English Dolls' Houses of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Greene, Vivien

Published by B.T. Batsford, 1955

About this Item

ENGLISH DOLLS' HOUSES OF THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES, Vivien Greene, hardcover, first edition, illustrated with B/W photos, 1955. BOOK CONDITION: good. The text block is in fine condition, with no tears, dogears, or marks. No signature or bookplate of a prior owner. Not a library book or remainder. The red cloth boards are in good condition (bumped, faded spine, bumped corners, a pencil mark on the front cover). 12 x 9, 224 pages, 48 ounces XX [From the text] IF the doll's house has an ancestor, it is the Nuremberg kitchen, though its earliest origin might be fancifully traced from some arbour of boughs where young children treasured seashells for cups and wide moist leaves for plates. We recognize in Samuel Palmer that visionary time and landscape, stretching wheaten in the late summer sunlight beyond primeval oaks. There, one likes to imagine, the game of houses was first played. A hollow was found among tree roots and lined with moss for some plaything, a large fir-cone or an oddly striped pebble, but an endowed being nonetheless. Thousands of years later an adult makes a toy especially for one child and then time comes into human reckoning; balls bounce, tops spin, forests of trees are felled to make wooden animals; dolls of clay and leather and wood and rag invade by millions. Then quite lately a new thing happened: a redirection. A pig is charming and so is a wooden pig, anyone would want to play with either, but is a saucepan in itself delightful, or why do we make a very small saucepan, and does a daughter want to play with it? Perhaps she does, quite spontaneously, take pleasure in it, but possibly it is we who think it an instructive thing and make her a little kitchen, its pots and pipkins set out for her. It is at any rate very typical of the Netherlands, where it probably originated in spite of its name of Nuremberg kitchen; the old Germany seems in all its other toymaking to have had a closer and more imaginative approach to a child's mind. The Nuremberg kitchen was a box of three walls and a floor and perhaps eighteen inches or two feet long and a foot deep. These single rooms were imported from Germany and the Low Countries from the early seventeenth century but very soon they were made in England as well. Seller Inventory # 002475

Bibliographic Details

Title: English Dolls' Houses of the Eighteenth and ...

Publisher: B.T. Batsford

Publication Date: 1955

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Good

Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

Edition: 1st Edition