The Children's Toy Industry in Nineteenth-Century Britain
The Children's Toy Industry in Nineteenth-Century Britain
复制标题
十九世纪英国的儿童玩具业
DOI：
10.1080/00076799000000045
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发表时间：
1990
期刊：
影响因子：
1.1
通讯作者：
K. D. Brown
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
K. D. Brown
1806年，玻璃饰品制造商托马斯奥斯勒作为伯明翰商会的代表首次访问伦敦。在那里，他后来在1824年告诉Anism和机械特别委员会，他得到了一个价值500欧元的硬币，用于供应玩偶的玻璃眼睛。虽然他无法接受这项工作，但他随后计算出，“全国每个孩子两岁之前都不用娃娃，七岁就把它扔在一边，每年都有一个新的娃娃。光是眼睛就能产生几千磅的流通量。“我提到这一点，”他接着说，“只是为了说明小事的重要性。”如果说奥斯勒的计算所依据的假设有些可疑的话，那么他的结论是足够合理的，几年后，经济学家JR McCulloch也附和了他的结论。他在1835年建议写儿童玩具，“这些物品在肤浅的观察者的估计中可能显得多么轻浮，它们的制造雇佣了数百名工人，并为许多家庭提供了面包。到1876年，当GC Bartley评论说同时代人“如此习惯于修复......注意那些主要限于成年人使用的物品.我们往往忽视了这样一个事实，即儿童也有他们的需要，这些需要是由我们称之为玩具的那些小东西来满足的，并且忽视了英国制造玩具的程度。"一个世纪后，巴特利的限制仍然适用。尽管这些文物本身对学者和古物研究者有着巨大的吸引力，但在现代对英国工业历史的描述中，生产这些文物的工业实际上被忽视了。典型的是，只有她提到了国内制造的儿童玩具4除了相对缺乏文件aypicai大多数小规模的行业，其他三个原因表明自己的这一疏忽。首先，对于许多19世纪的孩子，特别是那些来自贫困家庭或偏远地区的孩子来说，商业生产的玩具实际上是不为人知的奢侈品。即使在经历了三十年的繁荣之后，这种情况在世纪末仍然存在。充其量，玩具只包括自然界免费提供的东西，或者可以从随手可得的废料中生产出来的东西。例如，值得注意的是，在19世纪90年代由格姆夫人收集的关于儿童传统游戏的大量研究中，任何设备都是最小的或容易制作的-按钮，石头，形状的棍子，偶尔还有一个球，经常是不时尚的
In 1806 Thomas Osler, a glass trinket maker, paid his first visit to London as a representative of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. While there, he later told the Select Committee on Anism and Machinery in 1824, he was offered a conuact worth E500 for the supply of dolls' glass eyes. Although he was unable to accept the work, he subsequently calculated that'every child in the country not using a doll till two years old, and throwing it aside at seven, and having a new one annually... the eyes alone would produce a circulation of a great many thousand pounds. I mention this', he went on,'merely to show the importance of trifles'.'If the assumptions on which Osler's calculations rested were somewhat dubious, his conclusions were sound enough and they were echoed some years later by the economist JR McCulloch. Writing of children's toys he suggested in 1835 that'how frivolous so ever these articles may appear in the estimation of superficial obselvers, their manufacture employs hundreds of hands, and gives bread to many familie~'.~ Nor had such perceptions changed very much by 1876 when GC Bartley commented that contemporaries were'so accustomed to fix... attention on those articles, whose use is principally confined to persons of adult age... that we are apt to lose sight of the fact that children too have their wants, which are to be supplied by those little trifles that we call Toys, and to ignoa the extent to which their manufacture in England is camed on'.'Over a century later Bartley's strictures still apply. Although the artefacts cVtemselves have proved enormously attractive to scholars and antiquarians, the industry which produced them has been virtually ignored in modem accounts of Britain's industrial past. Characteristically, only she magisterial Clapham even mentions the domestic manufacture of children's toys4Apart from the relative lack of documentation aypicai of most small scale industries, three other reasons suggest themselves for this oversight. First, there was the fact that for many nineteenthcentury children, particularly those from poor homes or mral areas, commercially produced toys were virtually unknown luxuries. This still remained the case by the end of the century even after three decadcs of rising prosperity. At best playthings consisted only of what was freely supplied by nature or what could be produced from waste materials lying readily to hand. It is noticeable, for instance, that in the vast study of children's traditional games collected by Lady Gomme in the 1890s any equipment was minimal or easily made up-buttons, pieces of stone, shaped sticks, and occasionally a ball, as often as not fashioned