese.
[Illustration: Dolls and Furniture]
[Illustration: Chinese Coach and Horses]
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.
[Illustration: Old Jack-knives]
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, windmills, water-wheels, box-traps, figure 4 traps. Toy
weapons have varied little from the Christian era till to-day.
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
the court of Massachusetts ordered that all boys from ten to sixteen
years old should be exercised with bows and arrows.
[Illustration: Bangwell Putt]
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."
[Illustration: White House Doll]
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 mediæval 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
intercourse 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.
[Illustration: Old Tin Toy]
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 to-day, 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.
[Illustration: Doll's Wicker Coach]
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, @ 3/--£3, 16/." I do not
know the age of the skates shown opposite page 346. No date less
than a hundred years ago is ever willingly assigned to such relics.
They are similar in shape to the ones shown on page 349, in the
illustration taken from a book for children entitled _Children's
Sports_, published a century ago, which ends its dissertation on
skating with this sensible advice:--
"'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 to-day 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.