The Development Of The Dollhouse
The Dollhouse, that most popular and well-played with toy for little girls (and many a
little boy!) is a rarity - a traditional toy with few gimmicks whose interest still
endures for today's technically-savvy younger generation. In England (dollhouses
originated in the Europe of the sixteenth century) it is known not as a Dollhouse but a
'Dolls' House', and that is how I'll occasionally to refer to it as we look back at the
origins of the these often exquisite miniatures homes.
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Are dolls' houses really for children, or for adults?! A surprisingly large number of
grown-ups are passionate about them, with Dollhouse societies and internet forums
flourishing. These adult-owned dolls' houses may be considered to be 'museum
pieces' - albeit no doubt they are very personal to their owners, but they are probably
not to be played with. And so it was with the very first European dollhouses which
date back to the 16th century.
Known as 'baby houses', they were not dolls' houses as we now conceive them ('baby'
simply meant 'small') and their purpose was certainly not the entertainment of
children, much less to be handled and touched. In fact they were not even in the
shape of a house, but were a collection of display cases within which each would
contain a separate miniature 'room'. What was the purpose of the 'baby house'? Most
certainly not as a child's play thing - filled with miniature architectural details,
furniture and fabric furnishings, they were for adults to admire and were
commissioned by wealthy households in Germany, England and Holland as little
'cabinets of curiosity'.
By the mid sixteenth century, 'baby houses' looked like the dolls' houses we would
now recognize - those cabinet rooms arranged into the shape of a house: topped with
a roof and their opening doors finished as a house exterior. Some records indicate that
one purpose of these dolls' houses would have been the instruction of the young girls
and servants of a household in domestic skills and the running of a house. These may
have been simpler models - others however, built mainly for wealthy aristocratic
women were astonishingly elaborate and beautifully finished, complete with glazing
bars. Real houses and rooms within them were painstakingly reproduced at miniature
scale. These dolls' houses would have been manufactured not by specialists in
miniature (who did not exist at the time) but instead by those same individual
craftsmen who made full size buildings.
Beautiful show-house dollhouses continued to be made during the 17th and 18th
centuries - you can see some lovely examples at London's Victoria and Albert
Childhood Museum. During the nineteenth century however, the advent of mass
production saw companies such as Christian Hacker in Germany and Evans &
Cartwright in England, beginning to manufacture factory-produced houses, dolls and
furniture and for the first time for the middle classes. It was at this point that the dolls'
house became to be considered as a toy for children rather than a display for adults.
By the end of the 19th century, the Bliss Manufacturing Company of Pawtucket,
Rhode Island was producing children's dolls' houses for the American market,
although the German models in particular were also imported to the United States. It
is in dollhouses by companies like Bliss that we see the evolution of the house from a
perfect replica of a real, full-scale building to a toy made to appeal to children with
flat painted, simplified exteriors (cheaper, of course!) and certain recognizable
conventions such as the four-paned window. Interiors were often decorated with
lithographed paper.
Whilst during the 20th century dollhouses became cheaper, simpler and available to
the masses, no account of their history could possibly be complete without mention
of the grandest and most impressive showpiece dolls' house of all time - the Queen
Mary Dolls' House commissioned by the Queen herself in 1920 as a 'gift to the
nation' and displayed today at Windsor castle. Finished to an astonishing degree of
accuracy, it included work from 1,500 of England's finest craftsmen, manufacturers
and miniature specialists. Three floors high, it had working lifts, running cold AND
hot water and was fitted with electric power. From the grandest rooms to the lowly
servants quarters, including a wine cellar and a garden, no detail was omitted making
it both a superb record of a grand house of the time and an unmissable treat for
dollhouse enthusiasts who visit it today from all over the world. You can visit the
Windsor Castle official website for information.
After World War Two, the scale of mechanized dollhouse production stepped up a
pace as the appeal of the dollhouse spread throughout society. Finally, the 1950's saw
a move away from wood towards painted sheet metal houses with plastic furniture.
Cheaper materials such as tin litho, plastic and fibreboard meant that the dolls' house
could finally evolve from a plaything for wealthy adults to a popular children's toy,
available to all.