Category Archives: Cotsen Curatorial

Rewriting the Tooth Fairy’s Job Description: Folkore, Fantasy and Branding

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Time to welcome the Tooth Fairy into the 21st century, where more is more!  The brand needs to create more memories to store up besides comparing with siblings, friends, and frenemies how much the tooth fairy was good for, or whispering when someone younger is present that there was a big hand attached to dad’s arm under the pillow…

Try the video game “Tooth Fairy Run” on the website of the Royal Mint.  For the more bloody-minded there’s a little 2022 horror film “Drill to Kill” starring a psycho tooth fairy.   Naturally there are plenty of deviant reimaginings of the tooth fairy on the web. But enough of this—a quick detour into the merch before looking at some intriguing books for children about her (he-fairies or gender-neutral ones for another time).

Calm anxiety about keeping the tooth safe until it can be collected with the advance purchase (or creation) of a dear little container, a pouch, box, or pillow. Sterling and silver- plate ones are also available, but they look too knobbly to go under even the best cushioned head. Suppose you aren’t a particularly quick and adroit liar when confronted with awkward questions like “What does the tooth fairy do with all the teeth?” (My family’s ready answer was, “She strings them into a necklace miles and miles long and wears it flying around the world at night.”)  There is a large selection of picture books which expand upon the scanty stock of tooth fairy folklore by offering multiple backstories about her early life, descriptions of her workspace and workflows, family structure, and superpowers.

The more traditional reimaginings of the airy spirit preserve the pre-industrial business model.   In Peter Collington’s wordless The Tooth Fairy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), once she knows where she is wanted, she hurries to an extensive excavation below a tree to mine, melt, and cast ore into a token.  She flies to the sleeping expectant’s room, removes the tooth from the box under the pillow (one to fold can be found at the end of the book), and leaves the newly minted token in its place.  As soon as she returns home, she repurposes the tooth for a replacement piano key and once it’s been tuned, she happily practices for the rest of the night.

No obstacles crop up during the smooth and timely fulfilment of baby tooth removal and compensation.  All the fairy’s energy is focused on one child per night, which seems unlikely, given the number of children across the globe who must lose teeth every day.  In a realer world, every night she would have to rush to inconveniently far-flung destinations (although nowhere as many as Santa), routed by a team of experienced traffic controllers.  The operation would also need additional staff to manufacture the tokens, manage the inventory, pack, and address the nightly shipment.

The Underhills: A Tooth Fairy Story (Somerville, MA: Candlewick, 2019) by Australian author/illustrator Bob Graham substitutes a modern middle-class fairy family tied into the spirit network for the gauzy girl sole proprietor. In this sequel to April and Esme, Tooth Fairies, Mom and Dad drop the three kids off at their grandparents for a sleep-over at their tea pot cottage close to the airport.

Gran has just made the fairy cakes and syrup for breakfast, when a call comes in for an emergency pickup in arrivals. Gran and the girls fly to the terminal to meet Akuba’s flight from Ghana and wait with the angels and cupids until the announcement comes over the loudspeaker.  In the rush to get to the airport on time, Gran forgot the coin and tells the girls to find some loose change in a vending machine. The errand is completed  seconds before Akuba and her family walk by.  April and Esme find the pocket and dive deep inside it to nab the tooth and replace it with the coin.  Akuba senses their presence, which obliges the fairies to whisper in her ear that she never heard them moments before the family gets in the cab. Mission accomplished: Akuba won’t have the foggiestidea how the coin got in her sweater pocket.

Graham’s realm of the tooth fairy is so nicely integrated into our world that wings and jumpers look as right as an airport concourse watched over by angels and cupids. The funny, slightly incongruous story in which a little Black girl who lost a baby tooth on an international flight is not overlooked is reassuring without being obvious.

The blurbs on the dust jacket of Toothiana: Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies, volume 3 of William Joyce’s series The Guardians of Childhood, calls it “sweeping and epic, a Persian carpet of story lines”  and “deep, dark, dazzling…the most wonderful of William Joyce’s worlds.”   It is nothing if not eclectic.

A suggestion by Joyce’s daughter Katharine, who died tragically young of brain cancer, inspired the cast of characters assembled from the great brands of modern childhood fakelore.  Headed up by the benign wizard Osmic, the forces for good are Santa Claus (aka Nicholas St. North the Cossack), the Easter Bunny (E. Aster Bunnymund, prodigious digger, chocolatier extraordinaire, and bare chested warrior with six arms), the Tooth Fairy (Toothiana, the keeper of childhood memories) and Nighlight (a Peter Pan clone).   Their collective soul is Katharine, a girl on the verge of womanhood, who loses her last baby tooth, “The Tooth of Destiny.”  If  a new Golden Age is to be created, they must again rout the arch baddie Pitch Black, king of nightmares, and his henchman the Monkey King backed by a force of beserker flying simians, lifted from The Wizard of Oz.

Where does the Tooth Fairy fit into the pseudo-oriental epic straining to keep Katharine safe without utterly defeating Pitch, so the sequels can keep coming.  An orphan who is a sword-wielding hummingbird in harem pants with the power to split herself into six tiny avatars (the vaunted army).  Her name does not inspire terror and awe, but neither would  alternatives like Molarella, Bicuspidina, Canina, or Enamelette.  She has to compete for space in her own volume with the other Guardians—and more critically, Katharine–so backstory gets swallowed up by all the other storylines churning the thirty short chapters written in short choppy sentences.   Like Rise of the Guardians, the DreamWorks Animation fantasy-action-adventure franchise that foundered  after the first animated film,  Toothiana is stuffed so full with underdeveloped ideas that the narrative and characters never come alive to the extent necessary to sustain a series of installments.

It’s no wonder the Tooth Fairy has issues with mission, identity, and agency…

The History of Dental Care for Babies: The Anodyne Necklace for Teething

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Frustration is trying to soothe a teething baby.  The signs are easy to spot—a bright red cheek, inflamed gums, lots of drool, a fist stuck in the mouth, fussing and more fussing.  Rubbing the gums with a lightly chilled silver spoon or a clean finger wrapped in gauze may provide some temporary relief.  No one will be in a very good mood until the tooth breaks through.  The good news is that the process will repeat over and over again the next six to twelve months until all twenty deciduous or milk teeth come in.

We have known for some time that teething is a nuisance that can be dealt with at home, except in rare cases.  Probably every tired parent today goes online questing for a miracle cure.  Amazon makes it fiendishly easy to obsess over dozens and dozens of teething aides in all sizes and shapes—redesigned pacifers, silicone chew toys, plastic freezer beads, sleek Bauhausian rings that teach how to distinguish shapes and colors, etc. most too cute and reasonably priced to resist the temptation of a little retail therapy.

It was supposed to be simpler once upon a time, but that isn’t really true. In the past, medical professionals believed that teething was an important cause of morbidity because it was supposedly responsible for so many infant ailments.  What remedies were there?  Coral sticks were the rich family’s pacifier.  The more elaborate ones were mounted in silver and  decorated with bells and a whistle, like this splendid one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the right.  Surely easy to dent, they look like a gift to be proudly displayed rather like a Tiffany & Co. sterling silver barbell rattle and teether, not sucked by a drooly baby.

Protection from illness or bad luck have been afforded for centuries by amulets of various  materials.  In England, wise women put necklaces of peony roots around the necks of teething children, a practice was well documented in early modern pharmacopias.  White peony roots, necklaces of peony wood beads or seeds are still prescribed for fever, inflammation and pain by practitioners of Chinese traditional medicine.  All these ingredients are available on the web for medicinal purposes, by the way.

In the eighteenth century, the anodyne necklace for babies cutting teeth was one of the most famous (or notorious) of the many branded placebos and quack medicines in a rapidly expanding market.  At 5 shillings, only the well-to-do could afford one. Nevertheless competition was so fierce that consumers were warned away from the counterfeits.  Dr. P. Chamberlen, the supposed inventor without credentials sharing  the same last name a distinguished family of physicians, directed customers to the only authorized retailers, jeweler and goldsmith Basil Burchell and Mrs. Randall.   Do not buy a copy unless it comes with a copy of the 8-page pamphlet, the assurance of authenticity. Pages from Cotsen’s copy are shown at the left.

Children who balked at taking a pill would accept a light-weight, pretty necklace around their neck.  It worked its magic through  “a secret friendly sympathetic quality” similar to amber, jet, glass or agate and cited the eminent natural philosophers Robert Boyle and Dr. Willis as authorities.  A token pierced with a hole could be threaded on the necklace for added efficacy. Queen Caroline and Augusta, Princess of Wales, purchased one necklace per child monthly.   The pamphlet also suggested the time-honored method of rubbing the gums with a finger dusted in pain-easing powder also available where the necklace was sold.

These “toys” sold by the thousands to superstitious mothers, were nothing but frauds, raged the physician-author of The Modern Quacks Detected (1752).  He described the case of a woman who brought her feverish baby to him for an examination.  Two teeth were nearly ready to break through, so his recommendation was to have a surgeon slit the gums to reduce the baby’s suffering.  Instead the fearful mother bought an anodyne necklace a few days later, by which time the teeth had cut.  Her claim that the necklace cured the baby was picked up by one of the agent’s scouts and doctored up as a testimonial to be included in advertisements.  “Hocus pocus,” snarled the author.  She could have hung a stick around his neck instead and claimed it was responsible for the baby’s improvement.

His protest was in vain.  Cotsen recently purchased a bill head dated January 12 1833 for Basil Burchell, son of the original “proprietor & preparer of the ANODYNE NECKLACE” still trading from no. 79 Long-Acre.  And who paid 9 shillings for a necklace?  None other than Her Royal Highness, Duchess of Kent, Victoria Saxe-Coburg-and-Gotha, the mother of the future Queen Victoria.

Before laughing at the Duchess’s credulity, stop for a reality check.  Dentists caution against allowing babies to wear necklaces, bracelets, and anklets without mentioning if they are being worn as amulets against distress during teething.  Amber teething necklaces have their advocates and there must be a fair number of them for a medical blogger address the veracity of  claims made for them.  Plus ca change, plus c’est plus la même chose….