Scholarship on the Web: introduction
By the mid-nineteenth century in the US, most parents and domestic advisors agreed that a “good toy” was educational. By educational, they generally agreed that the toy should impart some intellectual skill
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View Print CSS for Basic(concentration or manual dexterity) or factual knowledge (biographical facts of famous people’s lives, the identification of plants and birds, European capitals, and so forth) conducive to children’s upward or forward progress. In addition to applauding educational toys, parents and observes advocated safe, durable toys and preferred toys that children made themselves to commercial products. While dolls and doll accessories apparently solved the problem of toys for girls, locating toys for boys was a different and difficult matter, and advisors puzzled over the problem of boys and toys. “[T]here seems to be,” one writer baldly wrote, “a paucity of toys suitable for, or rather interesting to, boys.”1 Although authors like Maria Edgeworth and Theodore Dwight suggested the standard, useful remedies—field trips, building models, gardening and carpentry—boys’ toys continued to perplex writers, contradicting their thinking about toys as engendering skills for adult life.2 But as they refined their illustrations and opinions, Dwight and company conceded that toys which promoted mechanic skills no longer applied to the sons of the middle class. In the end, they retreated to advocating manual skills as a hedge against financial misfortune or as an engaging hobby for later life.3
the problem: toys for boys
Nineteenth-century toy manufacturers who thought about the topic, in contrast, followed a more liberal interpretation of education that coincided with the aims of their business. More in the tradition of Friedrich Froebel, who pioneered the kindergarten movement, toymakers like Milton Bradley saw play and toys as valuable in and of themselves. Still toy manufacturers wrestled with making toys for boys; the difficult task of finding boys’ toys remained intractable during the nineteenth century. Manufacturers increasingly elaborated the realism of girls’ domestic toys, and toys designed for girls continued to teach domestic skills. Toymakers also took preliminary steps to familiarize boys with the skills and values appropriate to business or professional life through games such as Banking, The Checkered Game of Life, Telegraph Messenger, and Office Boy. These games offered a partial solution to the problem of creating amusement that interested boys by furnishing products based on finance, business, and upwardly-mobile career development. More important than introducing boys to the skills involved in capitalism, these games were also laced games generously with advice on appropriate values for advancement in the business world. Despite these promising solutions, the fact of the matter was that toys could no longer prepare the middle-class boy for his career or simulate the skills he would need for business or the professions—at least not in the sense that girls’ toys offered concrete training. A train set was not a railroad and cardboard models of papermills neither fully resembled the factories nor taught necessary engineering or architectural talents to construct them.
beginnings: building blocks
American toy manufacturers, despite their allegiance to liberal education, attempted to balance parental desire for toys with obvious cognitive benefits with profit. One of their earliest solutions, continuing a European tradition, was alphabet blocks packaged in sets. In 1858, the S. L. Hill Company patented a set of alphabet blocks which were simply flat square blocks painted on one side with a letter and on the obverse with word of one syllable.4 With the advent of chromolithography, block manufacturers pasted paper squares containing the pictures, letters, and words on the several faces. This advance allowed the greater use of color and reduced manufacturing costs. Another solution, also a continuation of European toy manufacture, was building blocks. Joel Ellis of Springfield, Vermont, invented a precursor to the later Lincoln Logs with his Log Cabin Playhouse between 1860 and 1870. The play house set contained various house parts, including long and short logs, roofing pieces, a chimney ridgepole, and other cabin elements.5 The R. Bliss Manufacturing company of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, probably the most notable of all block manufacturers, introduced varied sets of the Improved Architectural Building Blocks. The No. 248 set, for example, although it contained the smallest assortment of building elements, still offered columns, turned balusters and finials, triangular, rectangular, and square solids to children.6 At one and the same time, alphabet and picture block sets satisfied the demands of nineteenth-century parents by introducing the child to the basics of the language and toy manufacturers’ more liberal view of education and their need to sell as many of their wares as possible.