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.

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