What is this? Dead spider? Scrap off the floor? It’s quite small as you can tell by the needle.
It is a discarded bonnet. I have been dressing the one inch jointed Jane Austen dolls; this bonnet didn’t quite come up to scratch (I’m my own worst enemy – but you know that.)
We don’t actually have evidence for Jane Austen herself having dolls. She was farmed out as a baby to day care with a family until she was three. This was common practice in Georgian England, where ideas about the development of the brain and rationality held that children were not very sentient until they were three or four. Happily there are pictures of contemporary children holding dolls, and surviving examples in collections to prove that there were plenty of dolls in Georgian and Regency England.
This is not this first time I’ve visited doll’s dolls in the age of Jane Austen. Surviving Regency dolls are quite fetching, often jointed wood, sometimes with various composition plaster-type overlays on the face to make a base for the painted features. These Georgian dolls and earlier dolls are the descendants of the Bartholomew babies in that most survivors are English. Possibly because of Bartholomew Fair, England, certainly from the sixteenth century for at least two or three hundred years, was the doll capital of Europe. In the later eighteenth century we find the start of the mass import of wooden dolls from the traditional German toymaking areas. The German dolls were the dolls that Queen Victoria was so fond of dressing when she was a child.
To modern eyes the English mid eighteenth century dolls in court Mantuas, the dresses with the huge skirts, like shelves resting on the hips, are not as attractive as the slim Regency dolls in their wispy white dresses. The life size court Mantuas must have been a trial to their owners, some of the dresses incorporated strings and pulleys so that the ‘shelves’ on the hips could be collapsed or drawn upwards to allow the wearer through a doorway.
For these reasons of attractiveness this is not the first time I have visited Regency doll’s dolls.
Here they are in their bonnets and lacy dresses. I have managed eight.
As with every doll I have ever made they have more hand appeal than photographic lure.
You can see them in person in a week.
A week! EEK!
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