No. 18 ~

‘Missing Baby’ Penny Novelty

London, 1895

Museum of London

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Two of my main reasons for choosing this plaything are its lovely decoration on the lid, and the fact that it features a box.

Boxes are lovely things in themselves – there is something satisfying about a container made for little treasures, and I think we have all felt that particular sense of gratification after finding out that something ‘comes with its own box’. In this case, it is even better – a set of nesting boxes, the smallest of which contains a little doll.

I was delighted to see that the Museum of London has a selection of ‘penny toys and novelties’ from Victorian and Edwardian times, which were collected by a man named Ernest King, who donated them to the museum in 1918. You can find out more about the collection here. King worked as a Company Director at a straw-hat maker’s company, Melch & Sons, based in Gutter Lane, near St Paul’s Cathedral. Over 25 years (1893-1918) he purchased more than 1500 toys from street sellers in the area around St Paul’s and Ludgate Hill, presumably on his workdays. That in itself made me want to look into this a little more.

The curator of Social and Working History at the Museum of London points out that, though we have no further information about Ernest King, he did leave a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings about street sellers and their hard lives. Victorian London had around 30,000 casual street sellers, known as costermongers, and working and middle-class families relied on them for supplying the bulk of their needs. I wonder whether King developed a little ritual of buying one or two toys per week, say on a Friday. He must have been recognised by them, and he must have built a relationship of sorts over all those years.     

I looked up photographs of street sellers in Victorian London to picture the scene a little more (see here, a couple of decades earlier), and to imagine what these exchanges might have looked like. I also found a picture of Ludgate Hill a few years later, sometime between 1902 and 1906.

As a side note, I found it interesting in terms of further context and scene-setting, that Oscar Wilde’s trial was held in April 1895 at the Old Bailey, around the corner from where this toy was purchased a few months later. For the same price as this ‘Missing Baby’ toy, you could purchase a copy of the tabloid newspaper The Illustrated Police News, with drawings showing Wilde sitting next to Alfred Taylor, who was also accused of ‘gross indecency’: ‘He is hooted by the mob’, it reads.

The book ‘Street Life in London’ by John Thomson and Adolphe Smith, published in 1877, contains great photos and wonderful descriptions about the various characters to be found in Victorian London. And then we have Henry Mayhew’s extensive  'London Labour and the London Poor' (see Vol. 1 here). Published a few decades earlier than our penny toy, in 1851, it offers an incredibly detailed observation of life and people on the street. On p.463 of the first volume he writes about ‘A Single Woman, As a Street Seller’, who says, in conversation with him:

“Mother’s been dead these – well, I don’t know how long, but it’s a long time. I’ve lived by myself ever since, and kept myself, and I have half a room with another young woman who lives by making little boxes. I don’t know what sort of boxes. Pill boxes?  Very likely, sir, but I can’t say I ever saw any. She goes out to work on another box-maker’s premises. She’s no better off nor me. We pays 1s. 6d. a week between us; it’s my bed, and the other sticks is her’n. We ‘gree well enough. I haven’t sold sweet stuff for a great bit. I’ve sold small wares in the streets, and artificials (artificial flowers), and lace, and penny dolls, and penny boxes (of toys). No, I never hear anything improper from young men. Boys has sometimes said, when I’ve been selling sweets, ‘Don’t look so hard at ‘em, or they’ll turn sour’.”  

Looking at this box and its ‘Missing Baby’ (I presume this is the name given to it at the time, and used by Ernest King to describe it), I am struck with how much work went into it, for a penny. I realise that they must have done these quickly, but it would still take some time to cut the chipwood, shape it into boxes, assemble them, decorate them, make the little figure (however ‘crude’ it may be), and paint the figure and the boxes. I am also interested in how lovely and loose those lines are in the decoration, and wonder at how skilled these people were, and how our expectations (and our idea of ‘cheap’) have changed so very much over the past 126 years.

This toy was bought by Ernest King on 18 December 1895, and the museum states it was probably made to go in a Christmas stocking. Some days later, Christmas Day was described in a newspaper as being “marred by wretched weather” in the form of sleet, snow, and rain (see the article).

I wonder whether many more of these boxes were made, and whether any children sat at home that Christmas, the room a little airless and stuffy, while they looked out of the window at the nasty weather. I wonder whether they carefully took the little baby figure out of the box, and then quickly put it back excitedly and practised at plopping the lid back on. And whether, just seconds later, they had a look at the baby figure again, and took out all the boxes, lining them up side by side to admire them properly before finally putting the nice lid back on, at least for a few minutes. That really is a nice lid.

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19. Leather Mouse