"OUT OF PRINT BOOKS: ESSENTIAL REFERENCES FOR DOLL COLLECTORS > Page 1, 2
The Doll Book by Laura B. Starr
First Serialized Excerpt from this 1908 book, the first known American book about Doll Collecting
Foreword and start of Chapter One.
The Doll Book by Laura B. Starr.
Illustrated in Color, Many Half-Tones from Photographs. New York, The Outing
Publishing Company MCMVIII
To Mr. Stewart Culin, In Grateful Remembrance of his Kindly Advice and Happy Suggestions in The Compilation of This Book
FOREWORD
To all those who are interested in dolls, from the children who play with them to the students of their ethnological and educational aspects, I dedicate this story of the doll.
I take this opportunity of acknowledging my indebtedness to those who have contributed to my store of information, among whom are several authors unknown to me, as I found many unsigned paragraphs on the subject in magazines and newspapers. I am also grateful to the may friends who have brought and sent me dolls and puppets from all parts of the earth.
Especially are my thanks due to Mrs. John Cooper, of Shanghai, who from the first shared my enthusiasm and who has made my collection unique by her contribution of old and valuable Chinese and Japanese dolls.
My collection owes its origin to the following incident: In Yokohama, while shopping with a friend, I saw a number of Japanese manikins. I admired them so much that one of them was put into my Christmas stocking, making the nucleus around which I have gathered several hundred character dolls.
During a six years' tour around the world, I had time and opportunity to study doll-lore in many countries. I found that the love of the doll is common to children of every land, and that many legends and folk-tales in which the doll figures, bear a striking resemblance to teach other, though they many come from widely diverse parts of the earth--facts from which it is but natural to conclude that dolls are among the most potent factors in the civilization of the world.
The study of the doll has given me great pleasure, which I trust will be shared by my readers. Of these, the children will delight in the pictures of many forms of their beloved playthings; while the older readers may find food for thought in the ethnological, historic and sociological aspect which the subject presents.
LAURA B. STARR
Pen and Brush Club
New York
CHAPTER I--Antiquity of the Doll
Who played with the first doll; how was it fashioned; when and where was it evolved, are questions to which history fails to give a satisfactory answer.
We search the archives of the past, we unearth Egypt to discover the secret, we wander through pagan Rome, we travel to India, to the cradle of our civilization, as far back as documentary evidence, legend or myth will carry us, and we find dolls. Recorded history does not go back to the time when there were no dolls.
They are found in the sanctuary of the pagan, in the tombs of the dead; pictured in quaint and sometimes awkward lines in plaster and stone, that have withstood the elements for thousands of years.
Since time was they have been, apparently, the presiding deity of the hearthstone and the cradle. Most people would subscribe to the popular theory that the mother impulse is so strong in every child that she must have some object upon which to lavish her childish affection, and that the most natural object is a doll built on somewhat the same lines as the baby brother or sister or some of the "grown ups" of the family.
The gathered opinions of various early and classic writers point to the probability that the doll, as the image of a human or superhuman creature, had an ecclesiastical origin and was used in the ceremonies of the religion which preceded Brahmanism.
Later with the religion it was carried to China and Egypt and from thence made it way to all the other countries of the globe. So much for theory.
That dolls were common in the time of Moses is certain, for we read that in those sarcophagi which are frequently exhumed in Egypt, there have been found beside the poor little baby mummies pathetically comical little imitations of themselves placed there by loving mothers, within reach of the cold little baby fingers.
In "Ave Roma Immortalis," Marion Crawford speaks of children's dolls of centuries ago, "made of rags and stuffed with the waste from their mothers' spindles and looms." He also tells of effigies of bullrushes, which the pontiffs and vestals came to throw into he Tiber from the Sublician bridge on the Ides of May.
In the museums at Naples and Rome there are numbers of terra-cotta dolls that were found in the ruins of Pompeii; pathetic little remains of happy childhood.
When Herculaneum was being excavated, there was found the figure of a little girl with a doll clasped tightly in her arms,--not even death could divide the two.
The presence of dolls in the graves of children is accounted for by the fact that it was an ancient custom to bury a child's toys with it in the expectation that the spirit forms of the inanimate things would rise with the child and amuse it in the spirit world as they had done in this.
Early writers tell us that a custom among the pagans required children to make votive offerings of their toys and playthings to the gods in the temples, when they had reached a certain age. This custom still obtains in certain parts of the Orient.
The oldest dolls in the world are in the British Museum. They were found in tombs of Egyptian children and some among them are more than 4,000 years old.
Queer little manikins they are but they command immense respect as being the veritable doll-babies which the little children of Pharaoh's land loved and cuddled and put to sleep centuries before the Christ child was born.
The collection is labeled "Early Egyptian Dolls," with the dates ranging from 1,000 to 4,400 years B.C. There is a great variety of them, as to material, form and decorations. Clothes evidently were thought superfluous or the material of which they were made has vanished, for there is nothing that might even by a vivid imagination be thought to represent clothing. These small images are made of ivory, clay, wood and bronze.
The dolls in one group have curious heads of clay to which strings of colored beads have been attached, either to represent hair or perhaps the face veil, which is still worn by many Eastern women, though in these days the beads are interspersed with coin which represents the woman's dower or fortune. They have neither feet nor legs which peculiarity is probably accounted for by the fact that at that time the extremities of babies were swathed about with yards of cloth and it was thought hardly worth while to carve feet and legs that would never be in evidence. The long flat body of one of this group is marked off in squares like a checkerboard, possibly having been used for a game of some sort. This particular group dates from 1000 B.C.
In another group there is one which somewhat resembles our modern dolls, it being fairly well shaped down to the knees. The arms are grotesquely long like the elongated ones of Japanese monkeys. The body is crudely carved of wood to represent a Nubian woman, and the doll was without doubt the beloved toy of an Egyptian child a century or more before Christ was born.
Part 1 > Read about Out of Print books about dolls, and why they are important to your collecting > Page 1, 2
NEXT WEEK: The remainder of Chapter One--Antiquity of the Doll
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©Denise Van Patten 2000, reprint
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