Review: Pollock's Toy Museum, London

To this crib I always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded, graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doted on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my nightgown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise. 

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)

Pollock's Toy Museum

Childhood and the nineteenth century often seem to go hand in hand in the popular imagination. The Victorian period saw the growing popularity of fairytales, the plight of children as a central theme in the period’s novels and the golden age of children’s literature, with the publication of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1862) and many more. Here too is the emergence of the very idea of childhood as we know it, so it’s little surprise that visual reminders of the Victorian nursery still maintain popularity today – from the bonneted little girls on kitsch greetings cards, to the Victorian-style wooden rocking horses which serve as toys or ornaments in many houses around the country.

Before I left London, I spent an afternoon visiting Pollock’s Toy Museum – a small but maze-like museum filled with original toys from the period, and the twentieth century. Soldiers, dolls, teddy bears, and puppets stare out from glass cases – a little worn (like Jane’s doll), and maybe occasionally glass-eyed and creepy, but still very obviously objects of fun, elevated by the charm and novelty of age.

The elaborate dollhouses allow you to glimpse into middle class Victorian homes in miniature, while the toy theatres, for which Pollock’s is particularly famous, are grand and detailed, giving you an idea of the lavish sets for popular plays (including Cinderella, Aladdin and Black Beard the Pirate) and the experience of being in the theatre (the dress of the figures in the boxes, the attire of the conductor and orchestra). The more modern toys will make many feel nostalgic – or surprised at just how far back some games and toys date. There’s an action man from the 1920s, Meccano from 1907. Of socio-historical interest are then military toys linked to both World Wars and even the Falklands conflict. While the collection is mainly British, there are cases of American toys too and some of the nineteenth-century theatres are modelled after German and French playhouses.

The Secret Victorianist at Pollock's Toy Museum

For Victorianists, the magic lanterns, kaleidoscopes and stereoscopic viewers show how a preoccupation with early forays into photography and film trickled down to children’s toys – a pattern of reflecting adult concerns in child’s play which we see also in the ‘space’ toys which start to come to prominence from the 1940s.

If you’re in London and passing by Goodge Street, the museum is worth a visit. For £6 an adult you can indulge your inner child, and transport yourself back to a Victorian schoolroom.

The Secret Victorianist at Open House London

The Secret Victorianist at Leighton House

Last weekend, the Secret Victorianist enjoyed Open HouseLondon – two days when hundreds of London’s historic buildings are open to the public for free. The sheer number of properties to choose from is staggering, even when you limit yourself by period, but I avoided the chaos of the city centre and crowds and queues of Whitehall in favour of a civilised Saturday in Kensington. Here I looked around two nineteenth-century properties, important for their contents as well as their former occupants – 18 Stafford Terrace and the Leighton House Museum.

18 Stafford Terrace is a building stuck in time. The servants’ rooms are gone, but otherwise the house is much as it was when it was home to famous Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne and his wife Marion. The couple moved into the house in 1875 and lovingly furnished it with furniture and ornaments reflective of late nineteenth-century aestheticism. On Saturday a bustling costumed ‘housekeeper’ showed us round the property but unfortunately only two rooms were on display.

Stained glass panel, 18 Stafford Terrace

 Other treasures the house holds which weren’t on show on Open House weekend include Sambourne’s collections of photographs and photography equipment. Working to tight deadlines for his Punch cartoons, photographing people was Linley’s way of cataloguing potential subjects and he used the same technique to plan the sketches for his book illustrations - notably Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863) and Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales (various). The Sambourne residence is beautiful, fascinating and familial – and well worth another visit on a quieter day.

Edward Linley Sambourne photograph for Little Mermaid illustration

The resulting illustration

 Leighton House on the other hand is grand and spacious –not kitted out like a home, like 18 Stafford Terrace. You enter an extravagant atrium – domed ceilings, Moroccan tiles, a water feature, a rich blue and turquoise colour scheme and even a stuffed peacock - and wander through rooms which are largely empty, except for the impressive collection of paintings – Frederic Leighton’s and some of his contemporaries’ – which lines the walls. A significant portion of the first floor is taken up by Lord Leighton’s incredible studio space – home to much of the art collection and large enough for working on the very biggest canvasses. In comparison to the grand entrance, massive studio and large garden, Leighton’s bedroom is small and plain, furnished much as it would have been at his death in 1896. The museum is a must-see for anyone interested in Victorian art.

Leighton House

 If you find yourself in London for Open House weekend in 2015, you should definitely check it out – the buildings featured range from historic to cutting edge, beautiful to functional, and are dotted throughout the city. And learning more about Edward Linley Sambourne or Frederic Leighton from visiting their houses would make a great day out throughout the year. 

Did you visit any London attractions on Open House weekend? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: F is for Fern-Fever (Pteridomania)

It may sound like a tropical disease but the word Pteridomania (coined by Charles Kingsley in 1855) describes the passion for ferns and tropical plants which took possession of many across the social spectrum in the nineteenth century. In fern-fever, scientific pursuit mingled with decorative design, and homely hobby with ostentatious monetary display. Plants were projects to work on and achievements to display, and, from their advent as a fashionable hobby, were particularly associated with female horticultural hobbyists. Kingsley writes:

‘Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing 'Pteridomania'...and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem different in each new Fern-book that they buy)...and yet you cannot deny that they find enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool.’

In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Vixen (1879), the cultivation of ferns and orchids isn’t just a topical side note but occasions significant commentary. Lady Jane’s wonderful collection makes its first appearance in the novel at the party which celebrates Rorie (the hero)’s coming of age. Braddon writes:

‘The orchids and ferns upon this horse-shoe table made the finest floricultural show that had been seen for a long time. There were rare specimens from New Granada and the Philippine Islands; wondrous flowers lately discovered in the Sierra Madre; blossoms of every shape and colour from the Cordilleras; richest varieties of hue—golden yellow, glowing crimson, creamy white; rare eccentricities of form and colour beside which any other flower would have looked vulgar; butterfly flowers and pitcher-shaped flowers, that had cost as much money as prize pigeons, and seemed as worthless, save to the connoisseur in the article. The Vawdrey racing-plate, won by Roderick's grandfather, was nowhere by comparison with those marvellous tropical blossoms, that fairy forest of fern. Everybody talked about the orchids, confessed his or her comparative ignorance of the subject, and complimented Lady Jane.

"The orchids made the hit of the evening," Rorie said afterwards. "It was their coming of age, not mine."’

The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland

This humorous linkage of plant-keeping with child-rearing and maturation is no accident. Lady Jane ‘rears’ her ferns with the same perfectionism which marks the careful upbringing of Lady Mabel (Rorie’s cousin whom Lady Jane intends to see as her daughter-in-law). Mabel has all the desired accomplishments of a Victorian lady – singing, playing, dressing and acting beautifully, and even (less traditionally!) going so far as to compose verse in Ancient Greek. From her first appearance in the novel she is specifically referred to as ‘flower-like’, and her earlier history has been sketched out by comparing her with a delicate young tree: 

‘At thirty the Duchess of Dovedale had lost all her babies, save one frail sapling, a girl of two years old, who promised to have a somewhat better constitution than her perished brothers and sisters. On this small paragon the Duchess concentrated her cares and hopes. She gave up hunting—much to the disgust of that Nimrod, her husband—in order to superintend her nursery. From the most pleasure-loving of matrons, she became the most domestic. Lady Mabel Ashbourne was to grow up the perfection of health, wisdom, and beauty, under the mother's loving care.’ 

The duchess abandons the natural world of the forest to enter an artificial space in which Mabel grows and learns (with the double meaning of ‘nursery’ clear here). Meanwhile the eponymous ‘Vixen’ Violet (Mabel’s rival for Rorie’s affections) is untrained and unaccomplished and so associated with the wild ferns of the surrounding countryside, rather than those cultivated under close supervision (like Mabel) at Briarwood. This happens throughout the novel, but the significance of flora to Violet and her perception of herself and her home is most clear when she glimpses plants which remind her of Hampshire while exiled in Jersey: 

‘And now they entered a long lane, where the interlaced tree-tops made an arcade of foliage—a lane whose beauty even Vixen could not gainsay. Ah, there were the Hampshire ferns on the steep green banks! She gave a little choking sob at sight of them, as if they had been living things. Hart's-tongue, and lady-fern, and the whole family of osmundas. Yes; they were all there. It was like home.’ 

Different as they are, Mabel and Violet are both linked to the ferns and orchids which are brought up again and again throughout the novel. Braddon doesn’t just throw in Lady Jane’s hothouses for fashion’s sake – they serve a metaphorical purpose, especially where the women who compete for her son are concerned. The ferns help show that the central difference between Mabel and Violet is not the ‘species’ of woman they are, but the environments in which they flourish and the strictures under which they have been brought up.

Can you think of any other Victorian novels which discuss the fashion for ferns? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!