wallpaper and old toys

This is the kind of wallpaper in the little bedroom, though there are touches of the colors of some of the others in this set. (And that site is absolutely amazing, I looked at eeeeverything they offer before leaving the website last night. The papers are all so, so pretty! and such a fantastic reference for historical interior design. <3)

It took me awhile to get the kind of information I wanted about kids' toys around the 1880s, 1890s. Teddy bears were 1902, but a German company, Steiff, started selling these little felt elephants as pincushions right about 1880 - only kids played with the things more than mothers used them as pincushions, so the company decided to go for making stuffed animals instead.

I had a hunch wind-up toys were around that era... and, holy crap. The little wind-up tin toys were a decade or so away from mass production, but what *did* exist, were absolutely stunning clockwork-type little things. And from there...

This blog gives a great overview of the sort of thing I wound up looking at. 1860-1910ish, there was a HUGE amount of this kind of thing being created, these stunning little animated figures. At Disneyworld, I was pretty blown away by the animatronics, largely created forty, fifty years ago... but this stuff? 1800s. Long before anything could've possibly been digital - the "memory" of these machines is all mechanical.
That blog has a video of one of these automatons, sculpted as a little boy, that *writes*, in a gorgeous old-fashioned cursive, one of three different poems, and can also *draw*. I can't even imagine how you would plot points like that into a clockwork machine's memory...

Even more stunning, was this guy - Pierre Jaquet-Droz, 1770, made these things - one could write, one could draw, one could play a piano. And what really grabs me, about all of these, is the insane attention to detail in the animations - watch a few, and you'll see how lifelike the eye movements are, the way the figure will turn its head, or move its hand vaguely, or all the thousand little things we do without thought. Absolutely astonishing work.

...though they also creep the hell out of me. I was looking at all this, of course, shortly before going to sleep last night, and when I closed my eyes, I kept seeing ones like this - eerily accurate movements and all, but with all the mechanisms exposed, the bodies half-decayed...

I love these things, though I really don't think you can get much creepier. So they're coming into my story - Mr. Mason and his brother have much, much more wealth and influence at their disposal than the townspeople will ever have seen. The kids can have some pretty darn expensive toys.