Household
Work: The English Toy-Making Industry and Dickens' Portraits of
Domestic Labor
By Elizabeth Williamson
A modern little girl not only does not make her doll's clothes,
but she actually puts out her washing. She knows nothing of the
delight of the doll's laundry day, with the drying lines stretched
across the nursery fender, and the loan of the iron with which
nurse gets up her caps. The modern little girl demands the services
of a maid for her doll. How different the old-fashioned little
girl. She slept with her doll. She shared meals with her dolly;
she sat on her doll in order to keep her safe and have her handy,
as Dickens describes the selfish old man at the seaside reading-room
sitting on one popular newspaper while he reads another. (Starr,
17)
Looking back on the age of Dickens, an anonymous writer cited
in Laura Starr's Doll Book, published in New York in 1908, touches
on almost all of the distinctive social issues surrounding the
nineteenth-century doll, both as a commercial product and a cultural
icon. The writer reminisces about a time when genteel young women
dressed their own dolls, a phenomenon that became less and less
common in England and America as the doll developed into a product
of specialized factory labor. This author's rant points out at
least two crucial things about doll history in the nineteenth-century:
first, that the doll is intimately tied up with other types of
labor and second, that Dickens is a key commentator on the subject
of toy-making, and on dolls in particular.
The "well-known" writer, who unfortunately cannot be
identified as either English or American, also makes a number
of more specific observations about doll making and doll care.
In the spirit of literary realism, the writer alludes to the many
extraordinary types of abuse inflicted on dolls in the name of
childhood love. The writer also reminds us that doll-play was
used to educate young girls in a particular type of womanhood.
Interestingly, the upper-class child nostalgically described here
understands both her own role in society and that of her maidservant.
Finally, the writer provides a sudden, ironic rhetorical twist
by comparing the old-fashioned child not to a beautiful and virtuous
literary heroine, but to a stingy old man-one of many created
by Dickens-who keeps the extra newspapers lodged jealously under
his rear end while taking his ease at the seaside.
Through her first two observations, in particular, the writer
seems to be attempting to collapse the distinction between the
consumer and the worker. The old-fashioned girl worships the doll,
but is also able to maintain its wardrobe, and therefore possesses
an appreciation for the source of labor that keeps her own beauty
in tact. The young girl understands the laborious task of laundering
clothes as well as the joys of wearing them, though the writer
is clearly affirming a necessary hierarchy both roles in a necessarily
hierarchical sequence. By invoking the maidservant, the writer
is even hinting at the existence of all the less fortunate girls
who spend hours stuffing the bodies of dolls they will never be
able to afford.
There is an obvious and wonderful irony in the steady increase
of British trade in dolls and other children's toys that took
place in England during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
During this period, the child's frivolous amusement became an
important symbol of English ingenuity and imperial dominance:
a useless object becomes a useful export, as well as one of the
keystones of domestic economy, through the wonders of British
know-how. This irony is vividly recorded in Henry Mayhew's contemporary
accounts of doll makers, and has been subsequently re-examined
by twentieth-century historians. Using this work as a launching
point, I would like to address more specifically the knotty problem
of usefulness that surrounds the history of the doll in Dickens'
England. Is the doll a trinket? An anatomy lesson? A fashion plate?
An industrial product? A gender model? An art form? Is it a product
or an example of English labor? It is all these things, but underlying
all of these categories is the question of whether or not it is
useful.
"A commodity," Marx tells us at the very beginning of
Capital, "is, in the first place, an object outside us, a
thing that by its properties satisfied human wants of some sort
or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they
spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference"
(303). We can read this as a basic apology for the doll's apparent
uselessness. The fact that it does not keep children warm or nourish
them does not change the fact that it satisfies their imaginative
appetites. Marx goes on to define the concept of use-value, a
term, which has more to do with the nature of capitalist exchange
than with inherent usefulness. "Use-values," he states,
"become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute
the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of
that wealth" (303). Use-values are an abstraction of labor,
an abstraction of use itself.
While my argument is mindful of Marx's definition of use-value,
I am primarily concerned with the way the doll inspires a unique
definition of "usefulness," one that Dickens turns to
his own purposes in Our Mutual Friend. After laying out some contemporary
analysis of the doll-making industry in the context of an 1853
article in Household Words, this essay will examine Dickens' particularly
compelling portrait of the doll-maker in Our Mutual Friend. Jenny
Wren, the crippled child known as the dolls' dressmaker, is a
fictional laborer, but she emblematizes both the labor behind
the doll and the type of female it is intended to produce. She
is a mother to an overgrown child. She is a child-woman with perfect
hair and sadly defective limbs. She provides commentary on nineteenth-century
gender roles, on Henry Mayhew's London poor, and on the doll as
the product of rapidly progressing technology. She is the patched-up
product of unfinished labor, but she herself is perfectly meticulous,
and exerts a certain amount of proprietary control over the rich
women who are both her customers and her workers. The problematic
way in which she reproduces feminine beauty constantly begs the
question of her social usefulness, and provides for Dickens' readers
a multi-faceted model of English working women.
* * *
"Dolls are trifles," Dickens flatly tells his readers
in the opening sentence of an 1853 article in Household Words,
"but are they such trifles as to be quite unworthy the notice
of all except miniature-women of doll-loving juvenility?"
The rest of the article explores with monumental irony the technological
accomplishments of dolls and doll-makers, but its main thrust
is that the labor of doll-making automatically precludes the doll
from being a mere "trifle". Here, usefulness derives
from the fact that the particular demands of the toy industry
allow English men and women are able to put food on the table.
Published a year or two after Mayhew's London Labour and the London
Poor (1851-1852) and more than ten years before the appearance
of Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865), this rich piece of commentary
provides a helpful starting point for a discussion of English
dolls in the late nineteenth century.
Doll making, says Dickens, involves both mechanics and aesthetics.
The doll is a celebration of technology and a parade of modern
taste. She is a product of "national and individual idiosyncracies,"
as well as standardized consumer desires. In this article Dickens
is paying tribute to the talents of the artificer, but he is also
playing with the question of usefulness, as he moves from an in-depth
discussion of doll production to an imaginative recapitulation
of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I will be using this article, which
deals deftly with almost all aspects of the doll trade, to structure
a brief history of the doll in nineteenth-century London.
After his opening salvo, Dickens introduces a quotation from a
Mr. McCullough to answer his initial question about trifles and
triviality. "'How frivolous soever these articles may appear
in the estimation of superficial observers,'" says McCullough,
"'their manufacture employs hundreds of hands, and gives
bread to many families.'" While much of Dickens' commentary
supports this claim, he also goes on to explain that many individual
doll craftsmen are barely making a living in their trade. He begins
with the story of these unfortunates, eventually moving on to
some of the most famously ingenious examples of doll making. Thus
he succeeds in emphasizing the frivolity of "automata"
in contrast to the demure, everyday products of English hands.
In the first half of the article, Dickens lays out the distinction
between different classes of dolls, which are defined, he says,
both by "aristocracy and democracy." The wooden doll,
the degraded child of an older technology, is generally turned
out on a lathe and is "innocent of calves, insteps, and ankles."
This doll is the product of a "cheap and cutthroat"
industry (Brown, 32). The wooden doll "has to work its way
in humble life" and is often deprived of human, let alone
female, features (353). Dickens is endowing the product with the
characteristics of the maker, even though that maker is explicitly
male, "a poor fellow who can hardly keep life and soul together."
The wooden doll may sell for no more than a farthing on the open
market, but her maker is expected to be an artist as well as a
woodcutter, for he frequently makes the whole doll himself, without
the benefit of apprentices or journeymen. With the possible exception
of luxuries like leather arms or ringlets made from real human
hair, the entire product is made by a single individual, or a
single family.
The portrait of the wooden doll maker is highly reminiscent of
Caleb Plummer, the modest craftsman from Dickens's Cricket on
the Hearth. The "poor fellow" also calls to mind the
subject of one of Mayhew's letters, dated February 28, 1850. Mayhew
finds his wooden doll maker sick in bed, surrounded by disembodied
limbs, bewailing "the decline of art in some branches of
his calling" (171). Though he claims that his finer specimens
do have calves, ringlets, and leather arms, most are, as Dickens
notes, turned out on a lathe. From 1809 to 1816, the sick man
tells Mayhew, there was a great trade in tiny wooden dolls, veritable
"dwarfs of dolls" that once brought in a penny a piece
but can now be sold for only a farthing.
After laying out the portrait of the poor wooden doll and her
poor maker, Dickens moves on to the more refined members of the
species, the dolls belonging to children like "Miss Emily
Augusta de Swellermode." In contrast to the doll owned by
plain "Jane Tibbs," these middle- and upper-class toys
are produced by more numerous and more artful hands. Instead of
being "stern and relentless," their bodies are composite,
flexible, natural. Their figures are more "symmetrical"
than that of the wooden doll and their limbs are made of "sheeps-leather."
Though the materials vary from doll to doll, the crucial distinction
between upper- and lower-class dolls is the type of specialized,
skilled labor use to make them. "The head [of Miss Emily's
doll] may perchance be made of paper or pasteboard or papier mache,"
dipped in molten wax, though the paper unfortunately produces
a "grey, grimy, unfeminine sort of face." A more elaborate
model may be made from porcelain, or pure wax, or even gutta percha,
a material that first came into use around 1850, forty years after
the paper mache method was developed in Sonneberg. An even more
sophisticated version may be waxen on the inside as well as on
the outside, or it may be a "gutta-percha lady." In
any case, Miss Emily's doll will surely have the benefit of her
own "perruquier" while the doll's milliner "is
earnestly preparing the attire for the young lady" (353).
But the most important feature distinguishing Miss Emily's doll
from Jane Tibbs's paltry piece of wood are the "glassy brilliants"
that adorn her face. Whether they are glass or ceramic, the eyes
are culture-specific wares, as Dickens observes. Victoria's citizens
prefer blue, while consumers in other some countries prefer the
"brilliant flashing dark eye" (354). His report confirms
the information supplied by Mayhew's glass eye maker, who claims
that "Blue-eye dolls won't sell in spanish America,"
but are all the rage in England, thanks to the Queen (345). According
to Mayhew, there are only two dolls' eye makers in London, but
both employ several journeymen, each of whom may make 30d per
week. One of the two, Mayhew's informant, claims that introduction
of a single competitor has reduced his prices significantly. The
common type of eyes, which consist of "hollow glass spheres
made of white enamel", either black or blue, sell for five
shillings per twelve dozen pair, though they used to sell for
twelve shillings per twelve dozen in 1825. By contrast, the "bettermost"
variety, made in a "superior" manner, sell for four
pence a pair. The dolls' eye maker is a skilled craftsman with
skills and inventions particular to his medium, and his wages
accordingly reflect his talents. Apparently, business was even
better before 1825. Kenneth Brown reports that "Thomas Osler,
a glass trinket maker from Birmingham, told the Select Committee
on Artisans in 1824 that when in London in 1806 he had been offered
a contract worth 500 pounds for the supply of glass eyes for dolls.
Although unable to accept the work, he had subsequently calculated
that the potential business in glass eyes alone could have produced
'a circulation of a great many thousand pounds'" (15-16).
"Little girls would look sad to learn what a small fractional
part of a penny a woman receives for stuffing a pair of arms,"
Dickens maintains. Not all "specialized" workers were
made as well as the glass craftsmen; stuffers and sewers of doll
limbs earned perhaps "2s. 6d. a gross" in 1850 (32).
Some of these workers were employed in factory settings, others,
like Caleb, tried to scratch out a living at home. In the February
28 letter, Mayhew describes the "grinding poverty" of
a composition-head maker and his wife. The man, who "seemed,
from grief and care, like a man half-dead," makes perhaps
twelve dozen papier mache heads dipped in wax per day, with the
help of his teenage daughter. He earns perhaps "4d a dozen,
4s. the gross," while his material coasts 1s 10d (172). His
wife, who is employed making "a few dolls' arms of stuffed
sheepskin," fares even worse, earning seven farthings a dozen.
Like the dolls' eye maker, this family has seen better days-their
trade and prices has declined drastically even in the last two
years-but unlike that skilled craftsmen, they barely seem able
to hold body and soul together. "It's starvation work,"
says the husband, "stuffing 144 bodies for half-a-crown"
(172).
Both Mayhew and Dickens describe a class of workers who seem to
have been "hollowed out" by their own labor, and both
contrast these unfortunate souls with the sophisticates who make
speaking dolls and other technological marvels. "The triumph
in doll-making," Dickens writes, "is to produce a doll
which will speak. Few are such examples, and necessarily somewhat
costly" (355). Mayhew places the account of a speaking-doll
maker directly after the pathetic story of the head-maker's family.
This London inventor makes a boldly false statement at the very
beginning of his account in Mayhew's February letter. "I
am the only person who ever made the speaking doll," he says,
though he coyly admits that "there may be something equivalent"
in the upcoming 1851 exhibition. His business has been so good
that there is not a single specimen left in the house; in lieu
of a demonstration, therefore, he tells an amusing story of how
he once used the talking doll to teach his parrot how to say "papa"
(173). This inventor may well have been the first Englishman to
make a speaking doll, but Mälzel, the man who patented the
metronome, had already produced a continental version in 1827
(155).
Dickens eventually departs from the type of local account provided
by Mayhew for the sake of describing internationally famous dolls
and automata. But he also describes the finest sorts of English
dolls, as they were proudly displayed in 1855 at the Paris Exhibition
by Napoleon Montanari. Dickens reproduces for his readers the
accounts of some of jurymen at the exhibition, who criticize the
dolls for being "adapted rather for the children of the wealthy
than for general sale." An undressed doll could cost five
guineas, while the dressed ones were considerably more, depending
on the costliness of the materials required. Dickens does add
that these models were at least realistic, social beings, representing
men and women of all ages, "in several family groups, with
suitable and elegant model furniture" (354). "Our dolls,"
says Dickens, "are not made to set off the dresses, unlike
those sent from Brussels. "They are beauties, beauteously
beautiful in themselves, and only attired because it is proper
so to be in publish, and because they deserve to be well-dressed."
Dickens provides an example of an even more ingenious invention
in "Count Durin's model man," a mechanical doll with
expandable parts that may be used to imitate the various proportions
of the human form. "The inventor thinks that his model man
might be useful to the artist or the sculptor; but he seems to
attach more importance to it as a tailor's measure or model, for
shaping clothes to suit all sizes of men" (356). Here, at
last, Dickens seems to have found a "useful" doll; but
why not measure the machine when you can measure the man? Count
Durin's invention is truly the tool of mass production, a concept
Dickens is not at all comfortable with. Dickens ends his article
with a tribute to a more frivolous type of ingenuity. He describes
the work of one Herr Fleischmann, a Prussian residing in Sonneberg,
who succeeded in producing a vivid tableaux of a scene from Gulliver's
Travels. Dickens expresses admiration for Fleischmann's knowledge
of Swift, but also for the realism of his tiny men. "The
Lilliputians," Dickens reports, "have mounted on [Gulliver's]
prostrate body, and are triumphing in various ways over the captured
giant" (356). In representing the Lilliputian's response
to a foreign invasion, Fleischmann has, perhaps unintentionally,
depicted a scene of revenge enacted against a citizen of the upper
class. Gulliver, "the big doll" is the product of the
greatest craftsmanship, but in this tableaux he is utterly unable
to fend off an attack launched by the "little dolls"
who have been described with such pathos by Dickens and Mayhew.
If, in this article, Dickens has been setting up a series of doll
contrasts-poor versus wealthy, wood versus composite material,
unskilled versus skilled labor, stiff versus flexible, simple
versus ornate, small versus large- here he seems to be turning
those distinctions inside out. Fleischmann has made the big doll
immobile, even pathetic. I will argue that Dickens enacts a similar
set of reversals in Our Mutual Friend.
Particularly in the interaction between the dolls' dressmaker
and Sloppy, the friendly giant, Dickens seems to be taking apart
some of these oppositions between large and small, useful and
useless. Sloppy, who by this point in the novel has been apprenticed
to a carpenter and has proved himself to be imminently useful,
has also remained resolutely dumb as a doorknob. He is no match
for her wit, and since he doesn't even know the story of Jack
and the Beanstalk, he is forced to ask, when Jenny compares him
to the giant, "Was he good-looking, Miss?" Always eager
to help, he offers to make Jenny "a handy set of nests to
lay the dolls in" or "a little set of drawers, to keep
your silks and threads and scraps in" (809). Immediately
identifying the items in the room that are necessary for her trade,
he offers to improve upon them. But he also makes a crucial error
in appraising her body, offering to provide "a rare handle
for that crutch-stick, if it belongs to him you call your father."
He fails to notice Jenny's lameness, despite the fact that she
is the one object in the room that actually needs fixing, but
his social graces turn out to be superior after all. While watching
her walk, he observes that, "you hardly want [the crutch]
at all." (810) Thus they end in a laugh over their own ridiculousness,
and Jenny hands him a doll to give to Miss Harmon. Jenny compares
the humble thing folded in silver paper to a woman "wrapped
from head to foot in new bank notes, and Sloppy responds immediately
by professing to him the doll-or perhaps the dress-maker-is worth
more than "a gold image" (811). It's a strange account
of value on both sides, but both of them are playing with the
preciousness of the doll, who belongs to a beautiful woman and
her beautiful baby. Jenny perhaps has a more realistic idea of
the return she hopes to make on the transaction, but both provide
an unusual commentary on the material cost and value of the "image."
* * *
Though Caleb Plummer's "handicraft" produces a wide
variety of toys, his doll output exactly replicates the entire
spectrum of English city culture, like Montanari's creations at
the Paris exhibition. His daughter, who is often simply called
"The Blind Girl," assists him with his work, like the
daughter of Mayhew's composition heads maker. Unlike that family,
however, the Plummers produce everything from dolls to Noah's
Arks to musical instruments, and all of these toys eventually
end up in the hands of the merchant, Mr. Tackleton, a man who
works out his frustrations over having been apprenticed to an
unsuitable trade by designing the most fiendish looking toys he
can possibly imagine. Caleb's daughter Bertha is one of Dickens'
hundreds of compelling portraits of the crippled child, but more
specifically she is a simplistic precursor of the lame but mentally
agile Jenny Wren. She is even described as being "busy as
a dolls' dressmaker." (60) Both of these portraits, I will
argue, present a nostalgic view of toy making as the result of
endless but loving toil on the part of individuals like Caleb
and Jenny. But Jenny is crucially not so much a toy maker as she
is a dressmaker, and her particular type of labor makes reference
to a special type of English doll not mentioned either in Mayhew's
account or in Household Words.
The Cricket on the Hearth, published in December of 1845, is chronologically
closer to the "old-fashioned" modes of production Mayhew
and others describe, and thus G.C. Bartley uses Caleb as a standard
against which modern toy making may be measured in 1876. But in
both texts, Dickens is clearly aware, as he is in the 1853 piece
from Household Words, that mechanization and specialization have
long since become the dominant themes of the toy-making industry.
Having served their turn as the virtuous laborers, Caleb and Bertha
are rescued from dullness and poverty by Caleb's long-lost son,
who returns home from colonial adventures to marry the girl next
door. But Jenny remains an independent and more or less successful
entrepreneur even after the death of her father. The difference
between this and Dickens' earlier portrait is that by making Jenny
primarily a dress-maker and not a doll-maker, he has provided
for her a more viable way of earning a living. Though Von Boehn
and others claim that by the latter half of the century baby dolls
had replaced fashion dolls representing full-grown women, Dickens
pushes the doll back into service as a fashion plate and puts
her in the capable hands of Jenny Wren, thus allowing Jenny to
make rich women serve as her models as well as her employers,
and providing a new twist on the type of class reversal Dickens
is so famous for.
Caleb's daughter lives in a make-believe world created by her
father; she believes their home to be beautiful and him to be
young and rich. The "cricket tribe" that presides over
the virtuous characters in this fairytale speak with voices "that
are certain to give none but the tenderest counsel" (57).
The association of gentle voices with the fireside in this story
calls to mind Lizzie Hexam's pictures in the fire, but Jenny,
too, has a make-believe life. Sadly, she has to conjure her own
voices, and she is constantly aware of her father's brutish nature.
The narrator calls him "Mr. Dolls"-named after her profession-but
Jenny calls him her "bad boy" whenever she is forced
to discipline him for his drunken habits. By the end of the novel,
she is forced to bury him, and therefore must increase her rate
of work to pay for it: "Many flaunting dolls had to be gaily
dressed, before the money was in the dressmaker's pocket to get
mourning for Mr. Dolls" (731). As it turns out, Jenny returns
from the funeral and begins cutting out a pattern for a surplice,
to be worn by a clergyman doll, for making doll marriages-the
clergyman also signals the upcoming marriage between Eugene and
Lizzie, over which the dolls' dressmaker presides like a fairy
godmother herself.
In the earlier story, Dickens tells his readers very little about
the actual work of toy making, but sets up an entire superstructure
of morals around the Plummer workshop, and even, to some degree,
compares Caleb's work to that of a fiction writer. Caleb's meager
living room contains entire doll neighborhoods, "for Dolls
of all stations in life": everything from tenements to single
apartments to capital town residences. Some are pre-furnished,
others are awaiting the arrival of the very newest in expensive
upholstery (58). Dickens adds that in representing dolls of different
classes, these humble makers have improved upon nature, by giving
the well-bred ladies the very finest, most shapely wax limbs,
while the middle classes appear in leather, and the lower classes
in "coarse linen stuff." The most destitute common folk
"had just so many matches out of tinder-boxes for their arms
and legs." Thus, the narrator announces, each individual
is fixed firmly in her station, "beyond the possibility of
getting out of it" (59). Caleb's workshop, like Dickens'
novels, contains every type of "human folly, vice and weakness"
one could ever imagine, though not, of course, "in an exaggerated
form" (60).
"Trivial things, invented and pursued for bread, become very
serious matters of fact," the narrator of Cricket opines,
and eventually Dickens' description of these trifles, in the hands
of Jenny Wren, does become more serious and more full of factual
references (61-62). Jenny, who is so serious about her work and
her position as the breadwinner she actually describes herself
in the third person as "the person of the house" (222).
Dickens introduces her rather ambiguously as "a child-a dwarf-a
girl-a something" to recreate the sense of confusion over
her age that characterizes her interactions with other characters
in the novel. We first see her "sitting on a little low old-fashioned
arm-chair, which hand a kind of little working bench before it,"
quite the portrait of secure domesticity, until she raises the
subject of her troubles: "'I can't get up,' said the child,
'because my back's bad, and my legs are queer. But I'm the person
of the house'" (222). Despite her lameness, we come to learn,
Jenny spends much of her time finding models for her dresses on
the London streets, and as her business card states, part of her
work includes attending dolls "at their own residences"
(437). What this mysterious phrase really means, whether it is
the residences of the dolls or their owners, remains unclear,
but the card gives her the air of both professionalism and mobility.
Jenny is occupied, when Bradley Headstone and his pupil first
meet her, with "gumming or gluing together with a camel's-hair
brush certain pieces of cardboard and thin wood, previously cut
into various shapes." She is described in this passage as
"it' or "the child," making her gender ambiguous,
but her labor is unmistakable: "The scissors and knives upon
the bench showed that the child herself had cut them; and the
bright scraps of velvet and silk ribbon also strewn upon the bench
showed that when duly stuffed (and stuffing too was there), she
was to cover them smartly." Her fingers are described as
being remarkably dexterous, and her gray eyes as being remarkably
sharp as she nimbly fashions her materials into patterns. She
challenges the two men to guess her profession, and despite all
this detail, and the proportions of her work, they make several
false guesses. "You make pincushions," Charley says.
"Penwipers," says Bradley Headstone. Jenny confirms
that she can do both, but that this is not her trade. Finally
they arrive at the solution, and Jenny tells them in answer to
their questions that she is very "Poorly paid" by dolls
who "take no care of their clothes, and . . . never keep
to the same fashions a month." (223). Crucially, Jenny dresses
her dolls in all the latest fashions by observing what real "fine
ladies" wear. Though she always talks about her dolls as
if they were real people, they are closest in function to the
two-dimensional fashion doll, which was, Von Boehn claims, a distinctly
English invention. Adapting an older continental product, the
paper fashion plate, they produced "one-sided figures to
be cut out of paper, for which many different garments were provided,
the costumes thus rendered changeable." The invention, according
to Von Boehn, was later adapted by the French as a means of advertising
new fashions. Von Boehn locates the original invention somewhere
at the end of the eighteenth century, but supplies an illustration
of movable fashion dolls from 1830 (145). These movables, however
cartoonish, look much more like the miniature ladies Jenny describes
as her clientele.
It is unclear exactly how much money Jenny earns for her dresses
and hats, let alone for her pincushions and penwipers, or who
she sells them to. She reports that her business pays very poorly,
but like Caleb, and unlike many of Mayhew's subjects, she appears
to live a very sustainable lifestyle, despite the burden of providing
for her "child." She refers briefly to her wages at
one point while disciplining her bad boy, who is begging her for
five shillings to buy rum. "'Pay five shillings for you indeed!'
she exclaims, as if he himself were an object for sale, and not
the liquor. "How many hours do you suppose it costs me to
earn five shillings, you infamous boy?" (532). The bad boy,
for his part, apparently earns a certain number of shillings,
by being what Jenny mysteriously calls a "Slave, slave, slave,
from morning to night," but after a stint at the public house
he brings home no more than "seven and eightpence halfpenny,"
a sum Jenny is forced to literally wring out of his pockets herself
(241).
On another occasion, the dolls' dressmaker urges her child to
"make yourself useful in some way," though he is evidently
incapable of doing anything but fetching her hat and gloves, being
an apparent imbecile with a nasty case of delirium tremens (533).
His whole appearance calls to mind a badly constructed toy:
The shaking figure, unnerved and disjointed from head to foot,
put out its
two hands a little way, as making overtures of peace and reconciliation.
Abject tears stood in its eyes, and stained the blotched red of
its cheeks.
The swollen lead-coloured under-lip trembled with a shameful whine.
The
whole indecororous threadbare ruine, from the broken shoes to
the
prematurely-grey scanty hair, grovelled . . . The very breathing
of the figure
was contemptible, as it laboured and rattled in that operation,
like a
blundering clock. (241)
Here,
as in Household Words, Dickens displays a certain distaste for
mechanical inventions, particularly those that are even more fragile
than the human body. We may compare this verbal portrait to the
artist's rendering of Caleb in an 1880s edition of Cricket, or
to an illustration entitled, "The Person of the House and
the Bad Child" from an 1868 edition of Our Mutual Friend.
In the former, Caleb and his daughter are caricatured in profile,
nearly lost among the clutter of toys they have created, though
the artist has given some attention to the lines of care on Caleb's
forehead. In the latter, the two figures are drawn much more clearly,
though all we see of Jenny is her dress and her long hair as she
points an accusing finger at her offending child. An single doll
slumps against the leg of her chair and an assortment of tools
are more clearly visible on her workbench. The entire portrait,
as in the novel, is less fanciful than those creatures displayed
in Cricket. As a result of the "sensual brutality and degradation"
living in her house under her care, "the dolls' dressmaker
had become a little quaint shrew; of the world, worldly; of the
earth, earthy" (243). No longer the innocent child guided
by a well-intentioned father, Jenny has become thoroughly disillusioned
woman, forced to take on the role of the hen-pecking wife and
the scolding mother, a parody of a fairy-story heroine with an
old but loving Jew as her fairy godmother.
In her interactions with characters like Lizzie, Riah and even
Fledgeby, however, Jenny regains a great deal of the dignity lost
in the ugly confrontations with her bad boy. One of her greatest
virtues, we learn during her trips to visit Riah, is her ability
to make use of other people's waste. Here her work does call to
mind the particularly English product known as the rag doll. "From
the middle of the century onwards," Brown tells us, "British
dollmakers began the commercial production of the rag (i.e. fabric)
dolls, know for centuries as a home-made item but now possessing
printed features" (48). Once again, Jenny as the individual
producer is somewhat behind the times, but it is important to
make a distinction here: she is not making dolls from scraps she
is making dolls' dresses from scraps. Thus, in a sense, she becomes
an essential hub of the London's local economy, moving scraps
from Pubsey back to the upper-class doll houses in which they
originated. Not only does she make "ornamental pincushions
and penwipers" from her own scraps, she also makes regular
trips to Pubsey and Co. to purchase their cloth waste (233). In
explaining her business to the suspicious Fledgeby, she even makes
an elegant little pun on the usefulness of scraps for making dolls'
dresses. "You never know where to expect their waists,"
she remarks (280). In hopes of clarifying this typically laconic
remark, Riah explains that the girls come to Pubsey to "'buy
of our damage and waste for Miss Jenny's millinery." He goes
on to state proudly that "[o]ur waste goes into the best
of company, sir, on her rosy-cheeked little customers. They wear
it in their hair, and on their ball-dressed, and even (so she
tells me) are presented at Court with it" (280). As usual,
Fledgeby misses both the humor of Jenny's remark and her economic
importance as a tradewoman, and so begins haggling with her over
the price of the scraps, which come in at a "precious two
silver shillings" (280). The scene ends with her marvelous
invitation to Riah to "'Come up and be dead!" Here,
for once in the novel, Jenny is invoking death but is surrounded
by life and appears to her godmother as if she were a fairy herself,
appearing "out of a Glory of her long bright radiant hair
. . . like a vision" (282). Jenny is the patron saint of
rag-pickers, adding grace and elegance to the essential business
of recycling human debris. She is also, for all her dreaming,
a very useful worker. "Let us not talk of triviality after
this," Dickens remarks of the rag doll in Household Words,
" to create such value out of bits of rag is a great commercial
achievement, even though the article produced be nothing more
than a doll," or in this case, a doll's dress (354).
Jenny takes evident pride in her work, and while walking with
Mr. Riah, her "fairy godmother," she is able to show
him the results of his labor in all their splendor. She points
to a "brilliantly-lighted toy-shop window" and exclaims,
"'[n]ow look at 'em. All my work!'" (435). Her work,
apparently includes dolls dressed "in all the colours of
the rainbow . . . for presentation at court, for going to balls,
for going out driving, for going out on horseback, for going out
walking, for going to get married, for going to help other dolls
to get married, for all the gay events of life," which are
quite unavailable to Jenny. But she goes on to explain that she
has fun with her work as well as satisfaction. "'Fun of it
is, godmother, how I make the great ladies try my dresses on."
She admits that finding her subjects is the most difficult part
of her work, but it is also the part that empowers her. "I
am making a perfect slave of her, with making her try on my doll's
dress," she says of her fine lady model, who little suspects
she's "only working for my dolls!" Finally, she points
to a doll, hanging in the window and calls her Lady Belinda, adding
the sly threat that the Lady is "much too near the gaslight
for a wax one" (436). The doll, frequently the object of
childish violence, here become the object of a much more subtle
attack by the child who clothes other people's children and makes
fine ladies her slaves.
Though it is difficult to find historical evidence for the type
of labor Jenny provides, particularly in England during the latter
half of the nineteenth century, for at least one author she is
the literary prototype for an entire generation of doll's dressmakers
in France. "Although dolls are for the most part made in
factories," Laura Starr writes, "much of the dressing
and finishing comes under the head of home industry. Near the
Rue de Temple in Paris there is a large warehouse where hundreds
of Jennie Wrens gather each day fashioning with expert fingers,
dolls' garments according to the latest mode. In some places girls
and women are allowed to take dolls to their own homes to dress"
(165). Here, in anecdotal form, we have proof that other Jenny
Wrens exist, work out of their own homes, supplying all the necessary
detail work that has not yet been replicated by modern machines.
Near the end of his article on dolls in Household Words, Dickens
remarks that the speaking-doll, being so rare, and apparently
made only by one person would certainly be "worth picking
to pieces" (355). This is precisely what he appears to have
done with the dolls' dressmaker, gestured towards in Cricket on
the Hearth, and made flesh in Our Mutual Friend. Perhaps if Mayhew
had scoured a few more houses, in a slightly different district,
he might have discovered that there were two dolls' dressmakers,
as well as two dolls' eye makers in the city of London. Like the
making of glass eyes, Jenny's trade is just specialized enough
to keep her in business as a craftsman in late-nineteenth century
London. This type of speculation does not change the fact that
Dickens' portrait of a woman's entrepreneurial spirit in Our Mutual
Friend is both nostalgic and deeply ironic.
Works Cited
Boehn, Max von. Dolls and puppets, trans. Josephine Nicoll. New York, Cooper Square Publishers, 1966.
Brown, Kenneth. The British toy business: a history since 1700. London; Rio Grande : Hambledon Press, 1996.
Dickens, Charles. The cricket on the hearth: a fairy tale of home. London: Chapman and Hall, 1886.
Dickens, Charles. Our mutual friend. Oxford and New York: Oxford, 1998.
Marx, Karl. Capital: a critique of political economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
Mayhew, Henry. London labour and the London poor. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England; New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1985.
Starr, Laura. The doll book. New York: The Outing publishing company, 1908.