This doll is referred to in the DAR Museum collection as a Queen Anne era doll, and its date is cited as being 18th century, but for our history challenge, we need to know a more precise date for this doll. Was it early 18th century or late 18th century?

I want you to also picture in your mind the person who made the delicate clothing this doll is wearing. The workmanship is phenomenal! Who do you picture as the seamstress for this doll? A child? A woman perhaps? What does she look like?

Keep the image of this dress’s seamstress in your mind as you read today’s article.

Today’s blog post is part of a history challenge! Click here to read about the challenge and download the free PDF to join the history challenge.

With other dolls we’ve discussed for this history challenge, we’ve learned that the costume a doll wears doesn’t always indicate its age. And there’s this to think about, when we try to pinpoint a more precise date for this Queen Anne style doll: fashion in the Americas was very likely a little behind the fashion in Europe at the same time, due to the fact that people had to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to bring news of what was in style across the pond, so to speak.

Now I did a quick study of Queen Anne, and her reign in England lasted from 1702 to 1714. On the one hand, her life was marred by tragedy. According to Britannica online, “Although Anne was pregnant 18 times between 1683 and 1700, only five children were born alive, and, of these, only one, a son, survived infancy. His death in 1700 ended Anne’s hopes of providing herself and the three kingdoms (England, Scotland, and Ireland) with a successor” (1).

Can you imagine losing eighteen children? No wonder her face looks sort of melancholy in all of her portraits (at least all the ones I was able to find online).

However it should be noted that Queen Anne had a hand in creating the slave trade in the Americas. “In 1713 an agreement between Spain and Britain granted the British a monopoly on the slave trade with the Spanish colonies. Under the Asiento de negros, Britain was entitled to supply those colonies with 4,800 African slaves per year for 30 years. The contract for this supply was assigned to the South Sea Company, of which Anne held some 22.5 percent of the stock” (1).

What an awful legacy to leave behind!

According to the Economic History Association website, Colonial Americans in both northern and southern states owned slaves in the 1700’s. “At the time of the American Revolution, [of the northern colonies], New York had the greatest number, with just over 20,000. New Jersey had close to 12,000 slaves” (2). How long did it take to build up numbers like this? The same site states that in 1619 “The first… slaves in what was to become British North America arrived in Virginia — perhaps stopping first in Spanish lands,” so slaves were definitely living and working in the colonies when this Queen Anne style wooden doll was made.

Queen Anne was a woman of great power and wealth, but she owned 22.5 percent of the stock in the British slave trade. Slavery? Really Queen Anne? Why? That’s just icky!

And yet we associate Queen Anne’s fashion style with the kind of dresses we see the Disney princesses wearing! Maybe as a society, we should re-think the veneration we’ve given to this style of dress.

I mean, think about it… Little girls all over the world associate the Queen Anne style of dress with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, but this style of dress was made popular by the same queen who promoted the British slave trade in America in 1713. Yech!

But I digress. Let’s see if we can pinpoint a date for the creation of the DAR Museum’s Queen Anne style wooden doll.

The glass eyes and wooden body of this doll remind us of the dolls we looked at last week. One of those, the one our challenge refers to as the “Imported English Doll,” was dated by the DAR Museum to be “Early 19th century” (3), even though its features look a lot like this doll’s.

Let’s have another look at her:

For our study of American dolls, we came up with a date of 1800 to 1820 for this doll, largely based upon a close study of the doll’s eyebrows, which were painted on the face, as a series of little dots (4).

I cross-referenced this eyebrow style with two Cree-style dolls that were attributed to a similar era. The Cree dolls are housed in the Southwark Heritage Centre in England, and I found documents from the Hudson’s Bay Company that seemed to verify that date (5).

However our little Queen Anne doll has very different eyebrows. Hers are not painted as dots, but as straight lines atop her little glass eyes.

And her costume, as we’ve said, seems to reveal a much earlier date, perhaps as old as the reign of Queen Anne herself.

Anne’s reign, as I said earlier, ended in 1714, at the time of her death. Did the dress style continue after her death?

Very likely it did, and again, I want to remind you that fashion in the American Colonies was delayed by the distance between the two continents. However, I think it’s safe to say that this Queen Anne style wooden doll likely dates between 1712 and 1720, making it the earliest of the dolls we’ve looked at for our history challenge.

And with the slave trade in full swing in America after 1713, I wonder if this lovely doll’s delicate clothes weren’t made by the hands of an enslaved African. I mean, it’s certainly possible.

In last week’s history challenge article, we learned that these wooden dolls were quite possibly imported to America without clothing, and once they arrived, the owner of the doll would provide them with clothes. Or at least, that’s what the Cree dolls‘ origin seems to imply.

I think we need to take a  moment to admire the elegant workmanship of whoever made the clothes for this doll.

We can also pause to consider the tragedies and tremendous resilience of the people of the past.

If she could talk, it would be amazing, I think, to hear the stories this little doll could tell…

Some of today’s images and a fair amount of the information provided come from the DAR Museum online. Please click on the links provided to learn more about the DAR Museum. The address of the museum is 1776 D Street NW Washington, DC 20006, so if you plan to visit our nation’s capital, you might think about going to see the DAR Museum in person.

I’m a museum liaison for my local (Twin Falls, Idaho) chapter of the DAR, which means that I sometimes do museum research for our local club.

The letters, DAR, stand for Daughters of the American Revolution. What does this mean? It means I have an ancestor who was in the American Revolutionary War. I’m very proud of the fact that my ancestor served in the Revolution for American Independence from Great Britain, and as such, helped establish the United States of America as an independent nation.

The DAR is a club that offers its members an opportunity to serve our nation by doing organized volunteer work. In particular, over the summer, I sewed drawstring bags for a public school to use as storage in one of the teachers’ classrooms. Last year I made doll clothes to give as Christmas presents to a.) the families of United States military service members and b.) a homeless shelter in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Although the doll clothes I made for these purposes was featured in some of my articles here on ChellyWood.com, the volunteer work I do for the DAR is separate from the work I do to maintain this website. They are not affiliated with one another in any way. ChellyWood LLC is recognized by the state of Idaho as a for-profit business, whereas the DAR is a nonprofit organization.

Some members of the DAR serve as volunteers at local voting locations, soup kitchens, food banks and so much more. If you’d like to contact your local DAR to request volunteers to act in service capacities in your neighborhood, or if you’d like to learn whether or not you could qualify to join the DAR (you must do genealogy research to find out whether or not you are a descendent of a person who served in the American Revolutionary War), feel free to contact members of the Daughters of the American Revolution on their website, by using one of the links I’ve provided here.

REFERENCES:

Please note: images were used, with permission, and they come from the DAR Museum website. Click on the link provided to visit the DAR Museum website for yourself, to see a higher-resolution image and to learn more details about each of the dolls featured.

1. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Anne”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 17 Sep. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anne-queen-of-Great-Britain-and-Ireland. Accessed 5 October 2024.
2. Bourne, Jenny. “Slavery in the United States.” Economic History Association, 2023. Web. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.
3. Artist unknown. “Doll.” [Medium: wood]. 18th century. DAR Museum, Washington DC, Accessed 5 Oct. 2024. Associated image is in the public domain.
4. Artist unknown. “Doll.” [Medium: wood]. Early 19th Century. DAR Museum, Washington DC, Accessed 28 September 2024. Associated image is in the public domain.
5. Artist unknown. “Doll.” [Medium: leather, wood]. 1800 to 1820. Southwark Heritage Centre, London, England, Accessed 28 Sept. 2024. Associated image is used with permission.
6. “Become a Member.” National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR), 24 July 2024. Web. 2024.