Rumer Godden’s imaginative stories for children evoke fairy tales. At once sumptuous and innocent, many of her stories, like The Story of Holly and Ivy, include an acute sense of lack and loss. The children in the lean post-war years in England are aware of hunger and scarcity. Her 1948 children’s book The Dolls’ House is no exception. The story, which takes place in 1946, focuses on a doll family in search of a house, which makes sense given the title.
The story also follows the girls who love and care for the dolls, Emily and Charlotte Dane, two thoroughly believable sisters who dream and scheme and bicker together as real sisters do. The story seems at first deceptively simple, but the daily goings-on of a pretend doll family in search of a pretend house are surprisingly nuanced and offer worthwhile reflections on life.
The illustrations by Tasha Tudor are an excellent addition to the text. Tudor, who maintained an exquisite collection of dolls and marionettes, was well qualified to imagine the inner life and social workings of dolls. In 1955, Tudor’s doll married another doll in an elaborate ceremony on the family’s property in New Hampshire, an event so unique that LIFE magazine featured it.
The central character in the book is the 100-year-old farthing doll, Tottie, a humble but sturdy doll carved from wood. Once played with by Emily and Charlotte’s great-grandmother and great-great-aunt Laura, Tottie proves herself to be wise and reflective. The newer dolls that make up her fabricated family are rather shallow and traumatized but possess a nobility of spirit that Tottie helps to draw out. There is a great warmth in the hodge-podge family and something wonderfully endearing about the drama that unfolds.
One reviewer noted that in the genre of literature about dolls there is a similarity in the way that dolls are at the mercy of the children who play with them as children are at the mercy of the adults who care for them. Muddling through how to provide for their beloved dolls, the girls try to find ways to earn money. When a friend of the family, Mrs. Innisfree, offers them money to display Tottie in an exhibition of dolls, Charlotte jumps at the chance. Realizing later that the exchange of money endangers their bond with the beloved doll, they return the money and seek alternative means of procuring doll house furnishings.
Mrs. Innisfree offers to help the girls in making much of the furniture by hand and restoring what has been preserved in the old doll house discovered in the extended family and sent to the girls. During this project, the following exchange occurs:
“‘What a great deal we are learning about things,’ said Emily, ‘all these beautiful old things.’
‘But you mustn’t think it is only the old things that are beautiful,’ said Mrs. Innisfree. ‘We can do as good work nowadays if we have the same patience.’
‘Yes—patience!’ said Charlotte. Truth to tell, her hand was aching very much from the sandpapering, but she went on rubbing.”
Rediscovering how to sing, bake, and make a beautiful home can feel challenging. It’s easy to romanticize some past era when the communal understanding was more robust, when finer things were more highly prized. However, all that is possible for us is to bring beauty to the present moment, however clumsily. With practice—and patience!—our efforts will bear fruit.
1 comment
Comments are closed.