Play in The Little Lame Prince

For Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), play represented the “independent outward expression of inward action and life” (29). In Maria Dinah Craik’s The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak (1874), play and toys are consistently used to contextualize Prince Dolor’s maturation, while also providing insight into Dolor’s expanding view of himself and the world around him. In this way, toys and playing function in Craik’s Little Lame Prince in the same way as Froebel’s Play Gifts. 

Dolor’s most cherished toys are “his beloved headless horse, broken cars, sheep…

The topics of play and childhood rapidly received attention in the Victorian period, with Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses providing an example of a new way to conceptualize childhood. The ‘garden’ might be understood as the transitional space between childhood and adulthood. Webb discusses the significance of Stevenson’s title: 

The garden is an extension of the enclosed domestic space of the house, where there is safety, but also the space for free and imaginative play. It can be a place of adventure, discovery, pondering, and…

Various editions of The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak feature an image of Prince Dolor on his cloak, sometimes wearing his spectacles, reaching out to “snatch at the topmost twig of the tallest tree” (Craik 24). Several critics, such as Philipose, suggest that the prince's cloak can be equated with the imagination, allowing him to overcome his physical limitations. On the other hand, Hingston claims, “Dolor’s lack of control over his gifts…suggests that they exist outside of him rather than as part of his imagination” (373). Though the prince’s cloak exists as a real…

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 friend. Prince Dolor’s growth is directly linked to the tools his godmother gifts him, like the flying cloak or the silver ears, objects that can be viewed as fantastical. Though these magical prosthetic…

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…

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 young children to absorb as they learned moral lessons through the adventures of the storybook characters. By proxy, a child could understand the life of a fairy tale prince, an orphan or anything in…

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 hearing about a beautiful dinner while you are starving” (Craik). Within this context, he looks out the window and longs for experiences outside of his tower, prompting his godmother to appear for the…

The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak - a Parable for Old and Young (1900). Alamy, https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-little-lame-prince-and-his-traveli....

The unknown illustrator shows Prince Dolor as the fully maturated ruler of Noman’s Land that corresponds with the story’s conclusion. Diana…

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, Diana Maria Mulock uses play and toys to showcase Prince Dolor’s maturation from boy to man. What is particularly interesting about his maturation, is the way in which his physical disability…

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 earthenware were on the board; that sorrow and faint-heartedness were in the house" (189). Caleb, inspired by the Cricket Spirit of his home, turns Bertha's "great deprivation... into a blessing" by…

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 (1886-1887), provided detailed recommendations for nursery room decoration, as well as information on the best toys for infants and toddlers. By 1886, mothers were encouraged to forego…

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 strengthen, develop and form the life of the child (Froebel 18). Play, in Froebel's conception, focuses on the basic perceptions and sensory experiences of the child, incorporating all of the senses:…