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Building off Maria Dinah Craik's contextualization of Prince Dolor's growth from "poor little boy" to "brave King Dolor" in The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak, this thematic gallery explores the shifting characterization of childhood, the fashioning of the child, and conceptions of play in the Victorian era.

Timelines, Galleries, and Maps

The Godmother as a Representation of Imagination | Gallery Image

This photograph comes from a Hope Dunlop illustrated edition of the Little Lame Prince, demonstrating Prince Dolor astonished to see his godmother; the figure who will bestow him with magical tools. Prince Dolor is isolated in Hopeless Tower due to the social stigma surrounding his disability, and utilizes his imagination to create companionship, as a child would with an imaginary… more

Posted by Maya Roumie on

Imaginative Horseplay | Gallery Image

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… more

Posted by Maya Roumie on

Reading as Imaginative Play | Gallery Image

This painting depicts three young girls enraptured by a storybook. This image is included in the gallery as it confirms that stories and books were a growing fascination during the period. Meant for children, these texts were used as both a method of entertainment and of education. Many texts were didactic, including narrators who would speak directly to their readers, offering advice for… more

Posted by Piper Grineau on

The Limitations of Reading | Gallery Image

While books are important to Prince Dolor’s development, this form of entertainment and imaginative play cannot be the only thing to sustain the prince. As the text says, “He sat one day surrounded [his books], having built them up round him like a little castle wall. He had been reading them half the day, but feeling all the while that to read about things which you never can see is like… more

Posted by Piper Grineau on

Prince Dolor as King | Gallery Image

The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak - a Parable for Old and Young (1900). Alamy, https://www.alamy.com/stock-… more

Posted by Khloe Rowse on

Prince Dolor Leaving The Domestic Sphere | Gallery Image

Ralston, John McL. The Little Lame Prince. Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts, https://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/14.

Illustrator, John McL. Ralston displays Prince Dolor as he first tests his traveling cloak within his tower. In The Little Lame Prince… more

Posted by Khloe Rowse on

The Role of Toys in The Cricket on the Hearth | Gallery Image

In Charles Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), toys allow Blind Bertha to interface with her physical and social environment. 

Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter Bertha build toys for toy merchant Gruff and Tackleton. Though their home is "a little cracked nutshell of a wooden house" (188), Bertha "never knew that ugly shapes of delf and… more

Posted by Cristina Matteis on

Water Cart Toy (1880-1899) | Gallery Image

Fuelled by a boon in books on childrearing, Victorian parents gained access to a growing body of recommendations on the "proper" methods of bathing, dressing, feeding, and disciplining children (Henderson and Sharpe,1821). Monthly magazines such as Babyhood: A Monthly Magazine for Mothers, Devoted to The Care of Infants and Young Children and the General Interests of the Nursery… more

Posted by Cristina Matteis on

Friedrich Froebel - Gift No. 2 | Gallery Image

Educator and educational philosopher Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) founded the first German kindergarten -- the "Institution for the Care of Children's and Adolescents's Desire to Explore" -- in 1837.

With his "play theory", Froebel sought to educate children through each child's own "self-activity" (Hailmann 5), by incorporating "play and means of employment... which nourish and… more

Posted by Cristina Matteis on

Froebel's Gifts - Gift No. 2 | Gallery Image

Educator and educational philosopher Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) founded the first German kindergarten -- the "Institution for the Care of Children's and Adolescents's Desire to Explore" -- in 1837 ().

With his "play theory", Froebel sought to educate children through each child's own "self-activity" (Hailmann 5), by incorporating "play and means of employment... which nourish and… more

Posted by Cristina Matteis on

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