This old thing?

She has a dizzying list of titles to her name, of which I managed to snatch only a portion: most people have heard of Ballet Shoes, and, for many, it was a defining childhood book. It’s a critics’ and writers’ pet: (Dame) Jacqueline Wilson cites it as her “all-time favourite children’s book”, and the BBC has twice adapted it for television. Lots of people also know about the other ‘Shoes’ books: Dancing Shoes, White Boots, Tennis Shoes, Ballet Shoes for Anna and the Carnegie award-winning The Circus Is Coming, but maybe less are familiar with The Children of Primrose Lane, Party Shoes, the Gemma books, or Caldicott Place. Certainly, her considerable output of books for adults has largely gone unnoticed (one of which formed the basis for Ballet Shoes itself) and I myself have only read one: Saplings, an experimental novel that explores contemporary thought about child psychology in the aftermath of war. Somewhat disturbingly, it is still written from Streatfeild’s distinctive ‘child’s-eye-view’, from which vantage point it addresses issues as varied as depression, alcoholism, sex, bed-wetting, bereavement and female self-esteem (not all at once, of course).

We Three Fossils... The Fossil Vow, illustrated by Streatfeild's sister, Ruth Gervis

It has been often commented that Streatfeild’s gift is her ability to establish a rapport with her reader: she never talks down to children, and deals with difficult topics in the same way she describes everyday occurrences. Her commitment to realism in writing extends to her habit of painstakingly explaining what all the characters are thinking at all times. Thus, in Dancing Shoes, the just-orphaned Rachel is considered unloving and aggressive because she took her mother’s death with equanimity: we the readers, on the other hand, are kept aware of Rachel’s trials – how she scowls to keep from crying and wants to avoid any questions that might set her off. The child-reader is nevertheless forced to see the situation from at least two perspectives simultaneously, a common approach to Literature since Samuel Richardson, but amazingly innovative in writing for children. The result is a style that demands a responsibility from its readers as well as understanding: it accepts that life is often unfair, but invites children to consider how best to respond.

Streatfeild was famously the ‘unattractive’ middle girl in a clergyman’s family of three daughters. After the ‘beautiful child’ tradition of nineteenth-century children’s literature (best represented by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Lewis Carroll), her novels frequently focus on the rebellious, the stubborn and the plain, than which no better example exists than the ‘black-doggish’ Jane Winter in The Painted Garden, which meta-fictionally reworks Hodgson Burnett’s most famous novel on a film set in Hollywood. In the absence of naive beauty and idyllic country settings, her characters must make their way on merit, and, not only plain, they are often money-minded to a startling degree: “The law lets me work; I don’t need a licence, and I can do what I like with my own money,” asserts Pauline, in Ballet Shoes, at fourteen (and she gets her way).

Dr Jakes and Dr Smith, by Ruth Gervis.

The central conceit of this novel – the absence of Great Uncle Matthew (“Gum”), who adopts the three ‘Fossils’ and then dashes off to “some strange islands” – means that the book features an essentially all-female cast. Aside from the Fossils themselves – Pauline, Petrova and Posy – the house in Cromwell Road also contains Sylvia, the children’s guardian (“Garnie”); Nana, a no-nonsense disciplinarian; Theo Dane, a dancing teacher at the Children’s Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, and Dr Smith and Dr Jakes, doctors of Maths and English respectively. These last two later move on to “a charming flat in Bloomsbury” and although aged seven I never thought to ask why two female doctors should have to live together, now I wonder if Streatfeild has not rather audaciously put a lesbian couple in a 1930s kids’ book (there are some rumours about the nature of the friendships she shared with women herself, and she has been claimed variously for a lesbian and an asexual). Certainly the illustration of the Doctors by Ruth Gervis suggests she saw it that way, even if Streatfeild may not have done: they are depicted in a stereotypical style that has barely changed since the novel was written in 1936.

The only man in sight, apart from the absent Gum, is Mr Simpson, a border who teaches Petrova all about cars and then must go back to his ‘rubber trees’ in Kuala Lumpur. And while Pauline and Posy have looks and interests to endear them to the most pink and fluffy reader going, Petrova remains as stubbornly boyish as that perennially scruffy heroine of female fiction, Little Women‘s Jo: when the dancing school plan is first mentioned, Nana hopes it will “turn her more like a little lady” – Petrova “never plays with dolls, and takes no more interest in her clothes than a scarecrow”.

Alas for Nana, Petrova ends up spending auditions “flying an imaginary airplane on a new route to China”, and by the end of the book, is a determined aviator: “Amy Mollison and Jean Batten will be [in the history books], but not as important at you”, promises Pauline, imagining the distinctly un-fluffy story such books will tell: ‘[She] found routes by which goods could be carried at greater speed and less cost, and so she revolutionized trade.” Hardly the dreams of a ‘beautiful child’.

For Petrova, as for so many of Streatfeild’s children not given to performing art (and there are a surprising number, despite her reputation), the most important lesson of stage school is self-sufficiency, a goal underlined across all the books by the fact that the overwhelming majority of child-characters have no parents to speak of, or are lumbered with a domineering guardian to struggle against (notably in Ballet Shoes For Anna and White Boots). With their realist emphasis, and the lessons that ‘even’ little girls can get on in a world assailed by stupidity, war, and even natural disasters, I can think of no better author to recommend to absolutely everyone you know.

K

KNICKERBOCKER

“I should say that a walking suit in which one could not walk, and a winter suit which exposes the throat, head, and feet to cold and damp, was rather a failure,” said Dr. Alec [who had his own ideas about what his niece should be wearing.]

“Alec, if it is a Bloomer, I shall protest. I’ve been expecting it, but I know I cannot bear to see that pretty child sacrificed to your wild ideas of health. Tell me it isn’t a Bloomer!” and Mrs. Clara clasped her hands imploringly.

Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins (1875)

Nope, a knickerbocker. This is a strange word, with an uncertain trajectory from immigration to ladies’ unmentionables, and its progress will here be followed with a suitably bifurcated approach: one leg underwear and one leg outerwear. We meet in the middle.

Work it. A Bloomer from the 1850s.

The word’s first appearance is in capitalised form: Knickerbocker is the name given to ‘a descendent of the original Dutch settlers of the New Netherlands in America; hence, a New Yorker’ – the New ‘Netherlands’ becoming, of course, New ‘York’ after the English got their grubby hands on it.

The everyday appearance of the term must be attributed to Washington Irving’s 1848 History of New York, purported to have been written by one ‘Diedrich Knickerbocker’. A long chain, this name was appropriated from Irving’s pal Herman of the same name, who was in turn descended from Harmen Jansen Knickerbocker (c.1650-1720), one of the original Dutch settlers, who supposedly invented the name. Awesome.

But where are the unmentionables?

It’s Over.

These appear in the second sense of the word, a development on the first, from 1859, where it is pluralised to knickerbockers – ‘Loose-fitting breeches, gathered in at the knee; also extended to the whole costume worn with this’. Irving is once again lurking around, because this usage is said to refer to George Cruikshank’s illustrations of the same opus. Knickerbockers wear knickerbockers. Duh.

These ‘loose-fitting breeches gathered at the knee’ became, in another life, standard wear for little boys, whose breeching (the graduation to trousers) consequently became a coming-of-age moment. Short trousers, of course, facilitated easy, boisterous movement, and in Eight Cousins, quoted above, the incorrigibly fashionable Aunt Clara resents her little niece, Rose, wearing such loose-fitting bifurcated garments: ‘Dress her in that boyish way and she will act like a boy. I do hate all these inventions of strong-minded women!’

So Knickerbockers were not simply a New York trend: they were part of sartorial gender differentiation. Little girls wear restrictive petticoats to keep them ladylike; those boys who have graduated from their baby-skirts wear garments that allow them to be as boyish as necessary. It is no coincidence that, in their modern incarnation, knickerbockers are kept firmly in the domain of sportswear.

Bloomin’ ‘Eck

Cartoon from Punch, 1895.

The ‘Bloomers’ Aunt Clara has such a horror of were the pet project of another Knickerbocker. In the 1850s, Miss Amelia Bloomer, from Cortland County, New York, began a crusade to popularise the ‘Bloomer suit’, not her own invention, but eventually synonymous with her name. This was an Eastern-inspired way to wear your skirt: shorter with the aid of modest, wide-legged trousers that tapered at the knee. Modesty preserved; movement uninhibited. Job done.

But despite enthusiasm from several quarters, Miss Bloomer’s overall success was limited and bloomers themselves roundly mocked in most quarters for being just too weird. In 1859, she dropped her project altogether because of the arrival of a fresh sartorial development, immediately fashionable, sexually appealing and simple – something that, she felt, did the job of fusing modesty, comfort and practicality just as well. And the name of this marvel? The crinoline.

Underneath the Bridge.

The devoted may remember that this strange hooped structure, by virtue of moving independently of its owner, facilitated the easy movement of the legs underneath. Obviously you could not sally around bareback underneath (as you had mostly done before), and thus the ubiquity of pantalettes (elongated drawers). And here comes the bifurcated garment – not yet knickers, for they are still too long to qualify for a diminutive – relegated to underwear.

These pantalettes were not simply loose cotton trousers like the bloomer (although they could be), but frequently two separate garments, one for each leg; their intent was not to cover one’s proverbial shame, but rather to keep the legs out of sight (and rather toasty too). Thus, they frequently bifurcated at the rumpal regions rather than the legs themselves, in which form they remained until the turn of the century.

Daisy, Daisy…

It was the strange innovation of the bicycle that, for the first time since Amelia Bloomer, re-addressed the question of external female knickerbockers, for simple safety purposes. Though the haterz still hated, there was something about this new mode of transport that (literally) mobilised a whole generation of women, storming these shocking garments through to respectability on a bicycle. It may come as small surprise to learn that these sartorial liberators came swingin’ back into fashion in the 1960s, epitomised by Yves St. Laurent’s velvet knickerbocker suit, and extending to gender-neutral clothing, and jeans for both sexes.

Meanwhile, bloomers were beating a retreat up the leg as Mary Quant advanced a new weapon: the ‘mini-skirt’. For the first time, stockings and the bifurcated undergarments worn with them were conflated, and suddenly there was a need for practical brief coverings (with a name to match) to avoid flashing in the streets and, presumably, to protect the designer tights that went over them. Knickers had arrived. The decline of stockings as status quo prompted some to herald a new ‘sexless woman’ (A Good Thing), although this may also have resulted from a vogue for pre-pubescent figures combined with ambiguous schoolgirl traditions: puffed sleeves, pinafores, Mary-Janes and little boy-shorts. A strange sort of liberation, perhaps.

NEXT WEEK: L is for Lady

I

INFANT

So runs my dream: but what am I?

An infant crying in the night:

An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

LinkedIn.

Have you ever noticed how many I-words have the in/im prefix? These clarify what something is not.

Thus, in-nocent, in-nocuous = not harmful (the same root as ‘noxious’), im-potent = not powerful, in-capable = self explanatory; &c.

Infant is one such, but cleverly concealed by an unexpected etymology. Along with its archaic variants (enfaunt, infaunt), it derives from the Latin infans, which is the Greek ‘phemi’ in its plundered Roman form, ‘femi’, plus the Latinate negative (in- = ‘without’).

And phemi / femi? ‘To make known one’s thoughts, to declare’ or, simply, ‘to speak’.

Don’t Speak.

So an infant is ‘without speech’; or, as its first definition clarifies, ‘a child during the earliest period of its life (or still unborn)’ – Shakepeare’s ‘Infant, Mewling and puking in the Nurses Armes’.

Mew.

Newborns / kittens must indeed rely on ‘mewling’ for their day-to-day needs, but paradoxically such speechlessness gives them a symbolic potency that rings in the ear.

Indeed, they (babies, not kittens) have ‘spoken’ throughout history, from whistleblowing on promiscuous parents to confirmation of marital fidelity.

But hold on just one gosh-darned minute: that’s female fidelity, of course. The maternal connection is the only one you can prove, sans DNA testing. Male extra-curricular activity is neither here nor there.

And history is full of those awkward occasions when ‘speaking likenesses’ gives rise to speculation about what the child’s mother was up to nine months previously.

Mother’s Ruin.

Strangely, the infant’s own inevitable silence simply compounds the seeming power of what ‘they’ are saying: you’re hearing with your eyes rather than your ears. Or just reading.

Indeed, Paulina, the faithful lady-in-waiting in The Winter’s Tale would prove her mistress’ daughter legitimate by pointing to her book-like qualities: ‘Behold, my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father…’

Well into the seventeenth century, the village gossip could also deduce parental naughtiness through something as seemingly random as a child’s constitution: weakness or disease suggested either that the parents had been having too much sex to copulate at their full vigour, or else that conception had happened during menstruation. You slags.

And it didn’t stop there: infants could also tell tales through the very time of their arrival. It was commonly believed that young’uns entered the world nine months to the day after their conception. Consequently, no child born on a Sunday could be christened until its parents had made a public apology for their desecration of the Lord’s Day. Busted.

Even a child’s existence could be disastrously significant.

To sea, To sea…

In 1741, the retired sea-captain Sir Thomas Coram set up London’s first Foundling Hospital, whence came unfortunates from all walks of life to ensure that their screamingly ill-begotten infants would be cared for and kept from incriminating them (not necessarily in that order).

In many instances, such abandonment was the alternative to killing the child or leaving it to die. So Coram was hardly acting on a whim: the social repercussions of Sin were severe, poverty and gin dependency rife (a woman’s problem, and also a means of inducing abortions – why else ‘Mother’s Ruin’?) and the streets covered with child corpses.

Infantine... 'The Angel In The House', photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron

So Coram’s critics accused him of fostering sin, by giving it a Hospital wherein to hide: to offer succour to bastard infants was to shield the sinful and encourage further debauchery. Let the wages of sin speak loud and clear.

Speak Now, Or Forever Hold Thy Peace.

In its second meaning, infant becomes more defined: it does not simply signify a speechless-screaming babe-in-arms, but also ‘a person under legal age; a minor’ (someone who has not ‘completed their twenty-first year’).

Here it is law-based, in reference, for example, to all those boy-kings of our early royal history (how many can you name????) – whose legitimacy is the most important thing of all, taking priority over minor considerations such as… oh, I don’t know, BEING OLDER THAN SIX.

Infant in this sense connotes something like having yet to earn freedom sui juris; the legal understanding that a person is fit to govern themselves (and, in royal cases, a country), and consequent emancipation from the rule of parent, guardian or Lord Protector.

Among Spanish royals – to this day – children who are not the direct heir to the throne have the title Infante / Infanta; presumably giving us English our third definition for infant (‘a youth of noble birth’), these are princes of the blood, but they ain’t ruling nothing.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear.

It is also worth considering the more direct fate of infants’ mothers: ‘The very being or legal existence of the women is suspended during marriage’ wrote William Blackstone in 1765. A financial, legal and social dependent – like the children she bore – a wife could be ‘infantine’ through her official speechlessness, than which there is no more perfect example than Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House (1854-62):

He’s never young nor ripe; she grows

More infantine, auroral, mild,

And still the more she lives and knows

The lovelier she’s express’d a child.

Yet, like the screaming infants littering Coram’s Fields, the silent appendage speaks vicariously: dress, jewellery and inactivity declare her husband’s wealth and status; ‘mildness’ and ‘loveliness’ (like youth and innocence) embody the ideals men battle to protect, with smatterings of the overpowering Rightness of the domestic sphere.

She remains, of course, firmly on her pedestal, and statues, as we know, do not speak (unless they are late Shakespearean and have the rather badass Paulina fighting their corner).

So being infantilised does not mean saying nothing; rather, it means saying what those around you choose to hear.

NEXT WEEK: J is for Jade 

G

GIRL

And alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.
– Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)

‘Twas brillig

Picture the linguistic landscape of the thirteenth century. Full of bastard Latin, Anglo-Norman, smatterings of Anglo-Saxon crudities, and a few words whose origins nobody knows. Sometime around 1290, the word girl appeared, used to signify ‘a child or young person of either sex’, alongside clarifying compounds knave girl and gay girl (‘boy’ and, er, ‘girl’ respectively). Like some tantalisingly similar words – lad, lass, boy – its provenance is unclear, although some cunning linguists would have it derive ultimately (via some torturous and dark history) from the Greek ‘parthenos’ (=’virgin’). But yes, uh huh, you read right: in its earliest incarnation, girl was ungendered. In fact, it was not until the 1530s that its more specific application to XX chromosomes surfaced, with girl meaning ‘a female child’ – and even then, it still had its enduring reference to ‘a roebuck in its second year’, with roebuck being, naturally, the male equivalent of roe (a deer, a female deer).

Dear, dear

John Ruskin aged three and a half, by James Northcote (1882), National Portrait Gallery, London (In storage: clamour for its return!)

So the Sylvanian Deer Family would be made up of a roebuck, a roedeer, and, perhaps a (male) girl. Not actually that uncommon: after all, we classify animals via male, female and child (calf, cow, bull; pup, bitch, dog) with a third, genderless young’un alongside their sexually mature parents all the time.

Here comes an art history aside to girl’s ambiguous beginnings: glancing, for example at Queen Victoria with her family, a  young prince of Spain, or even an English merchant family of the 1740s, the gender identities of the under-6s seem, well, fluid at best. I should add that, in the case of the Spanish Royal Family, the eldest prince (Baltasar Carlos) leaps straight from painterly petticoats to politically potent riding gear and full armour with apparently no mid-point whatsoever. Another prince, the young Charles II, appears in full armour aged twelve, although in his case there were excellent practical reasons for the switchover (lol revolution). There is also James Northcote’s portrait (right) of John Ruskin, art historian, antiquarian, arguable founder of the National Trust, patron of the Pre-Raphaelites and sometime author – aged three and a half. Manly indeed.

This could speak of a reluctance to bother gendering the child until that gender could be of socio-political relevance (something infant mortality could only have encouraged), but that is not to say it went un-bemoaned by the children themselves. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke complained bitterly of his mother’s reign of sartorial terror: ‘I had to wear beautiful long dresses, and until I started school I went about like a little girl. I think my mother played with me as though I were a big doll.’ I am also reminded of the story that hit headlines in Sweden about a couple who refused to gender their two-year-old at all, for fear of falling into gender’s traps.

Not yet a woman

Beggar children are in. Alice Liddell, photographed by Lewis Carroll.

But, as we may ask of this Swedish child, what happens to girl once its gender has been set? Well, one of its first gender-specific definitions is, as of 1668, ‘a maid of all work’; sweetheart or mistress makes its appearance towards the end of the eighteenth century (as in the popular song ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’); and it appears in compound reference to prostitution – a kind girl, girl about town. These are all potentially belittling terms for female-orientated stations in life, which can nonetheless retain a flattering appeal ­– think Patsy Stone and her insistence on being referred to as ‘mademoiselle’; or, more psychotically, think Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?

So, actually, as girl grows up, it sexes up: indeed, once gendered firmly female, its sexual identity becomes more complicated, and this is something that seems to go alongside a developing idea of what early youth actually is. It is only really with the Victorians that the ‘cult of childhood’ really came into being, upheld by luminaries such as J. M. Barrie, Ruskin himself, Charles Dickens and, of course, Lewis Carroll.

This is where whispers start snaking around history, and it feels fitting that the term paedophilia erotica did not come into diagnostic existence until 1886, for this was arguably the first time childhood was regarded with fetishism (as later underlines the actions of ‘poet and pervert’ Humbert Humbert, in Nabokov’s now-notorious Lolita). Girls suddenly become not simply small genderless adults, but (feminine) symbols of what adulthood is seen to lack: innocence, purity and beauty, as in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, whose Little Nell loves to say her prayers. Dickens’ adult females fare little better, of course, and the Victorian infantalisation of women proves girl in grown-up action, and a topic for another day.

This, then, is the context for Carroll’s photography, but it is important to note that, whatever their evidence for something darker, their subject matter was by no means original: Carroll’s contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron, produced many similar images (worksafety check: mild nudity) that played on girlish simplicity for typically Victorian effect.

[She was] the most beautiful little girl that Tom had ever seen. Her cheeks were almost as white as the pillow and her hair was like threads of gold spread all about over the bed.

He wondered if she was a real live person, or one of the wax dolls he had seen in the shops.

– Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (1862-3)

A strange journey, then: a word that commences genderless and ends sexualised and technically belittling (‘the checkout girl’), but without much perceptible backlash from the female population. Are we not all Patsy Stones?

NEXT WEEK: H is for Hysteria

D

DOLL

What fascinated Ermengarde the most was [Sara’s] fancy about the dolls who walked and talked, and who could do anything they chose when the human beings were out of the room, but who must keep their powers a secret and so flew back to their places ‘like lightening’ when people returned to the room.

– Francis Hodgson Burnett, ‘A Little Princess’

Were he not Romeo called…

Barbara Millicent Roberts is actually, it turns out, called Dorothy. At least, a ‘Barbie doll’ is a tautology, since the word ‘doll’ itself was originally a nickname. (Rs and Ls are colloquially interchangeable, donchaknow – see also Harry/Hal, Mary/Moll.)

‘Doll’ as a name makes an early debut in renaissance drama: first as Doll Tearsheet in Shakespeare’s Henry IV and then as Doll Common in Jonson’s The Alchemist. These two draw in ‘Doll’s’ second meaning, which assumes a ‘Dorothy’ is so common a species as to be generic. Thus, ‘Doll’ as a pet name is quickly expanded to indicate any female ‘pet’, or indeed any female ‘mistress’ (drawing confused attention to the potentially infantalising properties of nicknames in general). Additionally, as of 1560, it could also be used to mean ‘the smallest or pet pig in the litter’ (like Wilbur). But clearly there is a double edge to Dorothy’s common-ness, since ‘common’ means ‘for the use of everyone’ (tee hee) as well as ‘numerous’ – something Doll Common’s character demonstrates nominally. ENTER THE PROSTITUTE.

Work and Play

It is only in 1700 that ‘Doll’ loses its capital letter and acquires something of its modern sense. The dictionary defines this as ‘an image of a human being (commonly of a child or lady) used as a plaything; a girl’s toy-baby’. It is no longer a name, but it still stands in for something else, with a more spiritual implication in dear Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (that name-obsessed play). Here, Old Capulet refers to his daughter as a ‘whining Mammet’, a deviant form of ‘Maumet’ which, deriving ultimately from ‘Mohammed’, was a term used in medieval England to mean ‘a puppet, an idol, a doll’. Here lurks the second commandment, in all its thorny glory, giving an added layer to Barbie’s iconicism, not to mention the groom’s pledge to his bride in the traditional Marriage Service, ‘With my body I thee worship’. (I hear the clatter of toppling pedestals.)

clatterty clank

It is, I must NB, definitionally girls who play with dolls, and there is a pleasing juxtaposition of frivolous and stern in the dictionary’s reference to ‘playthings’ … but I cannot help but suspect that, in their initial incarnation, these ‘doll-babies’ were occasionally also educational tools, teaching the virtues of maternal care for something smaller and weaker, sartorial elegance and grooming and presumably also some degree of etiquette – these dolls could, after all, represent all ages, and I suspect that the comparative decline of the over 18s represented in modern doll-land may also signal a movement from dolls as work to dolls as play. (Incidentally, Londoners: for more on toys’ super-seriousness, go have a look at the Maritime Museum’s Toy Boats exhibition for examples of boys’ toys serving to illustrate German naval supremacy). But onwards.

From play to work, there’s a beautiful reference in the dictionary to ‘doll’ used in the more modern sense when, in 1860, the journal All Year Round talks about the ‘laborious class Who earn painful bread by fashioning dolls’ eyes’, which tellingly hints at the expanded manufacturing operations doll-craft represented by the mid-Victorian industrialised era – a far cry from what would presumably have been an ad-hoc domestic craft when ‘doll-babies’ first became popular. A Little Princess, quoted above, is a story obsessed with the power of make-believe and dolls as synecdoches for real-life figures. It features multiple references to the late-Victorian doll and the materialism she represents, including the disapproval of Sara Crewe’s family solicitor, who, on seeing what Sara dubs ‘The Last Doll’ says sternly ‘A hundred pounds […] All expensive material, and made at a Parisian modiste’s. He spent money lavishly enough, that young man’. Fans of Victorian women’s studies may think of Dickens’ Mr Merdle (Little Dorrit) and his search, not for a wife, but for ‘a bosom to hang jewels upon’.

Living Dolls

It has taken more time than usual, but finally the leximobile screeches up outside definition number three, another Victorian usage, ‘doll’ as ‘a pretty, but unintelligent or empty person’, especially, the dictionary adds, ‘when dressed up; also, a pretty but silly or frivolous woman’. Hence we have ‘a doll’s face’, which is one ‘conventionally pretty, but without life or expression’. Pleasingly, in this instance, it is the lifeless image of womanhood that inspires the pejorative reference to the real thing, rather than the other way round, although it gives rise to a disturbing number of aspirations in the sentient race to be ‘living dolls’ (a quick google, and you’ll see what I mean). The dictionary even has names for this sort of thing, giving a delightful number of compound terms: thus the (tautological) worship of dolls – dollatry, dollhood – the state or condition of being like a doll, dollship – the personality of a doll, although it also points out that these relate primarily to ‘doll’s’ fifth meaning, via a re-emerging ‘Doll Common’, as ‘a prostitute’. ‘Living dolls’ may in fact also be real-life Ladies Of Easy Virtue.

‘There is much for her to do, her whole sex to deliver from the bondage of frivolity, dolldom and imbecility.’

-Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), ‘Letters’, (undated)

So, from ‘Dorothy’ onwards, a ‘doll’ always represents something bigger, be it a name whose full gravity cannot yet be properly appropriated, a world of humans made more comprehensible for a small child, or even a religious figure incarnated in sacrilegious form. It is the idolatry of such a representation that I find most fascinating: it gives a whole new irony to Sara Crewe’s repeated assertion that, as her father has always told her, ‘All women are princesses.’

NEXT WEEK: E is for Emancipate