Temple of Fancy Paper Dolls--Frederick, or The Effects of Disobedience

 

Here's another one of those early 1800s paper dolls from S & J Fuller at the Temple of Fancy. Frederick, or The Effects of Disobedience was published in 1816. In this story, Frederick is a fourteen-year-old boy who runs away from home because he is too lazy to study Greek and Latin. Of course the first thing he does is dress as a sailor and get on a ship, which doesn't work out nearly as well as he expects it to. You can read Frederick's story on the Internet Archive here. He manages to get captured by pirates not once, but twice (well, once by "a Barbary corsair" and once by "an American privateer," but... those are both pirates) and have a few other awkward adventures. Some of these involve dressing in women's clothing as a disguise, so the two incongruous-seeming outfits with dresses really do belong to this set. Eventually Frederick meets up with some English soldiers, fights in one battle, and is sent home heroically wounded to apologize to his parents--and to his Greek and Latin teacher. You know, good 1800s morality tale drama.

The Bryn Mawr College was kind enough to share a printable version of Frederick online, but their copy is missing his head and all his hats. Their solution to that problem was to throw Little Henry's head on the scanner with Frederick's clothes, which technically would make it possible to play with the set. I had already constructed a Little Henry set, though, and I didn't want a Frederick with the wrong head. So I set out on a quest to find out what he was actually meant to look like. Eventually I found scans of an old book from 1899 called Pages and Pictures from Forgotten Children's Books, and on page 255 was a black and white picture of Frederick's head! If poor Frederick was "forgotten" by 1899, no wonder I had trouble finding him in 2024. By this time I was resigned to having to colorize the black and white image, but a while later I found pictures of a different doll in the series with an incorrect head--and since I had seen the picture of Frederick in black and white, I knew who he actually was when I saw him in color. So I am quite sure that my version of Frederick now has the correct head. The hats I decided to give him, however, are wild guesses. 

Frederick and Little Henry have matching sailor outfits, though in completely different poses. The hat I've put on Frederick was supposedly Little Henry's, though it can't actually be Henry's because all Henry's hats are otherwise accounted for. That doesn't mean it was originally Frederick's, of course--the copy of Little Henry that it was seen with appeared to have swapped heads with a doll named Hubert, so I suppose the hat could also have belonged to him. It does look similar to the hats on the background characters behind Henry's sailor suit, though I'm not completely sold on the feather. 

Frederick's "peasant" clothing isn't really a beggar outfit, but the stick and bundle makes him fit in pretty well with Fanny, Henry, and Ellen in their beggar clothes. He could have had a hat to go with it, but I have not managed to find one that I think fits. Maybe he could wear the possible sailor's hat with it.

The turban and also the dashing plumed hat in the first picture above were spotted with a different doll from this series called Young Albert. Young Albert's head is facing the opposite direction from Frederick's, and while it's hard to tell the front of a turban from the back, the plumed hat absolutely cannot have originally been Albert's. Once again, that doesn't mean it was Frederick's, but it fits his pose and looks pretty good with one of his outfits, so he might as well wear it. And of course he can't reasonably pass for a French girl without something to cover his hair, so I made him a lace bonnet by combining the basic shape of an unknown hat in a blurry picture of the Ellen paper doll (wrong pose for Ellen, and anyhow all her hats are otherwise accounted for) with the texture of a lace bonnet in an old painting. So that explains the hats I've given him; if you want your own printed Frederick to have only verifiably correct pieces, just discard those, but if you want fun hats to dress him with, I've done my best. 

Here's a school scene I set up with my modern copies of the Temple of Fancy paper dolls, just for fun. Little Fanny is reading aloud as Ellen and Frederick sit at their desks and listen. Since Little Henry is the only one who doesn't have either a book or a desk, I made him borrow Ellen's dunce cap so he would fit into the scene somehow. 

Download PDF files of the Frederick paper doll (two pages) here and here. The previous post about the Ellen doll is here, and the one about Little Fanny and Little Henry is here. Cinderella will be coming soon.