Childhood by design: toys and the material culture of childhood, 1700-present

Abstract

To early toy scholars, children throughout the ages shared universal preferences for simple playthings intended for vigorous use. Despite the ways in which childhood has been viewed through such universalizing lenses, notions of children, childhood and the material world surrounding them are not static but historically and culturally specific. A 'childhood by design' - material artifacts both reflecting and actively constituting shifting discursive constellations of childhood - represented a distinctly modern phenomenon paralleling the late 17th century 'invention' of childhood. Accommodating more than children's immediate physical needs, distinct forms of furniture, clothing and playthings evolved in response to adult perceptions of children's changing needs. The volume spans the 18th century, witnessing the advent of children's consumer culture and the educational plaything; through the 19th-century expansion of factorybased toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and new vocabularies of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century childcentered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television and digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.