ABSTRACT
Children’s toys and play had been part of the visual culture of childhood well before the age of consumption. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, traditional toys, belongings and entertainments for children and for the household needed to be increased and diversified. There were entrepreneurs who understood and even created such demands. Spatial relations in all the illustrations are unstable. Logical visual connections are broken, so that drapery, for instance, abruptly disappears and then reappears unsupported by architecture or furniture, or a juxtaposition of door, couch and boy’s jacket collide in a visual jumble. Children, their mothers and caretakers were the market for these stories and pictures, which helped female consumers of domesticity to define themselves as well as they could, attempting to describe what they were, what they wanted, what their values were. But the guidance offered was often as confused and inconsistent as the pictorial interpretation.
