Children have always played. Play helps them make sense of the world and act out, through imitation or fantasy, their fears and imaginings, and toys are a catalyst for this activity. Toys are many things: they give pleasure and fun; they help to teach or hone a skill; they add to a child’s comprehension of the world; they give comfort; and, because they are within the child’s control, they pose no threat. They are therefore important to the child’s mental, physical and emotional development.
Historically, toys have mainly been the province of better-off children. Poorer children, until the Industrial Revolution, were helping their parents in the fields. Their father may have whittled a whistle for them or a rudimentary doll or toy animal. When their parents moved to towns and they started working in factories, children managed to spend precious moments together playing games in the streets such as tag, leapfrog, hopscotch, and hide and seek. If they had no money for toys, they could improvise: a long stick for a hobby horse, a handful of stones for marbles, a kite made of scrap paper. And later, towards the end of the 19th century, when Factory and Education Acts limited children’s working hours and made school compulsory, the plethora of cheap toys meant that even poor children could enjoy them.
Nevertheless wealthy Victorian children, while busy with lessons, had more leisure time and a wider range of toys to play with. These were all handmade until the 18th century when toys began to be manufactured and rich children were given the latest, most fashionable toys as a way of their parents showing off their wealth.
Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) was a writer with a serious interest in childhood development. She wrote Practical Education (1798) with her father, which enjoyed lasting popularity as a child-rearing manual. To Edgeworth, the best type of toy was educational and not a status symbol. While she was not so much interested in the pleasure toys could give, the point she makes is true of any child whom we have watched play with the box rather than its contents: “A nursery… should never have any furniture in it which they [children] can spoil… They should be provided with the means of amusing themselves, not with painted or gilt toys, but with pieces of wood of various shapes and sizes, which they may build up and pull down, and put in a variety of different forms and positions; balls, pulleys, wheels and strong little carts proportioned to their age and to the things they want to carry in them, should be their playthings.”
Toymaking as an industry started in Germany, particularly Nuremberg. Pinewood was plentiful in the forests of Bavaria and soft enough to carve, so hand-carved and painted toys began as a cottage industry. When mining was no longer viable in the Harz Mountains, miners became wood carvers, making Noah’s Arks and miniature farms to sell. By the end of the 18th century toy companies such as Bestelmeier of Nuremberg were marketing their wares by producing catalogues.
The Gröden Valley in the South Tyrol had 300 skilled carvers, each specialising in particular toys. An 1889 old newspaper article reveals the artisans’ narrow focus: “One person will make one or two things, and work at these all his life. One woman cut [sic] just six animals out of wood – a cat, dog, wolf, sheep, goat and elephant… One family will spend a lifetime painting gray horses with black spots, and another paints red horses with white spots.”
Rocking horses were a British speciality, first made in the 17th century to help rich children learn how to ride – the oldest known rocking horse belonged to Charles I. By the 19th century it had become a very popular toy for the nursery, the dappled grey being a favourite.
In fact Victorian nurseries were equipped with a wide range of toys for their occupants, although play was frowned upon on Sundays. However, exceptions were made for certain toys. Laura Forster, the aunt of the writer EM Forster, recalled her brother Willie being reproached by their brother Eddy for his ‘un-Sunday’ behaviour: “We were not kept without toys and occupations on Sunday, but were given different ones, a large Noah’s Ark being specially reserved for that day. Willie’s crime consisted in his making a stable of the animals, whilst Eddy held that they ought only to follow Noah in Bible fashion two by two into the ark.”
In comparison, the range of weekday toys grew ever wider: little horses and carts filled with tiny objects, wooden alphabet bricks, china tea sets – even a barrel organ with punched cards that played a tune when the handle was turned.
Toy soldiers were particularly popular. In 1893 William Britain made the first hollowcast soldiers, which were lighter than the lead ones from Germany and Switzerland. They were modelled on real British regiments, too. Forts, castles and transport wagons added to the entertainment. Children also played with popguns, which resembled real pistols.
The toy theatre was something new that gave children hours of entertainment because they could change the scenery, printed on interchangeable sheets of paper, and act out the dramas with figurines. This was good for their imagination and concentration. Doll’s houses held the same fascination.
Balls came into vogue again with the discovery of rubber; the jack-in-the-box, metal hoops, marbles and kites were also popular. These were universal toys – types of toys that had been played with from time immemorial and which had always been available to the poor in one form or another.
In contrast thaumatropes were the first optical toys to demonstrate how tantalising moving pictures could be. In 1825 the first set of six paper cards was produced, packed in a round container and sold as a ‘Thaumatropical Amusement’. The cards were illustrated on both sides and, when twirled fast, the images combined so that you could see, for instance, a parrot go in and out of its cage.
In 1834 William Horner of Bristol developed the zoetrope, a rotating metal cylinder with pictures showing, for example, different stages of a man running, viewed through slits in the drum. Thirty years later William Ensign Lincoln of Rhode Island patented a version of the zoetrope that had the viewing slits above the pictures, which allowed replaceable strips of images to be placed round the drum. In 1866 it was advertised in the USA, and a year later was patented in the UK. The London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company was licensed as the British publisher and used a set of 12 animations by illustrator George Cruikshank in 1870.
The Victorian age was the golden age of the mechanical toy, especially from America. Many of these were produced by experts in other fields: tinsmiths made walking dolls with loosely riveted joints and clockmakers added clock mechanisms to make them move. In 1856 the first moving tinplate trains were made by George Brown, a clockmaker in Connecticut, while Edward Ives founded the Ives toy-manufacturing company in the same state in 1868, selling simple hot-air toys. The company then produced clockwork toys, such as moving dolls, animals and the trains that brought the manufacturer international fame.
Early steam trains came mainly from England, and were much closer to the real locomotives, giving children a proper sense of how steam worked. Bing in Nuremberg, Germany, produced steam-powered locomotives, boats and road vehicles, exporting to Britain and America, and became the biggest toy manufacturer in the world. Steam trains were advertised in the 1885 American mail order catalogue, Montgomery Ward. One of the engines advertised was “the Emperor at $2 (warranted to work perfectly, absolutely safe)”, which shows that parents may well have been anxious about their children playing with steam.
During the 1880s European toymakers created and mass-produced simpler and cheaper tinplate wind-up toys. This was made possible by the mechanical metal-stamping machine, which enabled tinplate to be quickly stamped into shape using dies and heavy presses. But the advent of the alkaline battery to power toys’ motors in the 1960s meant that these type of toys were no longer mass-produced.