Paper Doll Memories

As children during the “Fabulous Fifties,” my sister and I enjoyed playing with paper dolls. Many hours were spent on our living room rug or on that of our Grandmother Lavenua, cutting out and arranging the clothes, accessories, and sometimes even furniture of our paper doll families. Our favorites included brides and grooms; ballerinas; movie stars: Doris Day, Vivien Leigh, Debbie Reynolds, and Elizabeth Taylor; and television stars: Roy Rogers and Dale Evans; the Mousketeers, Cubby & Karen from the "Mickey Mouse Show;" the Story Princess from the “Howdy Doody Show;” and the Lennon Sisters from the “Lawrence Welk Show.”

A special favorite was our magnetic set, “Magic Mary Jane.”

Paper dolls are a wonderful source of history, culture, literature, costume, art, marketing, and nostalgia and have been around as long as there has been paper. In Asian cultures many years ago, faces or other objects were applied to the paper used during religious rituals and ceremonies. More similar to contemporary paper dolls were the “pantins,” the jointed dancing or jumping jack puppets of eighteenth century France. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, printers printed paper dolls, mixing fun and virtue by printing stories with morals and values to accompany them. Paper dolls were a valuable treasure in early America, since paper was limited.

By the mid-1800s, paper dolls were produced as a beautifully lithographed full-color collection. The artist, Raphael Tuck, was perhaps the best known manufacturer of the vintage paper dolls of this era. The trademark style of this company was the set of vintage paper doll costumes and interchangeable heads.

There were dolls representing royalty, the children of royalty, and actors from the theater, stage, and opera. Early paper doll sets often advertised a particular product, e.g., sewing, bakery, or medicinal products. With the purchase of the product children would receive a doll or outfits.

The Boston Sunday Globe began printing paper dolls in the 1890s. Characters from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” were the subject of one of its paper doll supplements in 1896.

Women's magazines often came with a page of paper dolls for children to cut out: Ladies' Home Journal (Lettie Lane Series); Pictorial Review (Dolly Dingle); and McCall’s (Betsy McCall). The website, Betsy McCall Paper Dolls: The First Ten Years, features scanned originals from 1951 through 1961, ready to download, cut and play.  Another web site includes a brief history of McCall’s magazine and the history of the Betsy McCall paper dolls.

The popularity of paper dolls soared during the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's. Paper dolls were made and sold representing royalty, public leaders, movie stars, fantasy fairy tale style characters, comic book characters, TV characters, family groups, brides, dancers, stuffed animals, babies, and even cherubs. Public popularity waned somewhat during the 1960s , attributed to the increased popularity of television-viewing and the rise of the three dimensional fashion doll industry, i.e., Barbie, Toni, etc.

A site from which to order vintage and mint uncut paper dolls (as well as a real trip down "Memory Lane") is: http://www.papergoodies.com/scripts/default.asp.  You are certain to locate some of your old favorites!

Those Quaint, Old-Fashioned Hollyhocks

All the names I know from nurse:
Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,
Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

As a child I loved making hollyhock dolls from those quintessentially quaint summer flowers growing in my Indiana backyard. All that was needed was a wooden toothpick, one hollyhock blossom, one bud with some color just peeking out, and some tiny fern-like leaves if you wanted your Lady Hollyhock to have arms.





















After creating our hollyhock ladies, my sister and I would fashion villages in our sandbox in which they could live - at least for the rest of the afternoon…until they wilted in the summer sun…




















Below is my collection of decorative publishers’ editions featuring hollyhocks…each of which bring back memories of those hollyhock summer days of childhood.

A Beloved Doll

I received my beloved Queen Elizabeth II “Alexanderkins” doll for my seventh birthday. She was purchased by my parents from a stationers’ store in the small Indiana town of my childhood. From a very young age, I had been an ardent fan of the British royal family, collecting every photo and article I could find from local newspapers and national magazines and pasting them in scrapbooks. How thrilled I was to have this wonderful little eight-inch-tall Queen E!

The creator of this doll, Madame Alexander, was born Bertha (later changed to Beatrice) Alexander in 1895, the daughter of Russian immigrants to the United States. Bertha grew up living in an apartment over her father's doll hospital, the first one in the United States, located on Grand Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side. As a child she often played with the mainly German- and French-made dolls left for her father’s attention.

After her marriage, Madame Beatrice Alexander Behrman founded The Alexander Doll Company in 1923. Working out of her kitchen with only $1600 worth of operating capital, she adopted the title of 'Madame' and started a cottage industry business which eventually moved to a studio in downtown Manhattan. There, Madame Alexander conceived the ideas for new dolls, assisted in sewing the dolls and their costumes, and developed shop accounts.

Madame Alexander initiated a series of “firsts” in the doll industry. She created composition dolls with painted features and sleep eyes, using distinctive face molds; brought feature baby dolls to market; and pioneered the use of hard plastic as a new medium. She also created the first doll based on a licensed character (Scarlett O'Hara from Gone with the Wind), which led to the widespread production of dolls based on characters from popular books (i.e. Little Women and Alice in Wonderland) and motion pictures; and was also the first to create dolls modeled after famous people or celebrities, such as Queen Elizabeth II, the Dionne quintuplets, etc. In 1955, Madame Alexander's company produced the first fashion doll with an adult figure (Cissy) -- a full four years before the appearance of the "Barbie" doll.

Madame Alexander believed that dolls should engage the imagination and contribute to a child's happiness and understanding of the world. These fine quality and beautifully crafted dolls continue to be favorites for children and doll collectors throughout the world. Beatrice Alexander Behrman, “Madame Alexander”, died in 1990 at the age of 95.

Raggedy Ann and Andy

Raggedy Ann, and her brother, Andy, are the best-known and most adored rag dolls. They began as literary characters by the author, Johnny Gruelle, in whimsical tales of fantasy and make-believe with attributes of kindness, spunk, and trustworthiness.

Johnny Gruelle was born in Arcola, Illinois in 1880, the son of landscape and portrait artist Richard (R.B.) Gruelle. The family eventually moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. There, mixing with his parents' artistic and literary friends (among them, the well-known “Hoosier poet,”James Whitcomb Riley), young Johnny developed a strong love of region, and a penchant for the fine art of storytelling.

When Gruelle reached adulthood, he became a political cartoonist for several midwestern newspapers and, ultimately, a freelance illustrator, accepting a position with The New York Herald, creating a weekly Sunday comic, "Mr. Twee Deedle".

Sometime around 1900, it has been said that Johnny retrieved a long-forgotten rag doll, made by his mother for his aunt, from the Indianapolis attic of his parents’ home.Legend has it that in 1915 he designed a folksy, whimsical doll based on this rag doll and named it after two of James Whitcomb Riley’s most popular poems, "The Raggedy Man" and "Little Orphant Annie." In Gruelle’s introduction to Raggedy Ann Stories, a literary character named Marcella (named after his real-life daughter, Marcella Delight Gruelle) finds Raggedy Ann in her grandmother's attic and takes it to her for repairs.

The real-life Marcella Gruelle had always had an influence on her father's artwork; and she and her toys inspired Gruelle’s storylines and ideas for playthings. Sadly, the real-life Marcella died in 1915, at age 13, from an infected vaccination. In the same month of Marcella's death, Gruelle had been granted final approval by the U.S. Patent office for his doll, that he had designed, called "Raggedy Ann." It has been said that Gruelle gave his storybook Raggedy Ann a candy heart right from the start, which was the invincible, spiritual source of Raggedy Ann's sweet outlook and kindly ways. Worth Gruelle, Johnny's son (who would have been 5 or 6 at the time), distinctly recalls being sent to the confectioners shop to buy candy hearts to be sewn into the chest of each doll, picking out the "I Love You" hearts from those with other messages.

The Raggedy Ann Stories were published in 1918, and subsequent books were published thereafter. In 1929, Gruelle gave Marcella her own volume of tales, entitled, Marcella: A Raggedy Ann Story.

Matryoshka Dolls of Prague and Krakow

I took the following photos of Matryoshka, a.k.a, babushka, dolls, in Prague and Krakow. Matryoshkas are sets of dolls of decreasing sizes placed one inside the other. The word "matryoshka" is derived from the Russian female first name "Matryona", and the word "babushka" is the Russian word for grandmother.

The original matryoshka were created by Vasily Zvyozdochkin, a wood carver and designed and painted by Sergey Malyutin, a folk crafts painter at the estate of Russian industrialist and patron of arts, Savva Mamontov. The design was inspired by a set of Japanese wooden dolls representing the Seven Gods of Fortune. This original set consisted of eight dolls -- the outermost was a girl holding a rooster, six inner dolls – the first four, all girls; the fifth doll, a boy; and the innermost, a baby. In 1900, Savva Mamontov's wife presented the dolls at the World Exhibition in Paris, where the toy earned a bronze medal.




















A set of matryoshkas consists of a wooden figure which separates, top from bottom, to reveal another figure of the same sort inside, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on. The number of nested figures is traditionally at least five, but can be much more - up to several dozen with sufficiently fine craftsmanship. Traditionally the outer layer is a woman, dressed in a sarafan, a traditional Russian long, shapeless jumper dress (pinafore) worn as Russian folk costume by women and girls. The figures inside may be of either gender; the smallest, innermost doll is typically a baby fashioned from a single small piece of wood (and hence non-opening). The artistry is in the painting of each doll, which can be extremely elaborate.



Matryoshka dolls are often designed to follow a particular theme, for instance peasant girls in traditional dress, as my photos depict; but the theme can be anything, from fairy tale characters to world leaders.

The Marionettes of Prague

During our recent trip to Prague, I was enchanted by the beautiful marionettes for sale in many shops. They brought back happy childhood memories of the marionette and puppet shows my sister, friends and I often produced!