Doll

“ Three times three and nine times nine:
These are only her usual clothes:
Look, there’s a wardrobe! gracious knows
It’s pretty enough, as far as it goes!
So you see the way we dress the Doll:
You might make her a shepherdess, the Doll,
If you gave her a crook with a pastoral hook,
With sheep, and a shed, and a shallow brook,
And all that, out of the poetry-book.
Chorus: Bless the Doll, you may press the Doll,
But do not crumple and mess the Doll!
This is the way we dress the Doll;
If you had not seen, could you guess the Doll? ”

“ For a movable doll to be made too pretty.
An old-fashioned doll, that is not like nature,
Can never pass for a human creature;
It is in a doll that moves her eyes
That the danger of these misfortunes lies! ”

“ The rich little lady from over the way
Has beautiful dolls in vast array;
Yet she envies the raggedy home-made doll
She hears our little Miss Brag extol.
For the raggedy doll can fear no hurt
From wet, or heat, or tumble, or dirt! ”

“ There they saw all kinds of dolls,—rubber babies, fat kewpies with roguish eyes, doll soldiers, tiny Japanese ladies dressed in flowered silk kimonos, little Eskimo boys in pointed hoods and woolly coats, Dutch dolls in wooden shoes and snow-white caps, brown-eyed dolls with rich dark hair, blue-eyed dolls with golden curls.
Nothing could look lovelier than the little shop at Christmas time when the ground was white with snow. Then many of the dolls wore their gayest dresses, and when the lights were turned on, the little show window sparkled like fairyland. ”

“ My dears, if ever you are a doll, hope to be a rag doll, or a wax doll, or a doll full of sawdust apt to ooze out, or a china doll easy to break—anything in the world rather than a good strong wooden doll with a painted head and movable joints, for that is indeed a sad thing to be. ”

“ This breathing of life into playthings is seen in all its magic force in play with dolls. A doll, broadly conceived, is anything which a child carries about and makes a pet of. The toy horse, dog or what not that a little boy nurses, feeds and takes to bed with him has much of the dignity of a true doll. But adopting conventional distinctions we shall confine the word to those things which are more or less endowed by childish fancy with human form and character. ”

“ The more imaginative children prefer the flower dolls which fade or die quickly and then go to take their places in the sky to which they give the beautiful colors on sunset evenings. Others, natural little gad-a-bouts, always play “come to see,” while in some practical little souls the spirit of motherhood is so strong that, to them, every doll is a baby doll, and everything they play with, from a clothes-pin to a poker, must be mothered—sung to and cared for, petted and rocked. ”

“ It was a rudimentary attempt at a rag doll; so rudimentary indeed that as the passing flash of the lamps disclosed its proportions, or rather the lack of them, a titter rose from the darkness behind, where some older folk were lounging.
The old doll-maker, who was attempting to thread a big packing-needle by the faint flicker, turned towards the sound in mild reproof: "Lo! brothers and sisters," he said, "have patience awhile. Even the Creator takes time to make His puppets, and this of mine will be as dolls are always when it is done. And a doll is a doll ever, nothing more, nothing less." ”

“ The solemnity left one chubby brown face, and one pair of chubby brown hands closed in glad possession round the despised rag doll. Old Premoo heaved a sigh of relief.
"Said I not so, brothers and sisters?" he cried exultingly. "My hand has not lost its art with the years. A doll is a doll ever to a child, as a child is a child ever to the man and the woman. As for glass eyes, they are illusion--they perish!" ”

“ Poor little dolls! I wonder do they take themselves seriously, not knowing the springs that stir their sawdust bosoms are but clockwork, not seeing the wires to which they dance? Poor little marionettes! do they talk together, I wonder, when the lights of the booth are out?
You, little sister doll, were the heroine. You lived in the white-washed cottage, all honeysuckle and clematis without—earwiggy and damp within, maybe. How pretty you always looked in your simple, neatly-fitting print dress. How good you were! How nobly you bore your poverty. ”

“ Who is Queen of Dolly Town
My Little Doll Rose
I have a little doll,
I take care of her clothes
She has soft flaxen hair,
And her name is Rose
She has pretty blue eyes,
And a very small nose,
And a cunning little mouth,
And her name is Rose
I have a little sofa
Where my dolly may repose,
Or sit up like a lady;
And her name is Rose
My doll can move her arms,
And can stand upon her toes,
She can make a pretty curtsey
My dear little Rose
How old is your dolly? ”

“ For I had already lived long enough to be aware that the existence of a doll, like that of every thing else, has its limits. Either by sudden accidents, such as loss of limbs, or by the daily wear and tear of life, decay gradually makes its progress in us, and we fade away as surely as the most delicate of the fragile race of mortals. ”

“ A hand-carved wooden doll, in a plaid dress, which evidently had been made by the child, had been lovingly wrapped in a small red shawl. Lastly, tied up in a quilted blue bonnet with the strings, was a carved wooden bowl and spoon.
In the flickering lantern light, the expression on the four faces changed from eager excitement to genuine disappointment. ”

“ Generally armless, sometimes legless, occasionally headless, that doll becomes an enchanted spring of poetry when its small proprietress comes in and takes it up, loving it deeply and warmly in spite of its painful ugliness, its damaged condition, and general want of charm. ”

“ Her doll, the god or the plaything of childhood, has lost its interest, and all the pretty things that formerly were so pleasing have lost their charm, as the bell and smaller infantile toy had lost theirs before the doll had nestled into her affections. ”

“ Living at a doll-shop, and hearing the daughter of the master of such a wonderful shop reading so often, I naturally expected to have heard more about dolls than any other creatures! However, on the whole, I was very well contented, and should have been perfectly happy if they would only have hung me up in the shop-window! ”

“ Dolls without heads, others without arms or legs, eyeless ones, big and little were strewn about the room, while doll carriages minus wheels, kiddie cars, battered and streaked, awaited the skillful hand of the old man. ”

“ Since I visited you half the things I see turn into dolls as I look at them, and I immediately begin to make songs or jingles about them just as you do. As I sit at the table the dishes even, take doll form in my mind. The plates seem to have great moon faces, while the sugar bowl seems to stand with shoulders thrown up and arms akimbo like an awkward china washerwoman. The knives, forks and spoons are almost human with their shining faces. ”

“ The truth is, the doll illusion is one of the first to pass. There are, I believe, a few sentimental girls who make a point, when they attain the years of enlightenment, of saving their dolls from the general wreckage of toys. Yet I suspect that the pets, when thus retained, are valued more for the outside charm of pretty face and hair, and most of all of their lovely clothes, than for the inherent worth of the doll itself—of what we may call the doll soul, which informs it and gives it to the child its true beauty. ”

“ Of the ready-made toys, toy furniture for the house, the sand pile for outdoors and the doll for both are most useful. “The doll,” as Sully tells us, “takes a supreme place in this fancy realm of play. The doll is an all-important comrade in that solitude à deux, of which the child, like the adult, is so fond.” The complete adaptability of the doll makes it an ideal means for the puppet play of idealism. “A good, efficient, able-bodied doll, like the American girl’s,” says Joseph Lee, “is at home in any situation in life, from princess to kitchen maid, to which she may be called. ”

“ But the child has had its hour of play and make-believe sentiment of companionship and authority; and so, if the doll can do no good of itself, it can at least be the occasion of pleasantness to others.
Now there are women who are dolls in all but the mere accident of material. The doll proper is a simple structure of wax or wood, 'its knees and elbows glued together;' and the human doll is a complex machine of flesh and blood. ”

“ Now Lily's maid left the disgraced doll on a chair in the kitchen, and there Mary the cook found it. It had on a pretty muslin dress and sash, and nice embroidered underwear, just like any fashionable young lady. It was Christmas week, and Mary had bought a doll to give to her little niece on Christmas-day, and seeing at once what a treasure this costume would be, she took it off, did it up as fresh as new, and made the doll she had bought look quite like a princess in it. So the old broken-armed doll had not a rag left of its former glory. But luck sometimes comes even to dolls. ”

“ A doll is one of the most imperious wants, and at the same time one of the most delicious instincts, of feminine childhood. To clean, clothe, adorn, dress, undress, dress again, teach, scold a little, nurse, lull, send to sleep, and imagine that something is somebody,—the whole future of a woman is contained in this. ”

“ Quickly in the rear of the white horses and the spirits, who all wore little round caps with tassels at the top, came a procession of dolls—wax dolls, wooden dolls, and saw-dust dolls, very finely dressed, with here and there a doll who had lost a leg, or an arm, or a head, while some were quite cripples, and had to be carried by a train of tiny girls in very short frocks and very long sashes. ”

“ The maternity instinct defies, even denies death. The doll, whether left upside down on the floor with broken teeth and ruined eyes, or lovingly arranged to be overlaid in the night, squashed, tortured, mutilated, survives all cruelties and disasters, and asserts finally its immortal qualities. ”

“ Though made of wood, a doll is a visionary and ethereal personage, endowed by childish fancy with a peculiar life; the mimic lady is a heroine of romance, an actor and a sufferer in a thousand shadowy scenes, the chief inhabitant of that wild world with which children ape the real one. ”

“ The delight which a little girl sometimes experiences in getting hold of a doll that belonged to her mother when she was a little girl—a quaint, china-headed and china-haired little creature, with low neck and short sleeves and very full ruffled skirt—is a tame thing when compared with the feelings that any girl must experience over a doll now in the British Museum. ”

“ Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa’s doll-child. And the children, in their turn, have been my dolls. I thought it fun when you played with me, just as the children did when I played with them. ”

“ D. I do not say it can speak yet; it has not been taught; but you shall hear its voice, and you shall see it breathe; your doll does not breathe. [Eliza took her doll and placed her hand upon its waxen bosom, as if she expected to feel it heave.] And the clothes you will make will warm it too. A wax-doll is not warmed by its clothes. Your doll is as cold when she is wrapped up in a quilt and placed in the cradle as if she were laid naked upon a marble slab. ”

“ Dolls are being dressed by the score, not only your wax and paste-board beauties, such as may be seen in every toy-shop window, but also other members of the doll family which are wholly of domestic manufacture, such as those huge babies of cotton and linen, almost as large as the live baby in the cradle, with pretty painted faces, and soft, supple limbs. These “rag-babies,” as they are sometimes called in the nursery—Moppets, as we are instructed to name them by great dictionaries—are always pets with little mammas; no other dolls are loved so dearly and so constantly as these. ”

“ The dolls are small bleached bones or bits of peeled pawpaw sticks, dressed in blouses made from a worn out sleeve of grandpa’s red undershirt and skirts from scraps of worn and faded calico. She has never seen a doll house, never a real doll, only pictures. ”

“ If she has any imagination, and has been given a very splendid specimen of the modern doll, she is rather afraid of the brilliant waxen lady in a Worth costume, tied back, and flounced, with piles of golden hair, and face marvellously moulded to the last fashionable expression of flirtation or ennui. ”

“ One had a hopeless crack in its head, because its mamma got cross and threw it up to the ceiling. Some of them were naked, and most of them were very dirty. Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke of [53] the poor little dead one; and she said she could always tell what kind of heart a little girl had by the way she treated her doll. Those who made the sweetest and tenderest mammas were those who had taken the most loving care of their dollies when they were little girls. ”

“ It seems to be about the age of six, three years before the culmination of the doll passion, that the conflict between fancy and reality becomes clearly manifest. Abandonment to the doll illusion and the length of the doll period decreases as dolls and their accessories become elaborate. With every increase of knowledge of anatomy or of the difference between living tissue and dead matter, between life and mechanism, this element of doll play must wane. ”