Temple of Fancy Paper Dolls--Little Fanny and Little Henry

 

Little Fanny, published in 1810, is known as the first mass-produced paper doll. I believe that means she was the first printed and sold as a children's toy; older paper figures with changeable outfits are said to have been hand painted for adults. Anyhow, Little Fanny was sold by S. & J. Fuller at a London art supplies store called the Temple of Fancy. The Princeton University Library has posted an old advertisement here with a picture of the inside of the store. 

Bryn Mawr College has shared a nice, printable version of Little Fanny, with detailed instructions about how to put her together, here. I used that as a base and made a few slight fixes, most notably replacing the arm on Fanny's doll. Her companion Little Henry needed a bit more help--besides some unfortunate damage to Henry's sword and other projecting bits, Bryn Mawr's copy only had two of his six hats. I went to some trouble to restore these dolls by finding the missing parts from other sources, so I'm making my versions available as well. 

I have them printed on normal paper and glued onto paperboard I grabbed out of my family's recycling bin, but you can print them on cardstock if you prefer. If you use cut-up packaging like I did, you'll want to glue the dolls onto what was the inside of the box; it holds glue better than the outside and won't show through if you add spray gloss. Below is a picture of the back of my dolls. I labeled each piece with the doll's name and both the publication year and the year I constructed these particular copies. I used the inside of an empty wrapping paper tube as backing paper to make pockets to hold the heads on, but any thick paper should work fine. I lined the backs of the heads with it too, mostly because the printed paperboard isn't easy to write on. The spray gloss I used on the front made a few spots on the paper, but that doesn't matter because the back is already pretty funny-looking. 

I also made little paperboard stands by cutting three identical rectangles, folding two in half, and then gluing the folded pieces on top of the flat one and trimming the stand to the desired height. If you want stands, make sure to put glue only on the bottom piece. To use the stand, just slide a doll in between the unglued bits that stick up in the center.

I'm enjoying this style of paper doll more than I expected to--the detachable heads are a little weird at first glance, but they stay in place more firmly than tabbed paper doll clothing. The danger, of course, is that if you lose the head there's not much point playing with the outfits on their own. These pages have two heads included for each doll, in case one gets lost.

These characters also had rhyming storybooks to accompany them; you can read The History of Little Fanny on the Internet Archive here and The History and Adventures of Little Henry here. The stories are... well, they're very 1810. To a modern eye they are quite strange. It's an interesting bit of history, though.

I made PDF files of these that might be easier to print. Download Little Fanny here and Little Henry here.