This is another old paper doll from the Temple of Fancy. This one didn't have a convenient digital base to work from (I guess the Bryn Mawr College doesn't own a copy), so it took me longer to figure out what all the pieces would have been and make sure they were the correct sizes. Anyway, Frank Feignwell's Attempts to Amuse His Friends on Twelfth-Night was printed in 1811. His story has much less of a plot than the others I've blogged about previously--it's mostly just a framing device for the sections introducing his costumes. You can read Frank's story at the Hockliffe Project website here, if you would like. The copy scanned for that page has one added outfit, which is obviously hand-copied from one of Little Henry's outfits. Anyway, Frank's story is that he is hosting a holiday party for Twelfth Night, which isn't so much of a thing nowadays but would have marked the end of the twelve days of Christmas. At this party, Frank decides to, well, amuse his friends by dressing up as various characters. Each character Frank dresses up as has a little section of poetry about it. Overall it's pretty cute, but it's marred by the awkward accent and mocking stereotype used for the "Jew Pedlar" character. The original audience would assumably have found that bit funny, but to a modern reader it's offensive.
Most of Frank's costumes are lots of fun. He does also have a normal outfit, which shows him standing next to a Twelfth Night cake. His friends, of course, are not included, but I've made copies of quite a few other dolls from the same publisher by now, and those make perfectly natural party guests for him. (See previous blog posts about Little Fanny and Little Henry, Ellen, Frederick, and Cinderella, to make your own copies of them.)
It took me a while to figure out that Frank apparently came with not one but two wigs; the lawyer's wig and the barber's wig are actually a bit different from each other, with two traditional little ponytails on the lawyer's wig. It's not uncommon to see pictures of him wearing the lawyer outfit with the barber's wig, but this is not correct. The best picture I could find of the lawyer wig was a little pixelated, though not nearly as badly as the only one I could find of the peddler's hat. As we've seen from poor Frederick with his missing head and hats, Frank is lucky to have all his hats in any condition.
And I'm quite sure that my reproduction Frank does indeed have all his hats. In his starting outfit he is holding his hat in his hand, so that would not have come with a separate one. And the only other outfit that does not have a matching hat is clearly based on an 1800 painting of John Philip Kemble as Rolla, which you can find on Wikipedia
here but I will include in this post so you can see at a glance just how obviously it was copied. And the Rolla in that painting is not wearing any kind of hat.
So, not only is Frank dressed as the character Rolla, he is clearly dressed as a specific actor playing Rolla. I thought that was amusing. In his Scotchman outfit, on the other hand, he is called William Wallace but is specified to be only a generic Scotchman named after the historical character. It's slightly jarring to see that combined with a statement that "Scotland now is free" as part of Great Britain; I'm not an expert on the politics from either era, but it somehow seems unlikely that the real William Wallace would appreciate having his name used to celebrate that particular union.
The closest Frank has to the seemingly ubiquitous poverty outfit is the offensive "Jew Pedlar" costume, which I suppose is a bit of a stretch when you compare it to the beggar and peasant outfits his friends have. I took a group photo of them all dressed in their most ragged clothing anyway. Frank's hat or turban is badly pixelated, but I could only find one picture of that one and I thought it better to include what I had than to leave it out.
Frank is the character I borrowed the crown from for Cinderella's prince, so I had to take a photo of the two of them together. Frank's scepter was damaged in every photo I could find, but from what little I could see on the black and white scans from the Hockliffe Project page, I believe that it was a chunkier version of one I found in a portrait of Charlemagne. I didn't want to make the replacement scepter top stand out too much, so I have left it thinner and more delicate than it really ought to be. That's the only creative liberty I took with this set, except that the Harlequin mask originally had actual holes in it--I completely failed to cut out the holes neatly with either knife or scissors, so I just added a copy of Frank's eyes behind them so that they don't need to be cut out at all.
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