From the National Portrait Gallery, this photo is called “Oliver Stratchey”. It is a photo of a little boy who is posed, sitting on a toy horse and holding onto the horn. In Diana Maria Mulock’s The Little Lame Prince, readers watch as Prince Dolor grows up playing with a variety of toys. While he does this, he experiments with imaginative play through his Travelling Cloak that his godmother gifts him. As the prince is introduced to literature, he is awakened to the numerous ways in which his life is limited due to his lack of movement. Once his godmother gives him a travelling cloak, Prince Dolor can go on any adventure he likes. Philipose argues that the cloak is a physical manifestation of his imagination, acting as a device where he can overcome his disabilities through imagination (134). One scene that portrays his imaginative play is when he adventures out on his cloak and imagines galloping away on a horse. He thinks about what he would be like as a normal boy who could “hold the reins in the carriage” or “tear across the country”. Prince Dolor orders the cloak to “gee-up”, and then “pat[s] the cloak as if it had been a horse”, acting in line with a child at play (Craik, Chapter VI). Since Prince Dolor is not like any able-bodied boy, he learns the world through imaginative solitary play rather than physical play. This photograph demonstrates how Prince Dolor might feel when he is using the cloak as his manifestation of imaginative play.
Works Cited
Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock. The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak. 1875.
Oliver Strachey. Photograph by Bassano Ltd, 7 May 1915. National Portrait Gallery, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw128260/Oliver-Strachey.
Philipose, L. (1996). The Politics of the Hearth in Victorian Children’s Fantasy: Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 21(3), 133–139. https://doi-org.ledproxy2.uwindsor.ca/10.1353/chq.0.1268