Childhood by Design

Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-Present

Megan Brandow-Faller, Megan Brandow-Faller

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501332036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary 'material turn' and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern 'invention' of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design - Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented – critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture.
Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children's use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.

Part One

Inventing the Material Child: Childhood, Consumption, and Commodity Culture

1

Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys, and Learning to Shop in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Serena Dyer

Writing in 1798, Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), the prolific writer of children’s literature, together with her father Richard (1744–1817), stated that “the false associations which have early influence upon the imagination … produce the furious passions and miserable vices.”¹ The Edgeworths argued that, in order to resist the destructive passions, the mind of the child required careful shaping, molding, and direction. These childhood “passions” referred to more than simple emotion. Rather, they were psychosomatic experiences which could be overcome with rationality.² One of the key passions which afflicted eighteenth-century society was perceived to have been a tendency for middling consumers—and in particular female consumers—to be seduced and enthralled by an exciting new world of goods.³ Both women and children were perceived as irrational economic subjects—easily swayed away from rational consumption, and enticed by the sensuous delights of the material world. Targeting and training children to resist these materialistic consumer tendencies became a focus of pedagogical texts and didactic tools. Economic and material literacy were identified as the key skills required by this self-regulating child consumer, and were carefully cultivated through attitudes to toys and play.

Play took on a central role in the cultivation of the child consumer; and the centrality of play in didactic thinking and practice of the eighteenth-century set pedagogues of this period apart from their early modern predecessors.⁴ The pedagogical discourse at the heart of this new conception of childhood held John Locke’s (1632–1704) notion of the infant being born as tabula rasa, meaning clean slate, at its core. Locke first posed this theory in his 1693 work, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in which he argued that the education of the individual while in the state of childhood, when their mind was blank and easily impressionable, was essential for the molding of a rational adult.⁵ This skill and knowledge encompassed not only religious and academic education, but also the molding and training of the practical economic and material skills of the child, ensuring their social and economic future as productive, rational consumers. That play could form a key component of the educational arsenal was, in fact, central to Locke’s theories. At the time Locke was writing, play was seen as a sinful dissipation linked with vice and immoral behavior.⁶ Yet Locke’s work, expanded and popularized by eighteenth-century writers such as the Edgeworths, reframed play and educational objects as key tools for training children, especially regarding the management and restraint of their engagement with the material world.

The child as a consumer has long been recognized by scholars.⁷ Crediting middle-class children with a significant role in the birth of a consumer society in the eighteenth century, J. H. Plumb’s ground-breaking work on the “new world of children” has paved the way for discussions surrounding children’s education, status, and amusement, particularly in relation to consumption in the succeeding decades.⁸ However, the child as a distinct, independently-operating consumer figure has generally been considered the product of the marketing of toys and clothing targeted specifically at children in the twentieth-century postwar period.⁹ This essay draws a distinction between the commercial targeting of the child consumer by retailers, and the cultivation and training of the idealized child consumer by pedagogical figures (whether parent, educator, or writer) by utilizing didactic tools, such as toys and material playthings. When this well-trained middle-class child actively engaged in consumption, it was as a form of practice or play: an educational exercise for further consumption patterns. The argument put forward in this essay is not, therefore, for a full re-periodization of the phenomenon of the child consumer as targeted directly by commercial marketing and retailing; but rather that the growing perception of the moral and economic dangers of material enticement engendered a nascent awareness of childhood as being key in training self-regulating consumer practice. This, in turn, lay the groundwork for the commercialization of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century child consumer.

As such, didactic materials and toys were created from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, which were designed to develop the child’s consumer skills: specifically, their economic and material literacy. Parents and educators of eighteenth-century children—and in particular, girls—aimed to protect their charges from over-exposure to the consumer market, but not through shielding them from the encroaching seductions of the material, commercial world. Instead, such educators armed future female consumers, equipping them with an arsenal of economic and material skills, which would enable them to successfully navigate and contend with the adult commercial world with which they would soon be confronted.

Economic literacy and the pocket book

The economic literacy of the child consumer, and the enactment of this childhood training in arithmetic and accounting, is most clearly evident in contemporary pocket books, which were created for and used by both children and adults.¹⁰ Pocket books acted as moral and economic navigational tools, providing their readers with indispensable knowledge, and encouraging them to be accountable for their own financial outlay.¹¹ Some pocket books, such as The Important Pocket Book in the 1760s, specifically aimed to help children self-regulate their expenditure. These small books, usually measuring around five inches by three inches, became popular from the mid-century, and were available under a plethora of titles—directed at ladies, gentlemen, and children—and contained moral essays and stories, among other practical material. Central to the pocket book format were the diary pages, which were almost always accompanied by accounting columns. These columns were divided into daily sections for the “account of cash,” “received,” and “paid,” which were helpfully split into pounds, shillings, and pence. These books provided an economic framework through which adults and children alike should navigate their time and money, and furnish the historian with a unique resource through which to access the consumption practices of children.

John Newbery (1713–1767) was both a prolific pocket book publisher, and a seminal figure in children’s literature. Newbery has been lauded as the father of children’s literature, and has been credited with founding the genre in 1740s London.¹² His 1744 A Little Pretty Pocket-Book was his first publication for children. Purchasers also received a ball (for boys) or pincushion (for girls) along with the publication.¹³ This innovative marketing of book and object as one set an early precedent for Newbery’s acknowledgment of the importance of the material and visual when engaging with children. The ball and pincushion were to be used as disciplinary aids, and were each half black and half red. The child’s good deeds were to be marked on the red side, and bad marked on the right, in order to “infallibly make Tommy a good Boy, and Polly a good Girl.”¹⁴ Marketed to appeal to adults who wished to embrace popular Lockean ideas of education by amusement, play and toys were presented as an educational supplement which aimed to morally instruct the child.

The training encompassed in Newbery’s publications for children frequently connected moral goodness with economic responsibility. In The Important Pocket Book, a publication aimed at both girls and boys, and published in the 1760s, Newbery explicitly stated that keeping accounts was essential in order to maintain the social and economic security of the family unit; “[h]e that keeps his Accounts may keep his family, but he that keeps no Account may be kept by the Parish.”¹⁵ In other words, accounting functioned as a means of self-regulating financial and moral credit.¹⁶ The message is continued consistently in this publication, with the columns of the almanac section divided in a “Money Account” and “Moral Account.” The former was intended to record money paid and received, and the latter to record good and bad deeds, often with a financial element, mirroring the disciplinary format of the ball and pincushion which accompanied A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. For example, sample entries in The Important Pocket Book refer to the giving of small amounts of money to poor women and children. The Minor’s Pocket Book, which ran from the 1790s to the 1840s and was also aimed specifically at children, contained similar accounting pages.¹⁷ This apparatus for children’s financial self-regulation was supplemented by tables of coach fares, and more importantly, a table educating the young reader about money calculations, and providing information on the breakdown of one pound into shillings and pence. Keeping practical financial records was conceived as a form of practice-accounting, encouraging children to take charge of the small amount of pocket money they controlled, and to regulate their own spending, developing their personal sense of economic literacy.

The economic training through accounting which was encouraged in pocket book publications for children reflected contemporary pedagogical theories. That children should learn accounts was supported by Locke in the 1690s. He argued that children should be encouraged “to learn perfectly merchants’ accounts, and not to think it is a skill that belongs not to them, because it has received its name from, and has been chiefly practised by, men of traffic.”¹⁸ Locke encouraged accounting as a means of self-regulation, which would enable analysis of an individual’s spending, rather than to provide dissuasion to consume.

Maria Edgeworth was also a proponent of encouraging children to keep accounts in order to temper and manage their understanding of the material world, and expressed her views in the important 1798 publication Practical Education, which she co-authored with her father. Edgeworth had previously published The Parent’s Assistant in 1796, and has been criticized, both by contemporaries and historians, for seeing toys as part of the work of education, rather than the joy of play.¹⁹ Toys, economy, and the material world were inextricably linked for Edgeworth, who argued that “economy cannot be exercised without children’s having the management of money” in the form of pocket money, and explicitly recommended that girls in particular were supplied with pocket books in which to record their expenditure.²⁰ Edgeworth saw this rational management of money as central to training the child’s understanding of the material world, particularly in relation to new (equated with pretty, fashionable trifles) and old (meaning long-lasting, repaired, and cared for goods) things. The pocket money which Edgeworth advised that children received was not recomme...