A Penny For Your Thoughts

“I want to tell you about something I’ve found,” said Lavinia. She was sitting in the lively Agarimo café having coffee with her friend.

“Go ahead,” replied Pilar, not really expecting the discovery to be earthshaking. although it could very well be interesting. Her good friend Lavinia was by no means a bearer of boring news, never that.

Pushing aside the wave of auburn hair that had fallen partially over her left eye, Lavinia told her friend Pilar about one of the items that she’d found in the box from A Tertulia. This was the box Lavinia had been asked to inspect by her friend Xan, who was a great chef, because the owner of A Tertulia (the little bar where the box had been found) didn’t know English. A number of the items in that box were in that language.

It still was not clear to Lavinia - and this was now more unsettling than it had seemed the first time she had counted them - how many items were now in the box. The reason for her uncertainty was in no way due to her lack of expertise in handling archives, since she was in her element in this type of research. Lavinia had been cataloguing the items very carefully, but while none disappeared, additional ones had been appearing. There was always something she hadn’t seen the previous time…

This discrepancy in the type and number of the artifacts was more than a little upsetting to Lavinia, whose first impulse was self-reproach. Ultimately, she realized that something else was occurring. What could possibly be going on? I don’t do sloppy cataloguing, Never. She refrained from telling Pilar about this, though.

Many of the items in the aforementioned box were handwritten. There were letters and poems. There were also printed texts, books, a few articles… maybe manifestoes? What am I thinking?

Another group of items didn’t have any words at all. Among them, and their number definitely seemed to fluctuate, were sections of quilts or something woven. There was some bobbin lace. Lavinia was now telling Pilar that there was also a penny wooden doll. 

Penny Wood, aka Penny Wooden. At first it sounds like the doll had a first and a last name, but there was actually a reason for the name of this specific kind of doll. It usually cost a penny if one wanted to buy one, and it was affordable to most families. One wonders, if they weren’t hard to make on a lathe, why anybody ever bought one at all. They could sometimes be clunky, but they were also not easily broken.

Penny had other names, such as peg wooden doll and Dutch doll. The Dutch part might possibly have come from Deutsch, so maybe they were German dolls. (Like Pennsylvania Dutch is really Pennsylvania Deutsch, the German spoken by immigrants.) 

One source Lavinia found affirmed that the first penny wooden doll was made in Germany in 1810. That’s being precise about the date, but how did they know? How did the dolls get to the U.S.? Most sources overlook how that transferral from Europe across the Atlantic came about. Well, it was just a doll, something for a child to play with. It wasn’t food or a material acquisition to make American homes more comfortable.

Nobody seems to know if Germany was really the place of origin for the humble, naked dolls; other sources identify the Netherlands as an area where they were manufactured, maybe earlier than 1800. Still other sources list Val Gardena in the Alps as the place of origin, calling it Italy or Switzerland. 

This jumble of information had been unsettling to Lavinia, part of whose work had been to verify dates and origins of artifacts when they were donated to libraries and museums. She had already known about Penny dolls when she saw one in the box in Santiago, but hadn’t had the opportunity to look further. She wondered why there were such vague roots for Penny, who had grown very popular and was known in a number of countries.

Lavinia thought about how little she knew regarding the doll. Val Gardena was an area that had become known internationally for its woodcarving. Amelia Edwards (unjustly forgotten, but a very good fiction and travel writer) had called one of its population centers the Toyland capital. Why can’t I find more information? 

Was a goodly amount of carved items exported? That was vital to know. Were they always exported to other parts of the world or did skilled hands make copies of the dolls to sell at home? Did they just carve them for their daughters as Christmas presents? Did families emigrating to a new life bring the little dolls along on the ships? Did families on both Atlantic shores send them to each other? 

Lavinia was frustrated at the way historians had stripped Penny of her identity and potential role as witness to cultural contact. Apparently the cheap little dolls were just objects to those scholars, material possessions of minimal worth. Penny price tag and clothes made of scraps. Penny had no story to tell, evidently.

If wood carvers took to making a good copy of Penny to sell in the US, were they committing plagiary, or perhaps forgery? Probably not. They would simply be responding to a market. Why am I asking these questions?

Lavinia knew she needed to consult with a toy museum or with an expert in the history of toys. This was outside her range of basic library science. It was hard to get anything off random internet searches. Some bibliography databases might produce an article or two, but Lavinia hadn’t searched all the ones she knew yet. Nor was Miss Penny Wooden at the top of my list for researching, admitted Lavinia to herself.

“I’ve seen those dolls, but I think they’re awfully creepy. The ones in the Night Terror episode of Doctor Who were bad like that,” said Pilar. 

Lavinia agreed, but both women also thought the dolls the toy companies were making currently were too lifelike and were quite unappealing as playthings. Children tired of them quickly, perhaps because they left little to the imagination. That didn’t happen with the old Tiny Tears or Ginny dolls. It didn’t happen with stuffed animals.

“I haven’t seen any episodes of Doctor Who,” replied Lavinia, which was shocking to Pilar. “In my own defense, I’ve seen dolls with similar joints that bend, but they were made out of plastic. I think they were from the 1940s and 50s and instead of wooden pegs for arms and legs, they probably had metal pieces. My mother had two or three she’d inherited. I remember thinking they resembled the Frankenstein-type, bulky body I’d seen in comic books. Yes, I agree - I think they are rather creepy, too. They were the right size for those old painted metal dollhouses, which were also scary with their display of rigid wealth.” 

[Note: You need to know what those houses looked like to really understand what Lavinia is referring to here.]

It must have been something to do with the way the limbs were articulated that made both of the women uneasy. These were just dolls, though. Why the nervousness?

“You know why I decided to tell you about the doll, Pilar? It’s because of our conversation yesterday, when we both discovered how fascinated we both are by the nineteenth century.” She took a last, longing sip from her coffee cup. It was ice cold.

“I figured as much. It was about time you told me something about what you’ve found.” 

It was true: Pilar really hadn’t heard many details yet from Lavinia regarding the recently-discovered items, but she had been prepared to be patient. She also wanted to give the right response.

The use of wood for toys in Galicia and Portugal, as in the countries already mentioned here, was common. Pilar described some of the toys sold in outdoor feiras like the one in Barcelos. Those were either natural wood with ballpoint pen or pencil markings, sometimes red designs, or gaudy yellow paint with blue, red, and magenta designs. The wood might be pine, not as sturdy.

These wooden toys weren’t all dolls, but they had moving parts like Penny. Some of them were assembled with wire pins; others were able to move (mysteriously) on wooden joints. A favorite was the wooden circle with a group of chickens that pecked up and down. The chickens were linked by strings to wooden balls suspended from the hole in the circle. When the disk was given a circular movement, the balls spun and the chickens pecked. Similar toys have been found in places like Russia.

Pilar tried to describe some of her examples for Lavinia, but it was hard. She used hand gestures to indicate how the wooden parts moved, but knew her efforts were useless. You really had to see the toys to know what they were like, and to fall in love with them. Even adults bought them.

“Where did the doll in the box come from?” Pilar queried. 

She seemed very interested in knowing more. Unfortunately, the question didn’t have an easy answer, as Lavinia had already seen. The doll she had spoken of could have come from anywhere. It could have been made in the U.S. and been shipped to Santiago for some reason. 

“Maybe if we could get a closer look…” hinted Pilar.

In response, Lavinia pulled out a slender package. It was wrapped in new tissue paper, which covered the original wrapping that was still around the doll. She had been carrying it around for a couple of hours, but had taken pains to ensure its safety while she had it. She guiltily thought that she should never have removed it from the box, which was back at the bar, but she had, and that was that.

Lavinia carefully laid the doll on the table, on top of both the old and the new paper, then read:

“Ortisei, 1819.”

She had found that inscribed on the upper part of the doll’s hip when she moved the skirt up to inspect the actual body of the wooden figure. It looked to be written in graphite, with a pencil.

“That’s a beautiful area! It’s where the Dolomites are,” said Pilar, who had visited the town of a little under six thousand inhabitants a few years before. It had been a little too geared toward tourism, but there was no denying the beauty of the mountain range with its whitish, toothy peaks.

Lavinia provided some information for her friend: 

“Often the dolls were purchased unclad. The children who received them had to find ways to clothe them. Scraps of material were always to be had, and of course the style for female dolls was a long skirt. The exact type of garments would depend on available fabrics, but also on the part of the country where the girls who played with Penny Wood dolls lived.”

The doll Lavinia had discovered, the one dated Ortisei, 1819, had apparently been sent, along with the written and printed pages, by a woman in the U.S. to Santiago. (There was no indication that anything else in the box had come from the South Tyrol; everything appeared to have originated in the US.) The doll had been sent to an unknown child, telling her what to do and to pass it on, to send it across the Atlantic when she was finished with it. The person receiving Penny in Santiago would know how to carry out those instructions, how to find the right child.

That is the shorter version. Here is a more detailed picture, perhaps similar to what it might look like in a library or museum catalogue, but in abbreviated style:

The doll is around ten or eleven inches tall. Its joints allow for considerable movement, especially of arms and legs. It is carved from wood, sanded, and painted. Its clothing shows childish stitches and includes a bonnet, a full blouse, a skirt, and a shoulder shawl. There is also a tiny pair of shoes or boots with cunning little latches. To a non-expert eye, it is hard to date or pinpoint the origin.

Lavinia was still inspecting the underside of Penny Wooden’s blue serge skirt, when she found a note attached at the doll’s (really non-existent) waist with its history. It was too good to be true! Pilar looked at her...

Or maybe it was all perfectly planned. The scroll-like scrap of paper was actually very good quality, it had been coiled carefully and tied with skill after being anchored at the waist. Somebody (maybe Lavinia?) was supposed to discover the scrap and know it was not there by accident.

The note said:

I received a doll from Germany when she was six. Iam a lot older now. I want to emphasize that this is the second crossing of the ocean for the little wooden toy. The doll might have been carved in Ortisei in the Tyrol, but it was sent to me from Germany, from a small town just north of Stuttgart. 

The writer of the note was planting the idea of her own connection to the little German town. She then explained what she had been instructed to do upon receiving it from overseas. The recipient, no matter what her age, needed to create clothing for the doll, using stitches, yarn, weaving, or any method she knew. After that, she had to tell it stories, speaking aloud. The stories had to be worthy. (Whatever that meant.) They could be told verbally or visually, but should be recorded because the stories were valuable. The six-year-old who had been given doll and instructions had done exactly as required.

Now Penny Wooden, who was going to be sorely missed by the woman who had loved her for so long, was returning to Europe, to a new (for her) but worthy place. She had traveled with the same instructions as the first trip, from Germany to America. Her sender once again took pains to say that Penny was even wiser now and to inspect her wisdom carefully.

Lavinia had been amazed at how much had been inscribed on the rolled paper ‘belt’ the doll had been wearing next to her wooden body, but she followed directions and kept inspecting the roughly-stitched clothing made from equally rough fibers. That was how she stumbled upon more in the right front pocket of her skirt:

“There’s something here, in this pocket!” ‘Lavinia exclaimed. Pilar nodded, pleased. She made a subtle sign with her palm.

Lavinia knew at that moment that by sending Penny back and forth, the action of the women who had sent her on the two journeys was like weaving or stitching the shores together. They were tightening the weft around a warp that was the upright part of a structure. The warp was an unswerving belief in their worth. The weft was comprised of the people who embraced the weft and centered themselves around it.

What the girl who received the doll was supposed to do with it was indicated in what seemed to be an encoded decalogue of women’s rights, maybe a reference to Wollstonecraft. Neither Pilar nor Lavinia thought about that right then, but later they would.

Some of the instructions were:

Cross-dress her. Take her out without a chaperone. Have her appear in prominent places. Make her into a novelist or scientist. Give her the best, the strongest voice. Help her to spread her education to others.

Then there was a final statement that seemed to be an afterthought: 

Penny Wooden will increase in value. This will be through her experience and her role as transatlantic educator. This specific Penny cannot be sold or purchased, because nobody owns her. On the contrary, she serves as a guide, she acts freely.

“Meu Deus, there’s a quote from Rosalía at the end!” It was Pilar, who was stunned , who said this. She read aloud:

Porque todavía no les es permitido a las mujeres escribir lo que sienten y lo que saben. La hija del mar, 1859.

Lavinia translated, immediately:

Because women still are not allowed to write what they feel and what they know. Daughter of the Sea, 1859.

***

Epilogue

Small writing can be what we value the most.

Even words in out-of-the-way places can be seen and heard.