A "ludic space" is simply a place to play.  I used the term in my title partly to hint that for some scholars the culture of girls' play can only seem respectable if it is dressed up in technical terms.  But "ludic space," compared with "playground" or "playroom," does suggest a space specifically designated for play by adults whose intention is that children should play nowhere else. 
          A problem is that a child given a special place to play will often be subject to authority in that area: even if not confined to it as to a prison, she may be watched while she plays there.  One might, indeed, argue that a dollhouse is not so much a place to play as a glamorized storage area, since very few dollhouses allow children to climb inside them.  They can enter imaginatively as fully as they like, but often cannot get more than one hand inside.
          A dollhouse does have the advantage of permanence: large and heavy, with fragile furnishings that have to be kept "neat and complete," it is not likely to be moved around or "tidied away."  A child engaged in imaginative play that involves concrete objects such as dolls or miniatures needs a place relatively free of interference, where a complicated game can be set up and left in place for a reasonably long time.  As Edith Nesbit pointed out, any "scene of magnificence" needs a large safe space: "It is better for the child's mind that the cherished doll should safely be baby for ever, than that it should be Francis the First and get walked on."
          The more permanent the dollhouse, though, the more valuable--in financial terms--it is likely to be to the household as a whole.  The traditional dollhouse is a place controlled by adults in a way that other popular ludic spaces--tree-houses, club-houses, attics, "desert islands"--are not.  Dollhouses differ from these other spaces also in that they are officially places where dolls, not children, live.  In what follows, I will look at the dollhouse as a space under some degree of adult control. On the page A child's place I will try to find out how dollhouses were used when girls were left to their own devices. Home for a doll looks at dollhouses through the eyes of their doll inhabitants (though admittedly their stories have been recounted by human hand).
          To some extent, these divisions are chronological: writing before 1850 tends to emphaze adult supervision, from 1850 to 1880 the emphasis is on the child's point of view, and the most detailed doll's eye views come were written after 1880.

Vanity and pride
Historians of the dollhouse, though they have little textual evidence to guide them, agree that early detailed miniature domestic scenes belonged to the adult world.  Some of these models come from early Egyptian tombs; they are usually explained as providing furnishings for the after-life of the deceased.  Some are elaborate miniature rooms kept in locked cabinets of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century homes in Holland or Germany.  The cabinets may or may not be decorated outside to look like  houses, but their main purpose seems to have been to display family wealth.  Miniature houses seem to have entered English and America culture a little later, at the end of the seventeenth century, and to have been quickly become accessible to children. Adults still held on to some control, though, because these early models were elaborate and expensive.  A little illogically, they said they were afraid that owning such valuable toys might make children vain and proud.
          The earliest children's story about dollhouse play that I know of is "The Baby-House," a very short story in Eleanor Fenn's Cobwebs to Catch Flies (1783, 1800 ).  "The Baby-House" avoids the subject of baby-houses with a strange perversity.  There is a small illustration showing a single-roomed "house" perhaps two feet high, which is being completely ignored by two girls holding a doll the same size as the house.  The story begins without preliminaries:
                    FIRST GIRL: "My doll's quilt is chintz.  What is this?"
                    SECOND GIRL: "Old point."
                    FIRST GIRL: "Let us take the doll up.
                                           Where are her clothes?"
Second Girl replies that some clothes are in a chest, and some in a press.  First Girl admires the press, and admits she does not have one, though there is a chest in her doll's house at home.  (She incidentally confuses the modern researcher by using "doll's house" at a time when "baby-house," as in the title, was supposedly the accepted term.)
          Significantly, the mention of this "doll's house" at once induces a pang of envy, but Fenn does not push the point by warning First Girl not to wish for a clothes press; instead, the story shifts attention to the doll.  For the rest of the story the girls dress the doll and discuss its clothes, paying due tribute to mamma's neat stitching, and conclude by discussing whether to give money to a poor child or to buy a doll's gown.
          In another early book, Mary Mister's The Adventures of a Doll (1816), we are told that the wealthy and cruel Miss Rachel Harper loved "to display all the riches of her baby-house" (11), but Mister does not display them to us.  The almost equally nasty Miss Amelia Fry notices some little girls improvising a play-house on the beach, and "could not but feel, that they had more joy with their simple shells and broken china, than she had ever had in her magnificent baby-house" (107).  No details are given about either of these grand baby-houses. 
          In view of this literary silence, it is hardly surprising that when Mary Martha Sherwood
introduces a baby-house into The Fairchild Family (1818), she recognizes that some of her readers may not know what a baby-house is.  "If you have not seen such a thing, I will endeavour to describe it to you" (1: 93).  Although the description is kept plain, even the bare details might entice a reader who is easily fascinated by miniatures:
                    It is a small house, fit for dolls, with doors and windows, and chimney outside;
              and inside there is is generally a parlour and a kitchen, and a bedroom, with
              chairs, tables, couches . . . beds, carpets, and everything small, just as there is in
               a real house for people to live in. (1: 93)
          This baby-house belongs to Miss Augusta Noble, and when Lucy and Emily Fairchild see it they are "very much pleased," but no further details are given.  Later their mother tells them that such toys encourage sinful ambition; with the relentlessness moral intentions for which she became notorious, Sherwood later drives home her point by showing how pride leads Miss Noble to a fiery death. (1: 102, 152).
          "A New Year's Gift," a poem by Adelaide O'Keefe (1804),  goes into a little more detail and allows Rose and her sister Emma to play with their new baby-house for nearly a whole day.  They eagerly examine their gift, feed the dolls, and put them to bed; they even light the candles without mishap.  But sinful behaviour soon destroys the pleasure; after a small disagreement, disaster heaps on disaster: toys are broken, mamma reprimands the sisters, Rose collapses with measles, and Emma becomes a penitent nurse. New Year's Day ends with Rose struggling for breath, and the baby-house quite forgotten.
          Anna Laetitia Barbauld's poem "The Baby-House" (1825) is less specific in its moralizing, but it does constantly remind "Dear Agatha" that the the baby-house she has just received is not a place of her own where she can play as she like.  She is congratulated on her "mansion in itself complete," and reminded that it is "fitted to give guests a treat":
                    With couch and table, chest and chair,
                    The bed or supper to prepare . . .
Rather than continuing to picture Agatha preparing her dollhouse for guests, the speaker goes on to imagine what she calls "ourselves" turned into elves and visiting the house at night after Agatha has gone to bed.  Very likely Agatha might not object to this friendly magical invasion of her property, but the narrator goes on to a more outright appropriation:
                    But think not, Agatha, you own
                    That toy, a Baby-house, alone . . . (1: 287)
At first it sounds as if she is simply denying Agatha's ownership, but she goes on to develop the idea that a baby-house has adult parallels: a pyramid, Versailles, and other ostentatious buildings.  The parallels are unconvincing: the link is presumably that all these structures are futile displays of wealth, but the differences in scale and in the power to endure make the message unclear.  Phrases not fully understood often stick in children's memories, and one can imagine a child being haunted by the reference to "A Baby-house to lodge the dead."  The last lines, too, have a nasty ring:
                    Then do not, Agatha, repine
                    That cheaper Baby-house is thine.  (1: 289)
Cheaper than a pyramid or Versailles, Barbauld means; but the adjective takes the shine off a new gift.  This may be just what Barbauld intended, as an antidote to pride.  (Of course, if Agatha had indeed been repining aloud at having been given a cheaper baby-house than she had hoped for, she no doubt deserved this dispiriting poem.)

Sharing
          By about 1820 the tone begins to lighten up, and instead of warning about pride, fiction writers suggest ways of sharing one's treasures.  In Little Polly's Doll's House, a picture book published in the mid-nineteenth century, Polly is taken to a large toyshop to choose a present for her fourth birthday, and is overwhelmed by the wide selection of toys.  Her own suggestion--that her doll "Lady Graci-o-sa" would like a baby doll--is countered by a sales clerk who shows her dolls dressed like soldiers and sailors.  "Polly did not like these dolls," so her mother suggests a dollhouse instead.  On being shown one taller than she is, with many interesting details including a baby doll in a cradle, Polly is happy with the choice, and wonders whether her brother will like it too. 
          At the beginning of the story Mamma had said that George would get a holiday and Polly, since it is her birthday, a present.  But now she decides to buy George four "handsome dressed figures" (dolls, in fact, three of them male), because they would be "useful" to him, since they represent the four quarters of the world.  Cynical modern readers might see Mamma's decision as a weak submission to the shopman's sales technique, and might notice that Polly is more pleased with her first choice, the baby doll, than with the dollhouse, but the story avoids this focus, making its intended moral point by showing the happy results of sharing one's toys.  Lady Graciosa is pleased with her baby (and, one hopes, her house), Polly (not too worried about pride) is able to enjoy showing her visiting cousins the "won-ders of her fai-ry pa-lace," and George's figures cause much amusement.  Laughter prevails as dolls and children and adults enjoy a birthday teaparty together.
          Elizabeth Prentiss adopts a similar tone in Little Susy's Six Birthdays (1854).  As in her other books about Susy, she is concerned to get certain moral lessons across, but this didactic element is softened by a close and sympathetic observation of stages of child development.  By the time Susy gets a dollhouse for her fifth birthday, she has been carefully guided through four previous birthdays, in each of which her social circle has been widened.  The baby-house has been made by her father, with contributions from mother, nurse, and aunt; the illustration shows an impressive edifice, but the text does not.  Susy eagerly starts to involve her small brother Robbie in a dollhouse game, but has to wait while he gets a share of the spotlight, a chance to appear in his first pair of trousers.  After this, the interest does centre around the dollhouse, not as an object of admiration, but as a source of fun for all the household.  Prentiss even adds a touch of humour to entertain adult readers, showing how Robbie and Susy play the parts of husband and wife but visit one another as if they were strangers.

Neatness and completeness
The tidy and satisfying pairing of "neat" and "complete" becomes a favourite tag, neat and complete in itself, and turning up in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction throughout the nineteenth century. 
          The "New Year's Gift" given to Rose and Emma in O'Keefe's poem of 1804, for instance, is
                      A baby-house quite neat
                    With kitchen, parlours, dining room,
                      And chambers all complete.  (Taylor, O'Keefe 87)
The sisters' quarrel begins when Rose ventures to question completeness and endanger neatness, deciding to move some chairs to a room where they will match the carpet better. 
          Two decades after this, the "real" five-year-old Anne Evans was given a baby-house that had been made for her godmother's great-grandmother; on her seventh birthday, she received this rhyming note from (it is assumed) her father:

                    

          
Adapted from Frances Armstrong, "The Dollhouse as Ludic Space, 1690-1920," Children's Literature 24 pages 23 to 51.  For a temporary list of works cited, see Combined Bibliography.

Other excerpts from this article can be found at A Child's Place and Home for a doll.

To return to the index of the academic section of this website, click here.

To return to my main home page, click
               I'm really very glad I'm able
                    To give my little girl a table,
                    Since that will make her house complete
                    If she will only keep it neat;
                    And when her seventh birthday's past
                    I hope she'll tidy grow at last,
                    And all her faults both great and small
                    She'll study to correct them all.
                               (Greene, EDH 160)
The rather daunting expectations apparently did not turn Anne against her baby-house; she gave it back to her godmother's family when she grew up, but retrieved it with delight in her mid-sixties.  She saved the poem, too; it remained in the storage drawer below the dollhouse for another century and a half.
          Though texts of the later nineteenth century are less directly in their moralizing, they still promote neatness, often by associating girls with order and boys with mess.  In Katharine Pyle's account (1889) of a dollhouse made in the early 1800s, a brother and sister use two shelves of a linen closet as a playhouse; but since boys are "not so careful and orderly in their ways as little girls," the neatness is shortlived, and the shelves fill up with "bits of stick fit for whittling," an old dog-collar, string, fishing line, "and many other odds and ends" (Pyle, in St Nicholas 16 [1889] 448).  Seeing that her daughter is worried by this mess, a sympathetic mother orders a proper dollhouse to be made, and decorates it herself.  The untidy brother must have been excluded, or reformed, since the dollhouse survived in good condition to be described seventy-five years later.
          Pyle's article, and others like it, helped to set up generalizations about dollhouse play, so that children and adults were aware of how others treated dollhouses.  Frances Hodgson Burnett contributed to the process in a mild way through her fictional Racketty-Packetty House (1907), continuing the emphasis on neatness.  Racketty-Packetty House, we are told, belonged to its current owner's grandmother in the early nineteenth century, and she had kept it "very neat," having been "a good housekeeper even when she was seven years old" (10).  Cynthia, the present owner, is far from neat, and her new dollhouse, Tidy Castle, is presumably given its name to inspire her, rather than to reflect the truth.  When she sees Tidy Castle she is ashamed of Racketty-Packetty House, but ignores it rather than tidying it up.  Burnett, writing in the twentieth century, is not particularly concerned to promote neatness; Racketty-Packetty House is a far more interesting place than Tidy Castle, and a visiting princess finds it most attractive.  Cynthia gives the princess Racketty-Packetty House, which is subsequently "made gorgeous."
          It is tempting to see the "neat and complete" dollhouse as no more than a place to indoctrinate girls in the domestic values of  the time.  But perhaps neatness should not be judged too hastily as a requirement imposed by adults  The twentieth-century architectural critic John Summerson suggests that small "houses" of the kind that children enjoy should have "neatness and serenity within, contrasting with wildness and confusion without" (Heavenly Mansions 2).  "Complete" could sound as negative as "neat," if being complete means being finished.  A "finished" toy is not likely to stimulate the imagination.  But completeness in a dollhouse can also be a satisfying fullness, combined with a sense of wonder that every detail of a real house is there in miniature.  Though the miniaturization is never really perfect, observers are usually so surprised and delighted at the maker's ingenuity that they are not in the mood to notice what may be missing.
          Some autobiographical accounts cast doubt on the attractions of tidiness, though.  Eleanor
Acland and her siblings, who devised many unusual imaginative games during the 1880s, found their large old dollhouse delightful in theory but disappointing in reality:
                    One of us would say: "Hurrah, it's a real wet day.  Let's play the whole morning with the dolls' house."  There had to be a definite decision, because the windowed front of the house was kept locked, and a grown-up had to come and unlock it and latch it back against the wall and tell us to mind and not go breaking the glass.  Then, somehow, when we had straightened up the fallen bits of furniture, and tidied up the beds, and had a roll-call of the doll inhabitants, we failed to develop any really amusing game.  (Acland 60)
          On the other hand, neatness and completeness themselves might trigger amusing games.  The more rigid and respectable the miniature household may look, the more noticeable it is if something is incongruous.  "Just looking" without touching does not prevent subversive thoughts.  Emma Evans, for instance, eight years younger than her sister Anne, was rarely allowed to play as a small child with the dollhouse (the one that Anne was doubtless keeping neat and complete.  But in old age Emily still remembered the "almost sisterly resemblance" between the dollhouse's cook and its mistress, "Lady Delany" (Greene, EDH 158).
           Dusting and tidying the dollhouse was often allowed, and can disguise some mischief-making. Accessories can be hidden, turned upside down, misplaced, or stolen. 
Frances Hodgson Burnett, who as an adult fitted up a cupboard as a dollhouse for her own enjoyment, admitted that the occasional visitor might be a "good housekeeper, in which case she usually drops down on her knees before the Toy Cupboard, sticks her little head inside and has a housecleaning, from which she emerges glowing and triumphant."   But other children had a more mischievous spirit and liked "to turn things upside down, putting the footman into bed with measles in the nursery, and giving balls in the kitchen at which the grandpapa seems expected to dance with the cook" (Burnett, "My Toy Cupboard" 4).
          The intriguing oddities that survive in some old dollhouses suggest that many children responded to the rigidity and apparent discomfort of dollhouse dolls as an invitation to move the dolls around and give them more exciting lives.  In one of the earliest baby-houses known to have been played with by a child, the one given to Ann Sharp in the 1690s, a small boy and a monkey are alone in an adult's dressing room ([Jones] 709; Greene, FDH 88).  In another house, a doll was hidden for a hundred years under a mattress (Greene, FDH 101).  More curious still is the female doll discovered in a dollhouse belonging to the Shelley family, her painted hair permanently decorated with a yellow comb, but dressed in men's trousers and an apron, and lying in a four-poster bed (Greene, FDH 124).  These hints of secret stories make it plain that a child's imagination is not easily restrained, even in the most adult-regulated dollhouse.
The dollhouse:
a place under adult control?

The discussion below was originally published in a slightly different form in Children's Literature 24.  For more details, see the end of the paper.
I deliberately gave the article a ridiculously over-academic title, '"The Dollhouse as Ludic Space, 1690-1920," for reasons explained in the first paragraph below.
                                                                                                   Frances Armstrong
               I'm really very glad I'm able
                    To give my little girl a table,
                    Since that will make her house complete
                    If she will only keep it neat;
                    And when her seventh birthday's past
                    I hope she'll tidy grow at last,
                    And all her faults both great and small
                    She'll study to correct them all.
                               (Greene, EDH 160)
The rather daunting expectations apparently did not turn Anne against her baby-house; she gave it back to her godmother's family when she grew up, but retrieved it with delight in her mid-sixties.  She saved the poem, too; it remained in the storage drawer below the dollhouse for another century and a half.
          Though texts of the later nineteenth century are less directly in their moralizing, they still promote neatness, often by associating girls with order and boys with mess.  In Katharine Pyle's account (1889) of a dollhouse made in the early 1800s, a brother and sister use two shelves of a linen closet as a playhouse; but since boys are "not so careful and orderly in their ways as little girls," the neatness is shortlived, and the shelves fill up with "bits of stick fit for whittling," an old dog-collar, string, fishing line, "and many other odds and ends" (Pyle, in St Nicholas 16 [1889] 448).  Seeing that her daughter is worried by this mess, a sympathetic mother orders a proper dollhouse to be made, and decorates it herself.  The untidy brother must have been excluded, or reformed, since the dollhouse survived in good condition to be described seventy-five years later.
          Pyle's article, and others like it, helped to set up generalizations about dollhouse play, so that children and adults were aware of how others treated dollhouses.  Frances Hodgson Burnett contributed to the process in a mild way through her fictional Racketty-Packetty House (1907), continuing the emphasis on neatness.  Racketty-Packetty House, we are told, belonged to its current owner's grandmother in the early nineteenth century, and she had kept it "very neat," having been "a good housekeeper even when she was seven years old" (10).  Cynthia, the present owner, is far from neat, and her new dollhouse, Tidy Castle, is presumably given its name to inspire her, rather than to reflect the truth.  When she sees Tidy Castle she is ashamed of Racketty-Packetty House, but ignores it rather than tidying it up.  Burnett, writing in the twentieth century, is not particularly concerned to promote neatness; Racketty-Packetty House is a far more interesting place than Tidy Castle, and a visiting princess finds it most attractive.  Cynthia gives the princess Racketty-Packetty House, which is subsequently "made gorgeous."
          It is tempting to see the "neat and complete" dollhouse as no more than a place to indoctrinate girls in the domestic values of  the time.  But perhaps neatness should not be judged too hastily as a requirement imposed by adults  The twentieth-century architectural critic John Summerson suggests that small "houses" of the kind that children enjoy should have "neatness and serenity within, contrasting with wildness and confusion without" (Heavenly Mansions 2).  "Complete" could sound as negative as "neat," if being complete means being finished.  A "finished" toy is not likely to stimulate the imagination.  But completeness in a dollhouse can also be a satisfying fullness, combined with a sense of wonder that every detail of a real house is there in miniature.  Though the miniaturization is never really perfect, observers are usually so surprised and delighted at the maker's ingenuity that they are not in the mood to notice what may be missing.
          Some autobiographical accounts cast doubt on the attractions of tidiness, though.  Eleanor
Acland and her siblings, who devised many unusual imaginative games during the 1880s, found their large old dollhouse delightful in theory but disappointing in reality:
                    One of us would say: "Hurrah, it's a real wet day.  Let's play the whole morning with the dolls' house."  There had to be a definite decision, because the windowed front of the house was kept locked, and a grown-up had to come and unlock it and latch it back against the wall and tell us to mind and not go breaking the glass.  Then, somehow, when we had straightened up the fallen bits of furniture, and tidied up the beds, and had a roll-call of the doll inhabitants, we failed to develop any really amusing game.  (Acland 60)
          On the other hand, neatness and completeness themselves might trigger amusing games.  The more rigid and respectable the miniature household may look, the more noticeable it is if something is incongruous.  "Just looking" without touching does not prevent subversive thoughts.  Emma Evans, for instance, eight years younger than her sister Anne, was rarely allowed to play as a small child with the dollhouse (the one that Anne was doubtless keeping neat and complete.  But in old age Emily still remembered the "almost sisterly resemblance" between the dollhouse's cook and its mistress, "Lady Delany" (Greene, EDH 158).
           Dusting and tidying the dollhouse was often allowed, and can disguise some mischief-making. Accessories can be hidden, turned upside down, misplaced, or stolen. 
Frances Hodgson Burnett, who as an adult fitted up a cupboard as a dollhouse for her own enjoyment, admitted that the occasional visitor might be a "good housekeeper, in which case she usually drops down on her knees before the Toy Cupboard, sticks her little head inside and has a housecleaning, from which she emerges glowing and triumphant."   But other children had a more mischievous spirit and liked "to turn things upside down, putting the footman into bed with measles in the nursery, and giving balls in the kitchen at which the grandpapa seems expected to dance with the cook" (Burnett, "My Toy Cupboard" 4).
          The intriguing oddities that survive in some old dollhouses suggest that many children responded to the rigidity and apparent discomfort of dollhouse dolls as an invitation to move the dolls around and give them more exciting lives.  In one of the earliest baby-houses known to have been played with by a child, the one given to Ann Sharp in the 1690s, a small boy and a monkey are alone in an adult's dressing room ([Jones] 709; Greene, FDH 88).  In another house, a doll was hidden for a hundred years under a mattress (Greene, FDH 101).  More curious still is the female doll discovered in a dollhouse belonging to the Shelley family, her painted hair permanently decorated with a yellow comb, but dressed in men's trousers and an apron, and lying in a four-poster bed (Greene, FDH 124).  These hints of secret stories make it plain that a child's imagination is not easily restrained, even in the most adult-regulated dollhouse.
Adapted from Frances Armstrong, "The Dollhouse as Ludic Space, 1690-1920," Children's Literature 24 pages 23 to 51.  For a temporary list of works cited, see Combined Bibliography.

Other excerpts from this article can be found at A Child's Place and Home for a doll.

To return to the index of the academic section of this website, click here.

To return to my main home page, click
Toys in Miniature: Frances Armstrong
A "ludic space" is simply a place to play.  I used the term in my title partly to hint that for some scholars the culture of girls' play can only seem respectable if it is dressed up in technical terms.  But "ludic space," compared with "playground" or "playroom," does suggest a space specifically designated for play by adults whose intention is that children should play nowhere else. 
          A problem is that a child given a special place to play will often be subject to authority in that area: even if not confined to it as to a prison, she may be watched while she plays there.  One might, indeed, argue that a dollhouse is not so much a place to play as a glamorized storage area, since very few dollhouses allow children to climb inside them.  They can enter imaginatively as fully as they like, but often cannot get more than one hand inside.
          A dollhouse does have the advantage of permanence: large and heavy, with fragile furnishings that have to be kept "neat and complete," it is not likely to be moved around or "tidied away."  A child engaged in imaginative play that involves concrete objects such as dolls or miniatures needs a place relatively free of interference, where a complicated game can be set up and left in place for a reasonably long time.  As Edith Nesbit pointed out, any "scene of magnificence" needs a large safe space: "It is better for the child's mind that the cherished doll should safely be baby for ever, than that it should be Francis the First and get walked on."
          The more permanent the dollhouse, though, the more valuable--in financial terms--it is likely to be to the household as a whole.  The traditional dollhouse is a place controlled by adults in a way that other popular ludic spaces--tree-houses, club-houses, attics, "desert islands"--are not.  Dollhouses differ from these other spaces also in that they are officially places where dolls, not children, live.  In what follows, I will look at the dollhouse as a space under some degree of adult control. On the page A child's place I will try to find out how dollhouses were used when girls were left to their own devices. Home for a doll looks at dollhouses through the eyes of their doll inhabitants (though admittedly their stories have been recounted by human hand).
          To some extent, these divisions are chronological: writing before 1850 tends to emphaze adult supervision, from 1850 to 1880 the emphasis is on the child's point of view, and the most detailed doll's eye views come were written after 1880.

Vanity and pride
Historians of the dollhouse, though they have little textual evidence to guide them, agree that early detailed miniature domestic scenes belonged to the adult world.  Some of these models come from early Egyptian tombs; they are usually explained as providing furnishings for the after-life of the deceased.  Some are elaborate miniature rooms kept in locked cabinets of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century homes in Holland or Germany.  The cabinets may or may not be decorated outside to look like  houses, but their main purpose seems to have been to display family wealth.  Miniature houses seem to have entered English and America culture a little later, at the end of the seventeenth century, and to have been quickly become accessible to children. Adults still held on to some control, though, because these early models were elaborate and expensive.  A little illogically, they said they were afraid that owning such valuable toys might make children vain and proud.
          The earliest children's story about dollhouse play that I know of is "The Baby-House," a very short story in Eleanor Fenn's Cobwebs to Catch Flies (1783, 1800 ).  "The Baby-House" avoids the subject of baby-houses with a strange perversity.  There is a small illustration showing a single-roomed "house" perhaps two feet high, which is being completely ignored by two girls holding a doll the same size as the house.  The story begins without preliminaries:
                    FIRST GIRL: "My doll's quilt is chintz.  What is this?"
                    SECOND GIRL: "Old point."
                    FIRST GIRL: "Let us take the doll up.
                                           Where are her clothes?"
Second Girl replies that some clothes are in a chest, and some in a press.  First Girl admires the press, and admits she does not have one, though there is a chest in her doll's house at home.  (She incidentally confuses the modern researcher by using "doll's house" at a time when "baby-house," as in the title, was supposedly the accepted term.)
          Significantly, the mention of this "doll's house" at once induces a pang of envy, but Fenn does not push the point by warning First Girl not to wish for a clothes press; instead, the story shifts attention to the doll.  For the rest of the story the girls dress the doll and discuss its clothes, paying due tribute to mamma's neat stitching, and conclude by discussing whether to give money to a poor child or to buy a doll's gown.
          In another early book, Mary Mister's The Adventures of a Doll (1816), we are told that the wealthy and cruel Miss Rachel Harper loved "to display all the riches of her baby-house" (11), but Mister does not display them to us.  The almost equally nasty Miss Amelia Fry notices some little girls improvising a play-house on the beach, and "could not but feel, that they had more joy with their simple shells and broken china, than she had ever had in her magnificent baby-house" (107).  No details are given about either of these grand baby-houses. 
          In view of this literary silence, it is hardly surprising that when Mary Martha Sherwood
introduces a baby-house into The Fairchild Family (1818), she recognizes that some of her readers may not know what a baby-house is.  "If you have not seen such a thing, I will endeavour to describe it to you" (1: 93).  Although the description is kept plain, even the bare details might entice a reader who is easily fascinated by miniatures:
                    It is a small house, fit for dolls, with doors and windows, and chimney outside;
              and inside there is is generally a parlour and a kitchen, and a bedroom, with
              chairs, tables, couches . . . beds, carpets, and everything small, just as there is in
               a real house for people to live in. (1: 93)
          This baby-house belongs to Miss Augusta Noble, and when Lucy and Emily Fairchild see it they are "very much pleased," but no further details are given.  Later their mother tells them that such toys encourage sinful ambition; with the relentlessness moral intentions for which she became notorious, Sherwood later drives home her point by showing how pride leads Miss Noble to a fiery death. (1: 102, 152).
          "A New Year's Gift," a poem by Adelaide O'Keefe (1804),  goes into a little more detail and allows Rose and her sister Emma to play with their new baby-house for nearly a whole day.  They eagerly examine their gift, feed the dolls, and put them to bed; they even light the candles without mishap.  But sinful behaviour soon destroys the pleasure; after a small disagreement, disaster heaps on disaster: toys are broken, mamma reprimands the sisters, Rose collapses with measles, and Emma becomes a penitent nurse. New Year's Day ends with Rose struggling for breath, and the baby-house quite forgotten.
          Anna Laetitia Barbauld's poem "The Baby-House" (1825) is less specific in its moralizing, but it does constantly remind "Dear Agatha" that the the baby-house she has just received is not a place of her own where she can play as she like.  She is congratulated on her "mansion in itself complete," and reminded that it is "fitted to give guests a treat":
                    With couch and table, chest and chair,
                    The bed or supper to prepare . . .
Rather than continuing to picture Agatha preparing her dollhouse for guests, the speaker goes on to imagine what she calls "ourselves" turned into elves and visiting the house at night after Agatha has gone to bed.  Very likely Agatha might not object to this friendly magical invasion of her property, but the narrator goes on to a more outright appropriation:
                    But think not, Agatha, you own
                    That toy, a Baby-house, alone . . . (1: 287)
At first it sounds as if she is simply denying Agatha's ownership, but she goes on to develop the idea that a baby-house has adult parallels: a pyramid, Versailles, and other ostentatious buildings.  The parallels are unconvincing: the link is presumably that all these structures are futile displays of wealth, but the differences in scale and in the power to endure make the message unclear.  Phrases not fully understood often stick in children's memories, and one can imagine a child being haunted by the reference to "A Baby-house to lodge the dead."  The last lines, too, have a nasty ring:
                    Then do not, Agatha, repine
                    That cheaper Baby-house is thine.  (1: 289)
Cheaper than a pyramid or Versailles, Barbauld means; but the adjective takes the shine off a new gift.  This may be just what Barbauld intended, as an antidote to pride.  (Of course, if Agatha had indeed been repining aloud at having been given a cheaper baby-house than she had hoped for, she no doubt deserved this dispiriting poem.)

Sharing
          By about 1820 the tone begins to lighten up, and instead of warning about pride, fiction writers suggest ways of sharing one's treasures.  In Little Polly's Doll's House, a picture book published in the mid-nineteenth century, Polly is taken to a large toyshop to choose a present for her fourth birthday, and is overwhelmed by the wide selection of toys.  Her own suggestion--that her doll "Lady Graci-o-sa" would like a baby doll--is countered by a sales clerk who shows her dolls dressed like soldiers and sailors.  "Polly did not like these dolls," so her mother suggests a dollhouse instead.  On being shown one taller than she is, with many interesting details including a baby doll in a cradle, Polly is happy with the choice, and wonders whether her brother will like it too. 
          At the beginning of the story Mamma had said that George would get a holiday and Polly, since it is her birthday, a present.  But now she decides to buy George four "handsome dressed figures" (dolls, in fact, three of them male), because they would be "useful" to him, since they represent the four quarters of the world.  Cynical modern readers might see Mamma's decision as a weak submission to the shopman's sales technique, and might notice that Polly is more pleased with her first choice, the baby doll, than with the dollhouse, but the story avoids this focus, making its intended moral point by showing the happy results of sharing one's toys.  Lady Graciosa is pleased with her baby (and, one hopes, her house), Polly (not too worried about pride) is able to enjoy showing her visiting cousins the "won-ders of her fai-ry pa-lace," and George's figures cause much amusement.  Laughter prevails as dolls and children and adults enjoy a birthday teaparty together.
          Elizabeth Prentiss adopts a similar tone in Little Susy's Six Birthdays (1854).  As in her other books about Susy, she is concerned to get certain moral lessons across, but this didactic element is softened by a close and sympathetic observation of stages of child development.  By the time Susy gets a dollhouse for her fifth birthday, she has been carefully guided through four previous birthdays, in each of which her social circle has been widened.  The baby-house has been made by her father, with contributions from mother, nurse, and aunt; the illustration shows an impressive edifice, but the text does not.  Susy eagerly starts to involve her small brother Robbie in a dollhouse game, but has to wait while he gets a share of the spotlight, a chance to appear in his first pair of trousers.  After this, the interest does centre around the dollhouse, not as an object of admiration, but as a source of fun for all the household.  Prentiss even adds a touch of humour to entertain adult readers, showing how Robbie and Susy play the parts of husband and wife but visit one another as if they were strangers.

Neatness and completeness
The tidy and satisfying pairing of "neat" and "complete" becomes a favourite tag, neat and complete in itself, and turning up in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction throughout the nineteenth century. 
          The "New Year's Gift" given to Rose and Emma in O'Keefe's poem of 1804, for instance, is
                      A baby-house quite neat
                    With kitchen, parlours, dining room,
                      And chambers all complete.  (Taylor, O'Keefe 87)
The sisters' quarrel begins when Rose ventures to question completeness and endanger neatness, deciding to move some chairs to a room where they will match the carpet better. 
          Two decades after this, the "real" five-year-old Anne Evans was given a baby-house that had been made for her godmother's great-grandmother; on her seventh birthday, she received this rhyming note from (it is assumed) her father: