Temple of Fancy Paper Dolls--Frank Feignwell's Attempts to Amuse His Friends on Twelfth-Night

 

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.

Download the printable PDF version of Frank Feignwell here (page 1) and here (page 2).

Temple of Fancy Paper Dolls--Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper

 

Here's another old Temple of Fancy paper doll. Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper was published in 1814. You can read this version of Cinderella's story on the Internet Archive here, assuming the Internet Archive isn't down again due to hackers. It's a familiar story to most of us. For some reason this is the only one of these dolls whose story is based on a classic fairy tale. This doll was also shared online by the Bryn Mawr College, but I have added a few things. 

Cinderella wouldn't be Cinderella without her magic coach, would she? This is a large piece that originally folded in half to fit into the envelope with everything else. I had to fold my copy in half, too, or it would not fit in the pencil case I wanted to store it in. But the fold also makes it stand up on its own, so that's cool.

The Bryn Mawr College copy of the doll had two outfits without hats. I found a black and white picture of one of them elsewhere with a flat hat that did seem to fit the casual look of Cinderella running away from the ball, so I copied its shape and used colors and textures from her dress to make it match. So the hat on the right in the photo above is supposed to belong to her but could be missing details or have the wrong colors. The hat on the left was spotted with a copy of the Ellen doll, but it is not one of Ellen's hats. It fits Cinderella and goes with her last hatless outfit, so I think it's quite likely to be hers. It's styled like some Mother Goose bonnets, which I think fits with the idea that Cinderella would be working for her stepsisters--you can see them in the background--while wearing unfashionable old clothes. It's kind of pixilated, but I've tried to smooth it out a little. If you want to be completely sure you only use correct pieces, you can discard those two hats, but they are a much safer bet than Frederick's replacement hats.

Now, here's where I've gotten, ahem, creative with this set. Cinderella's final outfit is a wedding dress, and it comes complete with both the prince and the priest standing next to her. But I thought that was shockingly unfair, that the other characters were only part of her clothing! So I extracted them and tried to make them into proper dolls of their own. The prince's other outfits are recolors of his original one, so his pose unfortunately doesn't change. I did make him a bit bigger, just because his head was originally so small, so as a side effect he's taller than Cinderella now. Two of his feathery hats were blown up larger from the backgrounds of Cinderella's other outfits, and a third is a recolor of one of those. The crown was borrowed from a doll called Frank Feignwell and recolored, as I thought the prince really ought to have a crown. His page also includes Cinderella's wedding dress separated from the other characters.

The priest doesn't have any hats, but I recolored his robes in a few basic liturgical colors. I'm not an expert on those, but I figured green, red, and purple would offer reasonable choices for anyone who might want him for a paper doll church service. Anyway, since I was making the prince into a proper doll I decided that I might as well do it for the priest, too. If you want only the original pieces for Cinderella, print pages 1 and 2 and ignore pages 3 and 4. 

If you do use my extra dolls, the prince can interact with Cinderella while she is wearing her other outfits. It's fun to have options.

Here's my current collection of these paper dolls, all dressed up for Cinderella's wedding. Find my previous posts about Little Fanny and Little Henry here, Ellen here, and Frederick here.

Download the Cinderella paper doll in PDF format here (page 1) and here (page 2), and get the prince here (page 3) and the priest here (page 4).

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. 

Temple of Fancy Paper Dolls--Ellen, or The Naughty Girl Reclaimed

 

Here is another of the early paper dolls originally sold by S & J Fuller at the Temple of Fancy art supply store in London. Ellen, or the Naughty Girl Reclaimed was published in 1811 and is said to have been a favorite of Queen Victoria when she was a little girl. Like Little Fanny and Little Henry, which I blogged about here, Ellen's head is separate from her body and can be slotted into a paper pocket in the top of each of her outfits. I have constructed her in the same way as the others, gluing her onto paperboard for sturdiness. Ellen's story is, like Fanny's and Henry's, very much a product of its time. Ellen, the "naughty girl," refuses to do as she is told, eventually going through enough hardship as a result that she learns her lesson and reforms.  I especially enjoy that one of Ellen's outfits is shown in two states, before and after she falls into a muddy ditch. 

The hat from that particular outfit looks strikingly like Little Fanny's fancy hat, so I'm throwing in a picture of Ellen and Fanny wearing their matching hats. The outfits are not as similar; I'm not sure if that's a result of changing fashions or just Fanny wearing her winter coat and muff in the wrong season, as she does in her story. Ellen also has a red cloak and basket ensemble that looks a lot like two of Fanny's market outfits. It would be easy to confuse some of these pieces.

Ellen also comes with a dunce cap and a beggar's outfit. I'm not sure why the beggar's outfits were so popular for these dolls, but Little Fanny and Little Henry have them too. They can all stand around looking disreputable together while they wait to be changed into nicer clothing. 

Download PDF files of Ellen and her outfits here and here.  

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.