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The genesis of the modern toy

by John Brewer

1.It is a commonplace that a culture can be understood by an examination of its artifacts. Yet the history of "material culture", as opposed to the history of a society's finest works of sculpture, art and

architecture, is still an embryonic science. Costume, the tools of a man's (or woman's) trade, household utensils, furnishings, playthings — all of these, especially those that did not belong to the elite or leaders of

a society, have not received the attention devoted to "high" culture. Yet many aspects of everyday life exhibit the beliefs and social experience of the bulk of a nation's people. Costume can tell us how the members of a society are ranked and ordered, how sexes are differentiated (if at all), and what qualities are

least or most admired. Toys are equally revealing for they almost always contain statements made by adults (often though not invariably parents) either about the culturein which they live and/or the values that they think desirable. Toys mirror a culture — or at least, aspects of it; conversely, if we wish to understand the significance of an individual toy or game, we must set it within a broad context, looking at it in the light of

prevailing attitudes towards work and play, the psychology of man, the nature of learning and the place of the child in both family and society. Toys are cultural messages — sometimes simple, occasionally complex and ambiguous, but invariably revealing.

     2.Yet the idea of the "educational toys — indeed, even the concept of the toy as a plaything peculiar to children — is a relatively recent one. Before the eighteenth century there were virtually no toy manufacturers nor toyshops in Europe and America, equally, there were almost no books written or

produced especially for children, who shared most games and recreations with adults. The world of the child was not precisely separated from the realm of the adult; no special sector or segment of the culture was devoted exclusively to children·‘.”Thus Dr. Johnson defined "toy" in his famous Dictionary as "a

petty commodity; a trifle; a thing of no value; a plaything or bauble! There was absolutely no mention of children. The term "toy" meant any small inexpensive object or trinket sold to young and old alike. The travelling pedlar or chapman, the town's "toyman", offered cheap jewellery, buckles, bangles and hairpins.

Even "dolls" were not intended for children but were in fact miniature mannequins, clothed to display the latest fashion, fad or frippery, There were therefore almost no toys in the modern sense. This did not, of course mean that the children had no playthings; it simply meant that they had to fall back on the things

that they shared with their elders. They improvised and invented toys and games. Domestic utensils, the resources of field and forest, the debris of the urban environment: all of these contributed towards imaginative and open-ended play.

3.How do we explain this almost total absence of toys in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English and colonial American household? Historians have advanced several explanations, nearly all of which attribute the lack of toys to parental attitudes towards children and social attitudes towards play. Judged

by modern standards, it is argued, parents treated their children either with an indifference that verged on callousness or were actively brutal towards them, heating them with monotonous frequency. The world of the Anglo-American child before the modern era is therefore often portrayed as cruel, cold, unemotional

and lacking in the sort of family affection that might encourage play. These attitudes are usually explained as a reaction to the horrifying rates of infant and child mortality which militated against a close parent-child bond, and by the prevailing contemporary view that when children came into the world, they were,

like all human creatures, tainted with original sin against which a constant and brutal war had to be waged.

4.Those historians who look on the history of childhood as the gradual emancipation of the child from

70 this callous and cruel regime have used several types of evidence to demonstrate the harshness of seventeenth century childhood. English infants, they point out, were swaddled, bound so tightly that they could not move their legs and arms. This does not, however, seem to have been the practice in the thirteen

75 colonies of America where babies wore loose-fitting garments. Nevertheless in both cultures parental breastfeeding was far from universal, and the infant was often packed off to a wet-nurse, where quite commonly neglect and ill-treatment resulted in the child's death. From the age of two corporal punishment

seems to have been the staple of the child's educational diet. Schoolmasters ("my system is to whip, and to have done with it") as well as parents and tutors rarely spared the rod to spoil the child. Punishment, corporal or otherwise, was generally severe. The time between infancy and gainful employment was

mercilessly brief; service, apprenticeship or labour in the family began as early as seven, and all children were put to work before they were twelve or thirteen. Children died in such numbers that they left very little trace of their lives behind them. Even in the communities on the colonial frontier, where infant

mortality rates were lower than in the coastal towns or back in Europe, the death of a child — your child —was a frequent occurrence.

5.This picture of the heartless and cruel world inhabited by children needs some qualification. Nearly all

of the evidence that appears to demonstrate parental indifference towards the child in fact shows simply that his individuality was not strongly recognised. We tend to assume that parental affection cannot flourish unless children are regarded as individuals. But this is essentially a modern (and Western) assumption that

in part stems from our elevation of the bond between the parent (or, at least, the mother) and the individual child above almost all other forms of attachment. The chief affective bonds of the pre-modern American and English parent were probably to the family as a whole rather than to its individual members; this does

not mean that, they never showed affection to their children, only that they cared for them as a "brood".

6.The "no toy" culture, which scarcely seems to have recognised the special state of childhood, was gradually but radically transformed between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The most

110 significant changes were the development of a new conception of man, and a parallel recognition of new processes of human learning. Man came to be seen as a malleable and manipulable creature who entered the world with a mind that was not printed with evil but was a tabula rasa, like a blank sheet of paper, on

115 which appropriate sense impressions could imprint knowledge and learning. Man, in other words, was capable of moral improvement provided that he was nurtured in the right environment. This view was accompanied by the relatively novel theory of the human psyche that emphasised man's innate tendency to

120 eschew pain and pursue pleasure. From this perspective the widespread use of brutal corporal punishment was clearly counterproductive: by associating learning and pain it was more likely to discourage an interest in learning than to teach or socialise. Such crude practices it was argued, should be replaced by a much

125 more subtle psychological manipulation of the child, one that used the propensity for play to make learning stimulating and pleasurable.

7.These educational theories are traditionally associated with the English philosopher, John Locke,

130 whose «Some Thoughts Concerning Education» (1693), which went through numerous editions in several languages and on both sides of the Atlantic. Locke was not the first philosopher to realise that play could be used didactically, nor was his psychology unique.

8. We should not, of course, assume that these ideas swept  all before them. Their acceptance varied from place to place and class to class. They were taken up predominantly by middle-class parents eager to "improve" their children. But the old attitudes and practices continued: many children were still

whipped and flogged, and imaginative learning rarely ousted the more traditional method of rote memorisation. Indeed, for many childnen the situation deteriorated at the end of the eighteenth century, when evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic returned to the older view of infant depravity and renewed the practice of wholesale flogging.

9. Nevertheless, Lockean theory marks the growing acceptance in North America of the idea that education was a matter of carrot rather than stick. It also heralds the genesis of the toy both as a plaything peculiar to children and as an educational device. Locke and his eighteenth-century followers

were adamant that play was the key to successful learning. Both play and playthings, which had previously been regarded either as an obstruction to learning or as matters of no didactic consequence, became crucial

to the educational process. As Locke remarked about playthings (in sentiments remarkably similar to those of Froebel over 100 years later), "nothing that may form adult's minds, is to he overlooked and neglected, and whatsoever introduces Habits, and settles Customs in them, deserves the Care and Attention of their

Governors, and is not a small thing in its Concequences'. Toys and games were recognised as being very important. Indeed Locke was responsible for popularising one of the earliest "educational" toys, the so called "Locke blocks", whose role in teaching the alphabet he lovingly describes in his «Thoughts on Education».

   10. Locke's theories seem remarkably modern, and certainly they approximate much more closely to present-day views of learning than to the regime of flogging that he so vehemently opposed. Nevertheless his concept of play and of the role of toys and games was remarkably circumscribed. In his desire to

establish a controlled environment for the child, he recommended education at home under a private tutor. The idea of the home as a "sanctum, a haven in a heartless world, developed largely through the dissociation of the dwelling-place from the place of work and because of the transformation of the middle

class woman from an important figure in the family economy to the mother and guardian of children kept in the home. Prosperity and the desire for gentility produced a growing leisured class of women whose chief tasks were to adorn themselves and their homes and to superintend the moral welfare of their

progeny. For the middle classes of America "work", which had once been associated both with the home and with the entire family, became a predominantly masculine activity conducted beyond the domestic horizon. Play, especially children's play, became restricted to the domestic environment in which parental

(especially maternal) control could be most successfully exercised.

11. This desire to control the play of children stemmed from notions of play itself. Neither Locke nor the aspiring middle-class parent thought of play as a means by which children could learn from each other;

190 nor, though they saw play as a means of teaching individuals social and moral precepts, did they envisage play itself as a form of socialisation. Rather they regarded it as a tool of the tutor or parent, a means by which children could be educated. Play, therefore, was looked on as an individualistic endeavour, even

195 when it involved other children, and as being didactic in a rather narrow sense.

From: History Today, Vol. 30, December 1980.