Alien (Heads)
or
The Invasion
of the
(Peg Wooden)
Body Snatchers
by Robyn Katz
Photography by Stanley Kiyonaga
unless otherwise noted
A (Very) Brief History of the
Industrial Revolution
T
he first half of the nineteenth
century in Europe was
a hotbed of social and
economic upheaval culminating
in the beginnings of the industrial
revolution. It was also a period
of extraordinary creativity and
monumental change in the doll
world. Over the course of this
fifty-year time period the primary
material for dolls heads changed
from wood to papier-mâché to
porcelain and doll-making evolved
from a cottage industry of skilled
artisans to a mechanized, factorybased production model that could
be operated by less skilled labor.
The Industrial Revolution was
focused on improving production
methods through mechanization
so that goods could be made more
efficiently and less expensively. As
a result of this process, the handcarved wooden doll industry that
had prevailed during the end of the
eighteenth century and the first two
decades of the nineteenth century
was overtaken and exceeded by
the papier-mâché doll industry in
the succeeding thirty years. Two
of the primary advances made in
papier-mâché doll production during
this time were the use of molds to
Fig. 1 - Typical jointed peg wooden
bodies found on nineteenth century
wooden dolls. Courtesy of Theriault's
46
WINTER 2015
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Doll News Winter 2015