The History and Evolution of the Dollhouse

The dollhouse, a most popular and well-enjoyed childhood toy for young girls, might be said to be a little bit of an oddity. In so far as, it is a fairly old fashioned and simple toy whose interest still endures despite todays technically - aware new generation. In the United Kingdom (dollhouses originated in the sixteenth century) it is not known as a dollhouse but a dolls house.

We may consider before commencing with this history, whether doll houses really are for children, or are they actually rather for grown-up kids?! A surprisingly large number of grown ups are deeply passionate about dolls houses , with dollshouse groups and forums flourishing away. These grown up dollhouses are museum displays - albeit no no doubt highly personal to their loving owners - but they are probably not play things.

This was certainly the case with the very first dollhouses, which began to emerge in the sixteenth century. Referred to as baby houses, they were not dollhouses as we now understand them (baby just meant little) and their purpose was not as a play thing. In fact they were not generally in the shape of a house, but instead were a a collection of display cases put together with each comprising a separate room. What was the purpose of the baby house?

Certainly it was not as a toy for children. Filled with little household details, furniture and furnishings, they were designed for the admiration of wealthy adults. By the time of the mid sixteenth century, baby houses had come to like those dolls houses we would recognise. Those individual cabinets were be combined to form the shape of an actual house complete with roof, and with their two doors finished as a house exterior.

Records suggest that one particular function of these dollshouses would have been the teaching of the girls and servants of a house in domestic skills and the running of that house as the house provided a perfect demonstration of life both above and below stairs. These houses might have been slightly simpler - other ones however, built for rich aristocratic ladies, were fantastically elaborate and delightfully finished, complete with little glazed windows. Fine houses and mansions were copied and individual rooms within them were reproduced at a tiny size.

These dolls houses would have been manufactured not by craftsmen who specialised in miniature work (did not anyhow exist at the time) but instead by those craftsmen who built full size buildings. The cost would have been far outside the reach of all but the most wealthy.

These lovely show-house dollhouses continued to be manufactured during the 17th and the eighteenth centuries. And so it was during course of the nineteenth century, as the advent of mass production saw companies such as Moritz Reichel and Christian Hacker in Germany and Evans & Cartwright and Siber and Fleming in England beginning to fabricate factory made dolls houses, dolls and dollhouse furniture.

For the first time, the dolls house became obtainable by not only the super-rich but also by the middle classes. it was at this very time that the dolls house came to be considered primarily as a toy for children rather than a museum-piece for grownups

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Bliss Manufacturing Company in Pawtucket, RI was producing simpler dolls houses for the US market. In those early dollhouses by the Bliss company we can truly see the emergence of the dollhouse from a tiny reproduction of a real, full-scale building to a toy.

These doll houses were made more simply both to appeal to children with their flat simplified exteriors and their walls were often decorated with lithographed paper.

Although throughout the course of the twentieth century dollshouses became cheaper, simpler and available to the masses, no account of their development could possibly be complete without a brief discussion of the grandest and most impressive showpiece dolls house in history - the dollshouse known as the Queen Mary which was commissioned in 1920 and still displayed today at Windsor castle in Berkshire, England, the second residence of the current Queen Elizabeth.

Finished to a quite astonishing degree of realism, it included the work from over one thousand of Englands finest craftsmen and miniaturists. At 3 foot high, the doll house had working elevators (lifts), running water (hot and cold) and electricity.

It is fully finished both inside and out, from the grandest ballrooms and dining rooms to the lowly servants rooms. In the library, tiny books were printed and bound from every prominent author of the day including Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes.

The clocks in the dollhouse all work - as do the guns, keys and locks and many other items. The garage is full of beautiful cars, the wine cellar of bottles of real wine complete with a receipt ledger for the wine cellar.

No detail however small has been omitted making it a complete timepiece recording of a grand house of the time and an unmissable destination for dollhouse enthusiasts who come to visit it in their millions.

In the years after World WarTwo, the level of mechanized dollhouse production stepped and the appeal of the dollhouse reached new levels as it became an more accessible popular plaything.

Cheaper materials like tin litho, plastic and board meant that the dolls house could finally complete its journey from a toy for tremendously wealthy adults to a popular childrens toy, available to nearly everybody.