My favorite early china dolls are the brown-eyed, pre-Civil War china heads - especially the ones with glass eyes although I admit that the later Parians with blue glass eyes are also a favorite.
In 1850, the shift from brown-eyed dolls to blue-eyed dolls was attributed to Queen Victoria. Victoria was the fashion icon of her day. She popularized white wedding dresses and was at the forefront of mourning fashions.
The publication Punch picked up this tidbit about Victoria's influence on doll eye color. Other publications reprinted it throughout the United States and the phrase "Victoria Blue" was repeated throughout.
We think of Germany and France as the major doll-making countries. However, dolls, or at least their parts, were also made in England. "Labor and the Poor" was a regular column that appeared in London's Morning Chronicle. It was written by Henry Mayhew. This particular column was published on Thursday 28 February 1850 and can be read in its entirety here.
The reference to brown-eyed and blue-eyed dolls is specifically to glass-eyed dolls.
It is interesting, though, to read the accounts of how other dolls and their parts were made - wooden dolls, paper mache dolls, wax-over dolls (and why they could not be produced in the United States), doll wigs, and doll clothes. What is also striking is the poverty that doll makers lived in. Hence, the title "Labor and the Poor." One maker of paper mache doll heads produced 29,952 a year while living in abject poverty. He recounted that stuffing 144 doll bodies brought in only a half-crown. Thinking about the living conditions of doll makers and the times when dolls were weaponized diminishes some of the joy in doll collecting.
