CHAPTER VI

CHILDREN: THEIR ENVIRONMENT AND THEIR PASTIMES

Cradles-Toys-Games-Children's Illustrated Books -Children on the China Shelf.

It

THE literature of childhood is one thing, the folklore of the nursery is another. A considerable amount of ingenuity has gone to the provision of the one and the explanation of the other. is the nineteenth century which discovered childhood. Charles Lamb's Dream Children Children was the opening of the dawn, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was broad noontide. De Quincey, himself a child, had the child-inspired knowledge. There have been children's books innumerable, from Kate Greenaway to Charles Robinson. But in the literature of the past it is as though children had never been. One may wade through the smug pages of Addison's Spectator, who wrote with all the complaisance of a Secretary of State, and one may test Dr. Johnson's Rambler and find in these eighteenth-century essayists no record of the innocent laughter of childhood. Art came to the rescue of literature

Reynolds and Gainsborough, Morland and Ward filled the hiatus. Madame de Sèvigné, in all her wonderful letters to her daughter, brimful of touches of pure sentiment, ignores childhood. Robert Louis Stevenson proved himself a modern of the moderns in his understanding of the child's heart. The clock has moved on since that day when Stevenson touched most of us. The north seems, with its youth and its inner vision, to have led the way. It is to Hans Christian Andersen that one lovingly turns as the first real exponent of the mind of the child. It is to Barrie that we are indebted for Peter Pan, who never has grown up to this day.

The collector, therefore, has to grope beyond the known and to visualize something that literature has missed. This is his mission.

Cradles. It would be an interesting subject to illustrate pictorially the cradles of various countries of the world, from the primitive type made of hollowed bark, into which the Indian squaw straps her papoose, to the elaborate twentieth-century bed of state, with canopy and silk hangings made for the home of the nouveau riche.

With the cradle come national customs regarding the occupant. In England, except for the strap across to keep the infant from falling out, his limbs are free and unconfined, and he may kick and struggle at will, just as in Italy he hangs on a wall and can scream long and lustily, without

Typical example of farmhouse style of furniture made locally of same design from mid-seventeenth till mid-nineteenth century.

WOOD CRADLE ON ROCKERS.
Egyptian (Saracenic design). Eighteenth century.

With flower design in ivory and pearl, touched with red and green lac, having Arabic inscription at head and foot.