Not some nobs opening Miniatura by cutting a ribbon, but the names of a very famous pair of 17th century dolls. I have been obsessed by these dolls, who now live in the V&A, for as long as I’ve been a doll maker. It is amazing that any dolls have survived from so long ago especially considering the turbulent times that the 17th century encompassed.
Yet, as I researched and did a house in 17th century style, complete with priest hole under the stairs, I discovered that, out of turbulence and civil unrest, our modern age emerged, with the foundations of all that makes Britain a great place to live. If you are researching for yourself, you could let Samuel Pepys, the diarist who lived in those times, be your guide. His writings are never far from the top of a book pile here. His voice is so authentic, partly because he wrote in code and didn’t intend us to read it. He moved among the circles of the great and good at a time of immense political upheaval, yet spent just as much time talking about his everyday life.
It is from Sam Pepys that we get our first clue as to why 17th century dolls, which were wooden, look as they do in the buff.
The jointing replicates the antique doll as far as I am able in porcelain, in miniature. As my dolls are under two and a half inches I’ve omitted the knee joints that allow the famous dolls to sit in their chairs. I have done this because I made the last five dolls to shrink. The best I have kept to take moulds from; as they get smaller the difficulties will be those authentic hip joints and the fingers of the very distinct hands.
17th century wooden dolls all have these hands. The previous 16th century dolls either had no hands, carved spoon-like hands, or knotted rope hands, which I have replicated in the kits. The reason the dolls of the later century have these distinctive hands was good old fashioned showing off. Forks for dining first appeared in England in 1608, fetched from Italy. Although two pronged forks had been known as a carving aid, prior to the appearance of individual forks for each diner, people had eaten with a knife and a spoon, or, if you’re Henry the Ate th with a chicken leg grasped in each fat fist.
Forks at first were considered a bit nancified, but not getting your fingers covered with sauce caught on. By 1663 Samuel Pepys was writing about ‘the laudable use of forks.’
Mid century the fork was occupying the same place in society as the smart phone today. I’m sure there are modern dolls with smartphones; in Pepys England even the dolls have fork shaped hands, because the doll is always in the latest fashion.
Making such dolls in porcelain, which, to get the detail in, has to be cleaned when it is just dry, before being strengthened in the kiln, is an activity with a high wastage rate, which is why many were poured but few made it all the way through.
The black spots on the face of the doll are also a fashion of the time, they are covering smallpox scars. We have to wait until the end of the next century in 1796 for Edward Jenner to notice that milkmaids don’t get the pox and invent vaccination, vacca being one Latin word for cow, though if he’d used the other we’d have had bovisation instead.
I have dressed the two men very like Lord Clapham, they have breeches, which must have been chilly round the lower legs and a shirt, waistcoat and big overcoats.
I have moved the ladies towards the end of the century. It took quite a while for women’s fashion to recover from Puritan influences, when if you wore anything other than plain black you were likely to be hauled off by the authorities. Restoration fashions were very extreme but by later Jacobean times, even though it was James the 1st and 6th who was responsible for the mass hysteria that generated the Witch Finder General and the persecution of thousands of little old ladies, the costume of well-off women was pretty and the fabrics were lighter and moved more than the stiff Tudor outfits. They are still wearing stiff corsetry down the front, but, as I’ve written before, the habit of any respectable lady of lacing herself into her corsets first thing so she could think, continued, with my grandmother, into the 1950s.
We have to wait until 1914 for Caresse Crosby to pop into a corner with baby ribbon, handkerchiefs and her ladies’ maid to invent the modern brassiere and overturn five hundred years of corsetry. By the 1920s the boyish flapper look was in fashion and with it bust binding. I remember talking to a well-endowed older friend of my mother’s who told me of her miseries as a young woman trying to flatten her bust. I also recall a couple of older lady teachers in the girl’s school I attended, also young women in the roaring twenties, who wore their bosoms dangling au naturel and slightly flattened just above the waist, and, inevitably, eventually, somewhat lower.
Whether the 17th century dolls will mould and shrink after Miniatura, I’ll find out next week. meanwhile if you’d like to visit the doll’s dolls they’ll be here
the floor plan is now on the Miniatura website so that you can plan your visit.
Or you could just wander round being amazed in the usual way.
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