Category Archives: Cotsen Curatorial

Here’s a Ball for Baby

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Cleaning house during the Firestone Renovation led to the discovery of treasures like this one.   To be truthful, Ian and I didn’t know what it was.  But it couldn’t be described more fully until we figured it out, taking advantage of the opportunities presented by internet searching to follow leads and make connections.

Cotsen 31857

Cotsen 31857

I’ve been working on processing collections material that needs to be moved out of a space that will be demolished during the renovation. Much of this material is unprocessed, otherwise under-described, or not accessioned. It’s been tedious work, but I’ve managed to blow the dust off some great items and uncover some diamonds in the rough.

One such surprisingly delightful item has been Baby’s Ball (pictured above), which I came across the other day. It’s a stuffed textile ball which includes a nursery rhyme accompanying 6 lithographed illustrations. The initial record for the item didn’t have much information. But after some careful sleuthing, Andrea and I were able to discover a lot about this Victorian baby toy.

Each illustration is accompanied by 2 descriptive lines of verse, one above and one below the image. We started our investigation when Andrea noticed that this nursery rhyme was vaguely familiar:

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“Here’s a ball for baby, nice and soft and round / here’s the baby’s hammer, hear the baby pound / here’s the baby’s soldiers, standing in a row / here’s the baby’s trumpet, hear the baby blow / don’t take the ball away, to make baby cry / here’s the baby’s cradle, to rock baby by”

At first, we found several versions of the rhyme on the web, but no attribution or history. It was most commonly referenced as a finger play, a nursery rhyme or other simple song that one also performs with hand motions. Itsy Bitsy Spider is probably the most familiar example. Frustratingly, though the song appears so well known, we couldn’t locate it in any of our reference books on early nursery rhymes.

But then we finally hit pay dirt! Andrea found that the original version of the nursery rhyme is attributed to Emilie Poulsson in her book, Finger plays for nursery and kindergarten (Boston : Lothrop Publishing Company, c1893) under the title “All For Baby”. This book, it just so happens, is in the Cotsen collection:

finger plays cover

Front cover, 86551

page38

page 38

page39

Page 39

page40

Page 40

Though we were able to learn more about the ball’s verse by locating a related item from Cotsen’s own collection; this didn’t help use discover any information about the toy’s manufacture. That information came from a much less likely source: eBay.

While looking for information on our Baby’s Ball, I stumbled across an auction listing for: Antique Dated 1900 Art Fabric Mills Cloth Rag Doll BABY’S BALL Rare Uncut NR yqz. At first it didn’t look pertinent. But after scrolling down the page I realized that the item for sale was an original uncut cloth pattern sheet for the very same ball now in our collection. From this eBay listing, we were not only able to learn about the manufacturer and dates of the item, but that it was probably stitched together and stuffed at home, after the purchase of the uncut sheet.

Below, I’ve Included 2 pictures from that eBay listing for reference. But you can click on the link above to see the original listing which includes more pictures of the uncut sheet.

Uncut sheet for Baby's Ball

Uncut sheet for Baby’s Ball

Patent and manufacturer

Patent and manufacturer

We started with no information on a cute Victorian cloth ball and a vaguely familiar nursery rhyme. We ended up with a fully described Baby’s Ball (New York : Art Fabric Mills, 1900) which borrows (liberally) from a well-known finger play originally written by Emilie Poulsson in her book Finger plays for nursery and kindergarten, just 7 years before the pattern for the ball was patented. In short, it was a fun day at Cotsen doing research on collections material.

Purely for your edification, I’ve embedded a video performance of the finger play as well:

This video comes from the YouTube channel WCCLS Birth2Six, where a few more finger plays have also been acted out.

 

Scrapbooking in the 1790s: School Boys Collect Popular Prints

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“Portrait of a Christ’s Hospital Boy” painted by Margaret Carpenter (1793-1872).

William Pitt Scargill (1787-1836), was a Unitarian minister for twenty years before turning occasional writer and novelist.  His one children’s book was Recollections of a Blue-Coat Boy, or A View of Christ’s Hospital (1829). It is usually designated as a novel, but is actually a non-fiction dialogue between a father, an alumnus of Christ’s Hospital in London, and his two sons.  Based partly on Scargill’s memories of his time as a pupil at Christ’s Hospital between 1794 and 1802, he offers information of interest to children about the games the Blue-coat boys played, how strict the rules were and which ones were flouted, what was served at meals, who were the meanest teachers,   etc.

One passage, which historians of children’s print culture seem to have been overlooked describes a pastime Scargil believes no longer absorbs the boys: making books of images cut out of cheap half-penny prints they collected.  Pictures of farming were considered the most desirable and the boys competed to get the best ones.  No reason is given why the boys would put down their pocket money to possess teeny-tiny pictures of agriculture, but apparently they coveted them more than those of military subjects, hunting, race horses, street vendors, and performers or  rude caricatures of social types.

A farmer ploughing a field from a half-penny print.

An intact half-penny Bowles & Carver lottery print.

The school boys were purchasing and trading a kind of catchpenny print, known as a lottery, which is easy to identify from the format, a grid whose boxes are filled with a miscellaneous variety of pictures.  The print seller Robert Sayer advertised in 1775 his stock of 500 different designs that consisted of “men women, birds, beasts, and flowers “chiefly intended for children to play with.”  Lotteries, it seems, were supposed to be used up in an entertaining activity, much like a coloring or drawing book.

A detail from a Bowles & Carver print that would have pleased the schoolboy who wanted military subjects.

Scargill’s delightful account of the boys’ scrapbooking follows in its entirety.  The  illustrations from Bowles & Carver lotteries were taken from Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century (Dover, 1970).