I

The origins of the eighteenth-century English baby house lie in Germany and the Netherlands, with the first recorded dolls’ house produced for Albert V, duke of Bavaria, in 1557–8 as an elaborate miniature version of a ducal residence. Whilst German baby houses in the seventeenth century continued to favor the architectural style, contemporaneous Dutch examples were usually arranged in grand cabinets.Footnote ¹⁷ ‘Female counterparts’ to the cabinet of curiosities, Dutch dolls’ houses were commissioned by wealthy women as small-scale versions of their homes.Footnote ¹⁸ Although the first English baby houses similarly resembled cupboards, including the earliest known surviving example, the c.1695 Ann Sharp baby house, later models tended to take the form of true miniature houses.Footnote ¹⁹

Popular amongst English elites, the growing market for baby house miniatures already established by the early decades of the eighteenth century is made clear in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Travels into several remote nations of the world. When dining with the giant Queen of Brobdingnag, Lemuel Gulliver describes how he ‘had an entire Set of silver Dishes and Plates, and other Necessaries, which in Proportion to those of the Queen, were not much bigger than what I have seen of the same kind in a London Toy-Shop, for the Furniture of a Baby-house’.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, as well as being commissioned specially from architects, cabinetmakers, and estate carpenters for substantial costs, baby houses of varying sizes, qualities, and prices could increasingly be purchased ‘ready-made’ from sellers of novelties and trinkets known as ‘toymen’. A 1760 trade card for the renowned London toyman ‘Bellamy’, for example, advertises ‘Fine Babies and Baby-Houses, with all Sorts of Furniture at the lowest Price’.Footnote ²¹ In addition to highlighting the quality of his ‘fine’ baby houses and variety of the ‘all Sorts of Furniture’ on offer, Bellamy also crucially promises to supply his wares ‘at the lowest Price’. Buying baby houses ‘off the shelf’ in this way was certainly more affordable, and the growing hierarchy of forms to choose from inside toy-shops facilitated access to these objects for a progressively broad spectrum of women over the course of the eighteenth century.

Whilst it is thus important to recognize the significant evidence that baby house ownership was expanding throughout this period, this article, due to necessities of survival, focuses upon elite-owned objects and the material worlds of genteel women. As defined by Amanda Vickery, ‘genteel’ refers to that broad and complex eighteenth-century social category encompassing the intermingled gentry, professions, and upper trades. Although sitting below the aristocracy in the social hierarchy, the genteel should not be seen as ‘fawning junior members of a monolithic upper class’, but rather as variously privileged families of moderate social prestige.Footnote ²² Owing its approach to material culture studies, the article places baby houses themselves at the center of its inquiry, combining analysis of ten extant examples. Inspired by the recent work of Susanna Burghartz et al., who have emphasized the agency of early modern things in evoking powerful bodily affects, I analyze the very materiality of these objects to illuminate their inherent corporeal connections, and the heightened emotional and sensory responses they promoted in their female users.Footnote ²³

For the majority of surviving baby houses there is little to no historical record, meaning knowledge of their former owners and contexts is extremely limited. Key exceptions include the c.1729–42 Nostell baby house which remains onsite at Nostell, West Yorkshire, today. It belonged to Susanna Henshaw, wife of Sir Rowland Winn 4th baronet, with a now-lost note in an upper room supposedly indicating that it was Susanna and her sister Katherine who furnished it.Footnote ²⁴ Also still onsite in West Sussex is the c.1735 Uppark baby house, originally owned by Sarah Lethieullier. From a wealthy London mercantile family, Sarah married Sir Matthew Fetherstonhaugh in 1746, with her husband appointed a baronet the next year.Footnote ²⁵ Finally, the c.1760 Blackett baby house, now in London Museum, belonged to Lady Anne Blackett of Matfen Hall, Northumberland, and was perhaps a gift from her husband, Sir Edward 4th baronet, upon the birth of their children William and Mary in 1758.Footnote ²⁶ All three baby house owners, then, were women of genteel status, with their husbands baronets of wealthy merchant descent.Footnote ²⁷ The quality of other baby house examples suggests this stratum of female users is relatively representative of the wider whole. Despite a paucity of accompanying archival evidence, wherever available, scattered references to baby houses in diaries, letters, etiquette guides, novels, and trade cards are combined with material analysis. Collectively, these assembled fragments illuminate anew the intricate material lives and inner affective experiences of eighteenth-century genteel women.

II

Entering one’s baby house was a multi-layered material process. As collector Vivien Greene remarked in her seminal study, ‘it is hardly credible how a box with four sides can be planned with so many different methods of opening’.Footnote ²⁸ Although varying considerably in their construction then, many baby houses were covered with a set of hinged doors, meaning that, when opened, the entirety of their contents was exposed simultaneously. Often towering over their users’ heads, with the Uppark, Nostell, Forster, and Tate baby houses all measuring above 2m in height, women would have been fully enveloped within these miniature material worlds.Footnote ²⁹ Providing their female users with a personal place in which to retreat and reflect, such complete and immediate immersion was likely a reassuring experience.Footnote ³⁰ Patricia Ferguson has crucially recognized this potential of the baby house to supply upper-class women with physical and emotional comfort. She argues that their little walls provided a ‘private sanctuary with a controllable environment’ and ‘a rare space of one’s own in someone else’s ancestral home’.Footnote ³¹ These affective implications of entering one’s baby house, as acknowledged by Ferguson, also extended beyond the bounds of the domestic domain. Faced with a burgeoning and, at times, overwhelming object world, the small space of the baby house could act as an arena for both contemplation and consolation.

Of course, when carried out in company, it is undeniable that such imposing opening displays would have been strongly linked to the demonstration of social status. Whilst we cannot be certain just how frequently baby houses were opened and closed, the intricacy and impressiveness of their opening mechanisms would undoubtedly have constituted a key component of their presentation to guests. However, such performative concerns were hardly the sole motivator behind what could also be an incredibly intimate practice. Indeed, studies of small things agree upon the deeply personal nature of the diminutive.Footnote ³² As highlighted by the likes of John Mack, Chloe Wigston Smith, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, the body was central to individual interactions with the small-scale.Footnote ³³ It is therefore likely that the female baby house owner herself would have participated in the physical act of opening. Whether alone, or aided by a friend or servant, pulling open the large exterior doors of one’s baby house required no small amount of manual effort. Even when performed in company, this powerful embodied experience would have connected human and object in a tangible and personal way. Beyond the common double-door design, other forms of baby house had similarly strong corporeal connotations. For example, the front façade of the Nostell baby house [https://www.nationaltrustimages.org.uk/asset-management/2KDZIFIEN543J?WS=SearchResults&Flat=FP&FR_=1&W=425&H=420], rather than opening outwards like a cupboard, splits into two pieces. Sliding these large, wooden segments to either side of the house, and swinging out their supporting drop-down rods, again demanded a significant degree of bodily labor.Footnote ³⁴ The same is true of opening the unique c.1750 Temple Newsam baby house (Figure 1). Featuring four rooms, each covered by a paned window, the lower panels are moveable via a pulley system, the rope of which is visible on the right-hand side in the close-up below. When opened by the female owner, this design would have actively molded her body, demanding she quite literally make herself small by crouching down to push the lower panels upwards. Drawing her in physically, such embodied opening rituals made entering one’s baby house an intimate and individual material process.

Figure 1.

Temple Newsam baby house with pulley system, England, c.1750, Leeds Museums and Galleries (Temple Newsam).

Figure 1 Long description

Image A shows the Temple Newsam baby house with a wooden exterior featuring multiple paned windows. The structure is elevated on a base with two archways. Inside, various miniature rooms are visible, each containing detailed furnishings and decorations. Image B provides a close-up view of the interior through one of the paned windows, revealing intricate details such as furniture and decor within the miniature rooms. The craftsmanship of the woodwork and the arrangement of the interior elements are clearly visible.

This methodical progression of moving, step-by-step, from the outside world into the walls of her own life-size living quarters, and then again into the small-scale space of the baby house, may have worked to pull the genteel woman mentally inwards as well as physically. Hanneke Grootenboer supports this reading in her analysis of the c.1686–1710 dollhouse owned by Petronella Oortman. Exploring the ‘philosophical potential’ of this object, she understands the act of descending into the Dutch dollhouse as a kind of ‘mental staircase’ which helped the female thinker move deep into the reaches of the mind.Footnote ³⁵ Susan Stewart agrees that, although small in physical size, ‘cognitively the dollhouse is gigantic’.Footnote ³⁶ The multiple layers of interiority at work in these objects, as highlighted by Grootenboer and Stewart, certainly apply to eighteenth-century English examples.Footnote ³⁷ It is perhaps most evident in the Ann Sharp baby house, which features an intriguing small paper structure in an upper bed chamber. Topped with a pointed roof and comprised of four minute rooms, each filled with their own truly minuscule paper furnishings, this creation appears to be a baby house within a baby house. Potentially constructed by owner Ann herself, the miniature structure would have constituted a further, final tier to the succession of scaled-down spaces experienced in the ‘opening up’ process. Underlining the connection between size and understanding, Melinda Alliker Rabb argues that miniaturization enabled English contemporaries to process information ‘difficult to confront in full-scale’.Footnote ³⁸ Proceeding through this series of increasingly condensed material environments then, each contained within the last, perhaps aided female user Ann in comprehending the wider world around her. A more manageable medium for engaging with a vast and flourishing object realm, the diminutive domain of the baby house could act as a kind of material mediator for genteel women.

Indeed, carefully curated, cared for, and even created by the female owner, baby house interiors constituted intimate inner worlds. Places of private withdrawal, the familiar furnishings of their little rooms likely provided women with a source of emotional support amidst an ever-expanding outer world. Whilst this interpretation, which stresses the inherent intimacy of baby houses, may initially appear to be at odds with their well-established characterization as lavish status symbols, it is vital to recognize the complex, and often contradictory, material meanings associated with the ‘opening up’ process.Footnote ³⁹ Deborah Varat is right to emphasize the tension between concealment and display embedded within these objects.Footnote ⁴⁰ For one, the boundaries between a baby house that was ‘open’ or ‘closed’, and thus performative or personal in character, were less distinct than we might expect. Whilst early examples like the c.1695 Ann Sharp baby house, which originally featured a single, solid door, did have to stand with their contents either entirely exhibited or completely covered, the designs of later baby houses evidence a growing desire to decide upon the extent of external viewers’ access to their interiors.Footnote ⁴¹ Each room of the c.1735 Uppark baby house [https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/138073], for example, is covered by an individual door.Footnote ⁴² In showing off specific rooms whilst keeping others concealed from view, it was possible for owner Sarah Lethieullier to maintain the privacy of her miniature world by conducting a partial, visual unveiling. Meanwhile, the Temple Newsam baby house was covered with glass. Blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, a glass façade at once enticed the external visitor to peer in, whilst simultaneously providing a physical barrier to any kind of deeper embodied interaction. The varied mechanisms for viewing and opening baby houses thus worked to control and limit affective access to these small-scale spaces.

Even if she preferred to keep her baby house doors firmly shut to the outer world, it might still be possible for the female owner to individually enter their interiors. Halina Pasierbska, for example, has pointed out ‘peepholes’ in the back of the four main rooms in the c.1760 Tate baby house. The holes appear to have been pierced through the rear boards of the object, perhaps by the owner herself.Footnote ⁴³ Rather than opening it and exposing its contents then, she might choose instead to gaze through these little openings, granting her exclusive visual access to the inner realm within. This secret form of seeing required a strong affective awareness of her baby house’s structure, one cultivated through close and continuous embodied engagement, and simply unavailable to the passing friend or visitor. Indeed, baby houses could be truly secret spaces. Whilst the four primary rooms of the Blackett baby house are wholly visible with its main double doors open, it is only possible to access the interior of its separate attic room through a small, lockable side door at the very top of the object (Figure 2). Invisible when viewing the baby house from the front and blending seamlessly into its side when closed, this door is barely noticeable to the inexperienced eye. Entering this secret space therefore again relied upon a significant degree of material expertise and a deep familiarity with this object’s construction, one limited to the owner of the baby house herself.

Figure 2.

Blackett baby house with attic side door, England, c.1760, height 148.5cm, width 185cm, © London Museum, 37.13/1.

Figure 2 Long description

The first image shows a detailed dollhouse with multiple rooms visible. The rooms are decorated with miniature furniture and figures, including a staircase leading to the entrance. The second image focuses on the attic space of the dollhouse, showing a small, enclosed area with a railing and minimal furnishings. The attic is accessed through a side door, which is visible in the image.

Finally, perhaps the clearest material evidence for the role of baby house as private refuge is that they were frequently secured by lock and key. Deborah Varat points to the large locking mechanisms on their front façades, as well as their miniature interior and exterior doors also featuring fully functional little locks and handles.Footnote ⁴⁴ This point is confirmed by Dorothy Richardson, who noted in her diary that the Nostell baby house had ‘locks to all the doors’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, visible on the front door of the c.1720 Norwich baby house are not one but two tiny keyholes (Figure 3). In keeping the accompanying little key close to her body, perhaps pressed in a palm or buried in a pocket, the female owner could personally ensure her baby house remained tightly shut in her absence. Often displayed in public areas of the home, these multiple layers of security were essential in protecting their personal contents from prying eyes and hands. As small spaces of sanctuary in an expanding material world, baby houses were valued actors in the affective lives of genteel women. Unlocking their diminutive doors thus promises to reveal the intimate inner experiences of their female creators.

Figure 3.

Norwich baby house and front door, England, c.1720, Strangers’ Hall Museum, Norfolk Museums Service, NWHCM:1952.110.

Figure 3 Long description

The first image shows a miniature house façade resembling a Georgian-style building with three stories. It features multiple windows and a central door with steps leading up to it. The second image is a close-up of the door, painted green, with a visible keyhole and a decorative ring door-knocker. A small doll is positioned near the bottom right corner of the door.

III

Curating these miniature material worlds could represent a life-long project. Whilst some baby houses came ready-furnished with the latest fashions, Patricia Ferguson highlights how others were meticulously assembled over many years, and even generations, with their interiors being important sites of individuality and self-expression.Footnote ⁴⁶ To find the perfect furnishings to fill their little rooms, the genteel woman had to navigate and engage with a flourishing small-scale material culture.Footnote ⁴⁷ A c.1715–33 advertisement for ‘The Great Toy, Spectacle, and Print Shop’ of Ludgate Street, London, gives a sense of the myriad of ‘curious and other useful things’ which proliferated in eighteenth-century England (Figure 4). Packed into the depicted display cabinet are an abundance of small objects, from snuff boxes, scissors, and etuis, to combs, chatelaines, and purses. In the very top-left is also a small doll, hinting at the range of baby house wares available in toy-shops.

Figure 4.

Advertisement for ‘Willdey’s Magazine of rich, curious, and useful things, known by the name of The Great Toy, Spectacle, and Print shop’, Britain, 1715–33, print, © The Trustees of the British Museum, Y.5.265.

Figure 4 Long description

The image is a textual illustration of an 18th-century trade advertisement for Willdey’s Magazine, known as The Great Toy, Spectacle and Print Shop. The format is a printed broadside or engraved trade card with prominent lettering and dense copy. The main text reads: 'Willdey’s Magazine of rich, curious and useful things, known by the name of The Great Toy, Spectacle and Print shop.' The advertisement features a central illustration of a display cabinet filled with various small objects, including snuff boxes, scissors, etuis, combs, chatelaines and purses. At the top-left corner, a small doll is visible, indicating the range of baby house wares available in toy shops. Surrounding the cabinet are illustrations of figures and additional items. The layout consists of a headline and branding at the top, followed by the central illustration and a block of smaller text below describing the shop's offerings. The typography is typical of the period, with emphasized headline text and smaller body text, conveying a busy, catalog-like feel. The text is in English.

Perusing this diversity of diminutive goods was a complex embodied activity. Samuel Johnson, for example, in his 1755 A dictionary of the English language, demonstrates the meaning of the word ‘perusal’ with the description that just ‘as pieces of miniature must be allowed a closer inspection, so this treatise requires application in the perusal’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Melinda Alliker Rabb argues, ‘perusing’ was strongly associated with the observation of fine details, and miniature objects acted as an ideal illustration of those goods which required particularly careful examination.Footnote ⁴⁹ Faced with a highly intricate visual field, comprised of a multitude of minute wares, the genteel woman needed to possess a sharp eye and mind to identify her ideal baby house furnishings inside the toy-shop. The trade card itself plays on this theme of scale and seeing with the figure of Archimedes, stood on the top-right of the cabinet, holding a magnifying glass and looking through a telescope as if to emphasize such close scrutiny. Negotiating this burgeoning world of goods when piecing together one’s own miniature material world was thus a considered and highly thoughtful process.

As well as shopping for fashionable small-scale furnishings in toy-shops, women also crafted a plethora of little pieces with their own hands. In a process described by Amanda Herbert as ‘the reappropriation of luxury goods’, eighteenth-century elite women frequently altered and converted finished products into new pieces.Footnote ⁵⁰ The red silk velvet used to make the bedding and wall coverings in one of the Nostell baby house bedrooms, for example, is littered with tiny pin pricks, suggesting it was meticulously unstitched from another bigger object for use in the baby house.Footnote ⁵¹ Refashioning such full-scale furnishings from the large material world into diminutive decorations would have represented an intimate haptic activity for owner Susanna Henshaw. Her hands were not only ‘the measure and the container of the miniature’ in this case, but also the maker, so needed to be calm, steady, and especially precise.Footnote ⁵² Beyond this need for nimbleness, miniaturization studies also emphasize the unique tactile appeal of the small-scale.Footnote ⁵³ Handling and manipulating the red velvet, then folding its short, thick pile and pressing one’s fingers into its plush surface when fitting up her baby house, would have been felt especially deeply by Henshaw. In other words, in making things small, the genteel woman’s senses were heightened.

A range of other furnishings in the Nostell baby house also appear to be adaptations of life-size goods. Many of the tiny textiles, from the yellow silk moiré of the top-floor bedroom, to the chintz curtains of the lying-in room next door, were likely repurposed from off-cuts of dress fabric.Footnote ⁵⁴ Whilst making such small things could be sensorially pleasing, Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin highlight their equal capacity to be haptically challenging.Footnote ⁵⁵ Susan Stewart agrees that although the materiality of the miniature is reduced, the bodily labor involved in their creation is enlarged.Footnote ⁵⁶ Perhaps, then, the affective experience of altering and adapting such full-scale fabrics into fine and fragile baby house furnishings was one of difficulty and frustration. Alternatively, the methodical unpicking and restitching of these tiny textiles could have created feelings of comfort and calmness for their female creator, with Bridget Long suggesting that many eighteenth-century women resorted to the needle for consolation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Melinda Alliker Rabb corroborates this idea, arguing that transforming the large into the small could offer individuals a sense of reorientation and control.Footnote ⁵⁸ Whilst we can only speculate as to what Susanna’s own affective responses were, the potential of the baby house to offer diverse and enhanced engagements with material culture is supported by this existing literature on smallness. Indeed, in molding and modifying a diversity of full-size objects to create her own personal little pieces, the eighteenth-century woman could, quite literally, get to grips with the expanding world of goods around her.

Whilst crafting baby house furnishings could be solitary work which provided women with a private space for contemplative reflection, many diminutive decorations were probably also the product of multiple women’s labor. Collective sewing was an important form of female sociability in this period, and stitching tiny textiles within a group would have provided women with an intimate environment to share their thoughts, feelings, and ideas.Footnote ⁵⁹ The strong link between rituals of female communal craft and the production of baby house textiles is exemplified in the popular 1783 children’s reading primer Cobwebs to catch flies. In a short sentence dialogue between two young girls entitled ‘The Baby-house’, the first girl says to her friend: ‘My doll has a muff; has your doll a muff?’. The second girl replies: ‘No, she has not; my aunt says she will teach me to do chain stitch; and then I am to work one’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Carefully observing the hands of her aunt before imitating her technique, the young girl in this passage demonstrates the position of baby houses as sites of shared embodied skill and material knowledge. The physicality of stitching on such a small scale served to connect female friends and relatives in a close corporeal way. Once complete, the miniature muff would be cherished as a collaborative project, a precious material embodiment of the pair’s relationship. It is revealing that when questioned as to what her doll’s ‘best dress’ is, the second girl selects one that ‘is my dear mamma’s work; see how neat it is’.Footnote ⁶¹ Prized over finer and more costly pieces, her choice reveals how home-made baby house textiles were imbued with a sentimental value that money could not buy. Treasured here as a tangible record of maternal love, textiles hand-stitched and sewn performed significant affective work, in this case enabling a young daughter to trace the touch of her ‘dear mamma’.

Indeed, in the stitches and folds of crafted curtains and bedspreads, and in the joins and edges of repurposed chairs and wall coverings, we can see the hands, and hearts, of their female creators. As productions of what Amanda Vickery calls ‘supreme individuality’, hand-made baby house furnishings can allow access to eighteenth-century women’s personal, affective worlds.Footnote ⁶² Lining the walls of the Nostell baby house drawing room [https://www.nationaltrustimages.org.uk/asset-management/2KDZIF3740C2?WS=SearchResults&Flat=FP&FR_=1&W=425&H=420], for example, is a spectacularly elaborate collage constructed from an array of copper-plate engravings. Close inspection reveals that each of the individual components, including even the minuscule bees, have been painstakingly hand-colored and cut-out, then stuck to the wall to create an intricate design.Footnote ⁶³ The French origin and mid-eighteenth-century date of some of the prints selected suggests this collage was likely the work of Sabine Winn, daughter-in-law of Susanna Henshaw.Footnote ⁶⁴ Serena Dyer has explored how such print-centred craftworks acted as vital repositories of emotional and personal meaning for Sabine during her rather turbulent transition from ‘Swiss heiress to Yorkshire baronet’s wife’, following her marriage to Sir Rowland Winn, Susanna’s only surviving son, in 1761.Footnote ⁶⁵ Confronted with the Winn family’s concerns about her foreignness, her own inability to speak English, and frequent periods of isolation in Yorkshire whilst her husband was away, Sabine’s early marital life was emotionally challenging.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this context, re-decorating her diminutive drawing room would have represented a powerful affective outlet. Collating, cutting, and assembling the fragile paper fragments was time-consuming and highly technical work that required as much bodily control as it did mental resilience and patience. Read alongside Sabine’s other material outputs, particularly the ‘dressed prints’ studied by Dyer, it is clear that the manipulation of print was a practical skill honed by many hours of making experience.Footnote ⁶⁷ Beyond the physically therapeutic aspects of this close and focused work, conceptualizing such a complex collage was also a creative activity. Whilst all miniatures inherently rely upon imagination, one-of-a-kind designs naturally required an even greater degree of individual inventiveness and ingenuity.Footnote ⁶⁸ In constructing her own imagined little landscape Sabine would have been drawn inwards, with such craftwork providing a private space for her to think, dream, and reflect.Footnote ⁶⁹ An expression of Winn’s inner world at a pivotal point in her lifetime, the collage offers a window into the mind of its female maker-turned-user.Footnote ⁷⁰

Material embodiments of women’s personal lives, baby house interiors were thus subject to an ongoing process of making, manipulating, and mending. In their 1798 etiquette guide Practical education, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth actually attack the ‘completely furnished baby-house’ which ‘proves as tiresome to a child as a finished seat is to a young nobleman’. An ‘unfurnished baby-house’ on the other hand ‘might be a good toy, as it would employ little carpenters and sempstresses to fit it up’.Footnote ⁷¹ This sentiment, that a finished baby house was a redundant one, rang true across the female life-cycle, with these objects valued for the lasting creativity and imagination they promoted in their owners. It was common practice, for example, to upgrade and revamp existing pieces, as with the miniature screen from the Blackett baby house, which has been decorated with a set of reproduction prints of playing cards illustrating Aesop’s fables (Figure 5). From a pack sold at John Kirk’s toy-shop in St Paul’s Churchyard, London, during Christmas 1759, perhaps they were gifted to Lady Anne Blackett by a friend or family member, or acquired herself during a trip to the capital.Footnote ⁷² Either way, displayed in her baby house in Matfen Hall, Northumberland, the little screen would have been imbued with individual meaning for its owner, a small snippet of her London connections contained within her miniature material world.

Figure 5.

Miniature screen, Blackett baby house, England, c.1760, wood and paper, © London Museum, 37.13/112.

Figure 5 Long description

A five-panel folding screen stands upright and is folded in a zigzag shape. The full object is shown from the front in a product-style view against a plain background. Each tall rectangular panel has a narrow frame and a printed paper surface. Near the top of each panel are playing-card suit symbols. Below the symbols are small line-drawn illustrations. Beneath the illustrations are blocks of printed text arranged in short paragraphs. The panels show wear and staining and the frames have scuffs along edges and corners. Small feet at the bottom support the screen.

Baby house furnishings customized with such unique souvenirs, snippets, and scraps enabled genteel women to detail their experiences, pastimes, and interests. In manipulating the wider world around her to create her own personalized realm, the female baby house owner thus engaged in an especially intimate form of what Serena Dyer terms ‘material life writing’.Footnote ⁷³ Similar to the screen above, for example, printed ephemera was incorporated into an ivory chair in the lying-in room of the Nostell baby house. Only visible from underneath, its base has been fixed using a cut-up 1768 ticket for a concert in York by renowned violinist Gaetano Pugnani. The date of the ticket indicates this repair was again likely performed by Sabine Winn.Footnote ⁷⁴ Rather than being discarded and replaced, such dedicated restoration confirms Sabine’s ‘material skill with paper and a knife’, and highlights the real ingenuity and frugality of female makers within a broader eighteenth-century culture of recycling and repair.Footnote ⁷⁵ Whilst the repurposed ticket itself may simply have been scrap matter, it could equally have been saved by Sabine as a souvenir of her concert experience. Indeed, Freya Gowrley suggests such small fragments, whilst ephemeral and incomplete, could grow in sentimental significance when joined into new forms. As an ‘assembled’ object, the little chair would have transformed into a miniature material of memory, fundamentally entwined with a specific event in Sabine’s lifetime.Footnote ⁷⁶ Serena Dyer supports this reading, arguing that such ‘vignettes of making’ enabled Winn to capture moments of biographical note.Footnote ⁷⁷ When we look beyond, or in this case below, the impressive layers of masterful craftsmanship and expensive materials of many baby houses, we discover a plethora of home-made elements saturated with affective meaning. More than pretty things made to fill hours of leisure time, these hand-crafted furnishings could be employed as expressions of women’s inner selves. As such, the interiors of the baby house offer an intimate framework for accessing elite women’s personal lives and material experiences.

IV

Once assembled, using and moving these miniature material realms also constituted a complex affective experience. Whilst the baby house could act as a place of private solace, as we have seen, their little rooms equally represented significant spaces of female communication and connection within the expanding material world of eighteenth-century England. Various sources evidence such collective engagement, including the accompanying image to the short-sentence dialogue on ‘The Baby-house’, discussed earlier (Figure 6). In this scene, two girls are depicted playing with a doll. They stand before a neatly decorated baby house, its walls lined with tiny plates and its ceiling hung with neatly draped curtains. Inside, three dolls sit facing each other in a circular arrangement as if waiting for animation by the pair. From an early age, then, girls and women did not simply show off static baby houses to friends and family members, but actively ‘played’ with them.

Figure 6.

Image from ‘The Baby-house’, in E. Fenn, Cobwebs to catch flies (London, 1783), vol. I. From the British Library Collection: 1210.l.1.(2.), p. 88. Reproduced from Eighteenth Century Collections Online, a Gale publication.

Such active affective usage is confirmed by a diversity of material evidence, from a miniature chocolate pot featuring fire scale in the c.1740–50 Van Haeftan baby house, to a series of burn marks on the ceilings of the Uppark baby house, located above mounted candlesticks below.Footnote ⁷⁸ Melinda Alliker Rabb argues that miniaturization enabled contemporaries to engage with ‘the familiar in a new and heightened way’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Mirroring their full-size counterparts, lighting little candles and heating miniature chocolate pots would thus have intensified female users’ collective sensory interactions with these everyday objects.Footnote ⁸⁰ Reflecting on the shining silver surfaces of diminutive dinner services, for example, and smelling and smoking up small rooms, the visual and olfactory properties of candlelight would have been condensed and enhanced inside the baby house.Footnote ⁸¹ Such material evidence challenges Susan Stewart’s assertion that the dollhouse ‘cannot be known sensually’ and ‘is inaccessible to the languages of the body’.Footnote ⁸² Rather, united by their shared sensitivities to small things, and drawn into tight physical proximity with one another, genteel girls and women were connected in a close corporeal way around the baby house. Sites of joint usage, these small-scale spaces brought together mothers, daughters, siblings, cousins, and friends in mutual material experiences.

In particular, bonding girls and women across the life-cycle, baby houses represented intimate spaces of inter-generational exchange. In his 1767 etiquette guide Letters to married women, Hugh Smith describes how he has ‘with inexpressible pleasure seen many young ladies, women grown, happily amusing themselves at their younger sisters baby house, and often discovered a crimson blush, that genuine mark of female modesty’ arising from this practice.Footnote ⁸³ Whilst this ‘crimson blush’ is certainly tied to eighteenth-century idealistic notions of femininity, it does point to the real sense of emotional gratification experienced by adult women when connecting with younger female family members in the baby house. Conversely, baby houses also facilitated the transfer of material knowledge from ‘women grown’ to young girls. In their 1798 conduct manual, Practical education, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth describe how ‘A little girl, presiding at her baby tea-table, is pleased with the notion that she is like her mamma’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Patricia Ferguson rightly highlights how such fully functional toys mimicking real objects were intended to prepare genteel girls for their future, educating them in their proper usage, and in wider household management.Footnote ⁸⁵ This training also had a strong corporeal dimension. Mirroring her mother’s posture and physical movements at the full-size tea-table, engaging with her own miniature model would have enabled the young girl to practise and perfect her bodily conduct on a scale more suited to small hands. As sized-down versions of the wider object world around them, baby houses thus offered a unique medium for material learning and exchange across the female life-cycle, invoking affective responses in women and girls alike.

Given the prominent position of baby houses in structuring female affective relationships, it would be easy to overlook their role in shaping relations between daughters and their fathers. In the same way a young girl might mimic her mother’s corporeal conduct at the ‘baby tea-table’, she could equally recreate the bodily behavior of her father at the dining table. In a 1795 tale of ‘instruction and amusement’, main character Adelaide’s baby house dining room is described as featuring ‘a sideboard, with glasses, cases with silver knives and forks, spoons, and, in short, every thing the same as adorned her Papa’s, except that her’s were much smaller’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Fashioned as reduced-scale replicas of fathers’ material worlds, baby houses could function as vessels of paternal, as well as maternal, connection. This ability to bond father and daughter is demonstrated by author Henry Brooke in his 1774 novel Juliet Grenville. In one passage, the novel’s namesake Juliet recounts how, when she was a young girl, ‘My father had made me a present of a large and elegant babyhouse, ready furnished with several dolls, and their respective equipages’.Footnote ⁸⁷ A material embodiment of fatherly affection, this imagined gifting was based upon real practice.Footnote ⁸⁸ The c.1740 King’s Lynn baby house, for example, was likely commissioned by Hubert Flierden, a merchant of Dutch descent, as a gift for his daughter Ann. Based upon the full-scale building of twenty-seven King Street in King’s Lynn, which Flierden renovated around 1715, the baby house is remarkable in its resemblance to its life-size counterpart (Figure 7).Footnote ⁸⁹ From its near identical shape and architectural arrangement, down to finer details like the brick quoining on either side of the front façade, and pattern of lintels above the middle floor windows, the baby house is a near perfect reproduction of twenty-seven King Street in miniature. As with Adelaide’s fictional baby house above, the King’s Lynn baby house was a true microcosm of a father’s material world. Playing inside the walls of this personal place together would have brought father and daughter into close contact, facilitating a deeper degree of connection than that available in the full-size interior.

Figure 7.

Left: King’s Lynn baby house, England, c.1740, Lynn Museum, King’s Lynn (Norfolk Museums Service), KILLM:1994.715. Right: Twenty-seven King Street, King’s Lynn.

Figure 7 Long description

First photograph shows a miniature house model indoors against a plain wall and floor. The front of the model is opened to show a cutaway view of several stacked floors with interior rooms. The exterior has a flat front with rows of rectangular windows and a roofline with a balustrade and small chimney shapes. Second photograph shows a front-facing view of a multi-storey townhouse on a street. A sidewalk runs along the front. The facade has multiple rectangular windows arranged in rows, a central doorway with a small canopy above it and a roofline with a balustrade. Parts of neighboring buildings are visible at the edges of the frame.

Of course, the inherent intimacy of sharing such small spaces, especially from a young age, could be as emotionally challenging as it was fulfilling. A 1726 letter from Sir Charles Mordaunt of Walton Hall in Warwickshire to his mother in London highlights the complexity of contemporaries’ affective interactions around the baby house. Sir Charles describes joking with his daughter Penny about her new ‘Dutchess’ doll which has given him:

In a light-hearted attempt to bond with young Penny, Sir Charles animates her new toy, with the ‘Dutchess’ assuming an active role in this inter-generational exchange between father and daughter. Treating her as a real ‘visitor’ from London, he attempts to immerse himself in Penny’s miniature material world, imagining her baby house as the dolls’ temporary home. His efforts to connect backfire, however, with Penny believing in his performance so strongly that she was willing to give up her whole baby house along with its entire contents to keep her new friend, the depth of her emotional attachment emphasized by her ‘flood of tears’. Not all relations around the baby house, then, were easy and harmonious. In the same way that smallness could heighten the user’s sensory engagements with material culture, it could equally enhance their emotional interactions. As a medium for material contact and connection in an ever-growing world, the baby house thus fostered a wide range of affective relationships which could be as complex as they were powerful.

Finally, even when not together physically, the baby house could unite girls and women emotionally. As recognized by Amanda Vickery, the regular exchange of trinkets was a well-established currency of elite sociability in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁹¹ Miniature furnishings and dolls were key components within these systems of gendered gift-giving, with their small scale and inherent portability making them ideally suited for sending across great distances. Whilst away from home in October 1726, for example, the dowager Lady Mordaunt of Walton Hall received an update regarding her daughter Dolly’s well-being. A servant wrote that Dolly ‘desires me to present her duty to your Ladyship and she says she will write a letter her selfe with a great many thanks for her fine dutches wch she promisses never to pull to peices, and will never play with it till your Ladyship comes to Walton again’.Footnote ⁹² Young Dolly’s vow to properly care for her new Dutchess doll underlines her deep sentimental attachment to this object, with presents of baby house wares being invested with a large affective weight relative to their small size. In promising not to play with it until her mother returns, Dolly demonstrates how little gifts could perform vital work in preserving and affirming female relationships across time and space.Footnote ⁹³

Furthermore, in the same letter, Dolly also desired ‘her duty to her aunt and a great many thanks for her fine hearth wch is put in the drawing room in her baby house, she talks all day long of your Ladyship [and] her aunt’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Dolly speaking for hours about her family members following receipt of their presents reveals the role of these miniature goods in evoking thoughts of the sender, a point confirmed by Sally Holloway and Freya Gowrley, who agree on the ability of small things to act as valuable vessels of memory.Footnote ⁹⁵ As a material expression of familial warmth, feeling, and friendship, nestling this little hearth inside the small space of her baby house would have fostered a sense of closeness between Dolly and her aunt despite their physical separation. With their little rooms loaded with love, baby houses were thus active agents of inter-generational exchange, and significant creators and shapers of female affective relationships within the expanding material world of eighteenth-century England.

V

Indeed, women’s material horizons were continually broadening in this period. With the expansion of the British empire overseas and the growth of networks of global trade, driven especially by the expansion of the East India Company, new goods from across the world flooded British markets, transforming its consumer and material cultures.Footnote ⁹⁶ As with full-size homes, baby houses were increasingly filled with a diversity of global wares. Beyond their role in the demonstration of one’s wealth, fashionable tastes, and worldly knowledge, globally sourced and inspired miniature furnishings performed complex affective functions for their female users, with Melinda Alliker Rabb highlighting how ‘knowing the world’ was mediated through small-scale things in this period.Footnote ⁹⁷

In the Nostell baby house, for example, the set of c.1715 Japanese porcelain vases in the state dressing room, and ‘Japan’d’ sides of the drawing room, would have brought the ‘exotic’ into the homes, and hands, of English elite women.Footnote ⁹⁸ Contained within the small space of the baby house, such diminutive global goods served to compact and compress the world for their female users. Abigail Williams supports this analysis in her study of the miniature book, arguing that these small things functioned on the premise of ‘accessible totality through compression’ of an ever-growing world into a minute form.Footnote ⁹⁹ This condensing effect discussed by Williams is especially evident with the trio of c.1700 blanc de chine porcelain displayed on the mantelpiece of the Nostell state bedroom.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Produced in Dehua, China, the global origins of these distinctive white ornaments are emphasized in their forms, with the central figure shaped into a lion, flanked by two monkeys on either side. A fusion of diverse foreign nations, the whole globe was quite literally condensed into these little porcelain pieces, contributing to the Nostell women’s sense of an increasingly small world.

For eighteenth-century women, then, baby houses not only reflected the expanding material world around them but also actively shaped individual engagements with it. Prominent amongst surviving miniature material culture are a myriad of objects for the consumption of tea, coffee, chocolate, and punch. Themselves commodities supplied by burgeoning empire and global trade, these beverages generated new rituals of sociability within the life-size eighteenth-century interior. Soon after punchbowls became a staple of the English dining table during the late-seventeenth century, for example, London silversmith George Manjoy began producing tiny silver versions for baby houses, illuminating the inherent and intimate connection between the small- and full-scale material realms.Footnote ¹⁰¹ A later punchbowl in the Blackett baby house attests to the sustained popularity of these goods (Figure 8). Made of real porcelain, it was possibly produced in China for export market, with its blue and white floral design replicating the chinoiserie style favored by British consumers in this period. Karen Harvey argues how, for full-size punchbowls, such distinctively Chinese designs echoed the foreign ingredients of punch itself, a fact that would not have been lost on contemporaries. The miniature punchbowl would thus have evoked the wider world for its female user on multiple levels, from its foreign place of production and exotic design, to the ‘Indian drink’ it was supposed to contain.Footnote ¹⁰² Its incorporation into Lady Anne Blackett’s baby house speaks of her internalization of these imported drinking rituals, with her small-scale vessel allowing her to possess and influence the world in a particularly personal way.

Figure 8.

Miniature punch bowl, China (possibly), c.1760–80, porcelain, height 19mm, diameter 29mm, © London Museum, 37.13/124.

As well as placing and positioning punchbowls, women also arranged and engaged with tiny tea sets like the pictured example from the Victoria and Albert Museum ‘room setting’ baby house (Figure 9). Another global beverage, tea-drinking proved habit-forming over the course of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰³ Comprised of four teacups, two saucers, a tea-caddy, urn, and sugar bowl, the completeness of the little assemblage would have enabled its female user to fully recreate this drinking practice in miniature. Even the tea-table upon which the set stands replicates the functioning of actual-size examples, with its top swinging down to save space when not in use. An intricate maneuver, securing the little tabletop in place via a small brass clip on its underside necessitated nimble fingers and careful corporeal control. Using tiny tea sets therefore represented an intimate, bodily means through which women could sensorially engage with a proliferating global material culture. Melinda Alliker Rabb suggests this ‘process of down-sizing’ helped contemporaries comprehend the new cognitive demands of globalization, whilst Jack Davy and Charlotte Dixon similarly treat historical miniatures as ‘multifaceted pieces of equipment for coping with and changing the world’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ When placed in the palm and felt between the fingers, small-scale global goods like this tea set might enable the female baby house user to ‘get to grips’ with a burgeoning object realm in a mental sense as well as a physical one.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Figure 9.

‘Room setting’ miniature tea service, England (possibly), 1700–99, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, W.42:66-1922.

Figure 9 Long description

A miniature tea set is displayed on a small round table with a pedestal base. The set includes four teacups, two saucers, a tea-caddy, an urn and a sugar bowl. Each piece is intricately designed and the table's top can swing down to save space when not in use. The arrangement replicates a full-size tea service in miniature form.

Beyond simply purchasing and displaying ready-made items, global goods were also the source of new materials for women’s crafts inside baby houses. The walls of the state dressing room in the Nostell baby house, for example, are lined with a vibrant gilt leather featuring a pattern of lotus flowers, butterflies, kingfishers, partridges, and other birds. Undoubtedly Asian in influence, the largeness of its design suggests it was recycled from a full-scale furnishing or wall covering.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The same is true of the Chinese-style wallpaper in the drawing room and bedroom of the Blackett baby house, which is decorated with a highly fashionable and colorful floral motif (Figure 10). Helen Clifford highlights how such papers with birds, trees, and flowering plants were prized by British consumers for their supposedly accurate depictions of Chinese flora and fauna.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ With its bold blue background and striking botanic design, the wallpaper would have acted as a strong statement of Lady Anne Blackett’s worldly knowledge and refined tastes. Apart from their role as signalers of a globally aware life, however, adapting and altering such life-size transoceanic products into diminutive decorations also provided genteel women with a personal avenue for shaping and negotiating their place within an expanding material world. Indeed, as well as enhancing one’s senses, John Mack suggests that in making things small, we also produce a simultaneous exaggeration of content.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Rabb agrees that values become enriched in miniature.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For female crafters then, the feeling of the exotic evoked by one’s Chinese wallpapers would have been enlarged, rather than reduced, by their newly small scale. In molding and modifying full-sized furnishings to fit inside their baby houses, the Nostell and Blackett women may have felt like they quite literally held the world in their fingertips.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Figure 10.

Wallpaper in Blackett baby house drawing room, England, c.1760, © London Museum, 37.13/1.

Figure 10 Long description

The miniature room features vibrant floral wallpaper with large flowers, leaves and butterflies on a blue background. The wallpaper covers the walls entirely, creating a striking visual effect. In the corner, there is a decorative fireplace with an ornate gold frame surrounding a circular mirror above it. The fireplace itself is small and has a simple design. The room has a wooden floor and white trim along the ceiling and baseboards, adding contrast to the colorful walls.

Finally, moving from China to India, Dorothy Richardson informs us of the Nostell baby house that ‘The bed in the Nursery is Chintz’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Also known as the lying-in room [https://www.nationaltrustimages.org.uk/asset-management/2KDZIF37N7N7?&WS=SearchResults&Flat=FP], the window curtains in this space are made of the same floral fabric. Imported by the expanding East India Company, chintz refers to the range of Indian hand-painted, woodblock-printed, and stained cotton fabrics which proved highly popular amongst eighteenth-century English consumers. The small scale of the pattern in the Nostell tiny textiles suggests they were constructed specifically from dress fabric.Footnote ¹¹² Handling such globally sourced materials was an important affective method by which the women of Nostell, living on a country estate in Wakefield, Yorkshire, could comprehend and tangibly connect with an enlarged globe. Chloe Wigston Smith further suggests that the process of converting textiles from foreign nations into decorative pieces represented attempts by women to domesticate empire.Footnote ¹¹³ In this way, shaping and stitching chintz into tiny textile decorations enabled Susanna and Katherine Henshaw to manipulate and personally participate in Britain’s colonial expansion. Far from insular, these miniature material worlds were inherently entwined with the wider world around them.

VI

Much more than static showpieces, baby houses were active agents within the material and affective lives of their female users. Assembling, arranging, and engaging with these miniature material worlds constituted a complex embodied experience in which women’s sensory and emotive relationships to these objects were heightened and intensified by their small size. In particular, this article has argued that the baby house represented an intimate mechanism by which the genteel woman might imagine and interact with an expanding world of things. As a result, it suggests that early modern understandings of the inherent entanglement between the microcosm and macrocosm were still very much present in the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Invested with a mosaic of material meanings, baby houses could act as sites of retreat and reflection which drew women mentally inwards as well as physically. In their carefully crafted and curated interiors, we are provided with a close access point to the inner affective lives of their female creators. Uniting girls and women in joint embodied experiences, baby houses were also important arenas of female association and communication. Finally, filled with a range of global goods, these small-scale spaces represented a personal avenue by which the genteel woman could ‘get to grips’ with an increasingly enlarged globe. Creating and shaping women’s experiences on each of these levels, baby houses were thus imbued with a substantial affective weight that surpassed their diminutive dimensions.

In recognizing the dual position of these miniature objects as both significant historical agents and unique material sources, this article has furthered a flourishing body of literature concerned with the analytical value of smallness. It shows that, just as smaller does not mean lesser, so too are feminine ‘trinkets’, ‘toys’, and ‘trifles’ fruitful subjects of scholarly investigation. In doing so, it hopes to have advanced vital existing efforts toward dismantling those long-standing, gendered value judgments which led to both women’s possessions and small things being dismissed as trivial and insignificant.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Furthermore, whilst object-centered approaches are not without their challenges, this article has confirmed that such methodologies can continue to shed new light on the lives of historical actors whose experiences have been marginalized in the traditional textual archive. Whilst the scant survival of non-elite owned baby houses makes drawing any comprehensive conclusions about their usage by lower-status women difficult, baby house ownership was certainly proliferating over the course of this period.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Indeed, within the expanding material worlds of an increasingly broad group of eighteenth-century women, baby houses were crucial affective actors, not simply in spite of, but because of their small size.