{"id":2139,"date":"2016-11-04T10:17:17","date_gmt":"2016-11-04T10:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/?p=2139"},"modified":"2018-07-19T17:27:57","modified_gmt":"2018-07-19T16:27:57","slug":"2139","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/2016\/11\/04\/2139\/","title":{"rendered":"Heads, Shoulders and Whole Lengths, by Hannah Field"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heads, Shoulders and Whole Lengths, by Hannah Field,<\/a> responds to the Dalziel image pictured below, an illustration for \u2018To make dancing dolls\u2019 from Laura Valentine’s The Home Book of Pleasure and Instruction<\/em>, published in 1867 (see image 11 of Design<\/a> in our exhibition). This piece\u00a0was developed out of panel talks on the Dalziel Archive\u00a0at the University of Sussex on 21st September 2016. Panelists –\u00a0Hannah Field<\/a>, Lindsay Smith<\/a> and Nicolas Royle<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0each delivered a short paper, focussing on\u00a0an image from the Alice to Alice exhibition<\/a>\u00a0that spoke to their research specialism. We will be featuring their responses on our blog in coming weeks, so watch this space!<\/p>\n

~~~\"dn11-21_p173-jpg-detail-1\"<\/p>\n

In April 1764, George Alexander Stevens presented his Lecture upon Heads<\/em> for the first time at the Little Haymarket Theatre in London. In this public entertainment, before the viewer\u2019s very eyes, Stevens dressed papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 busts as a succession of types\u2014professional, national, urban, and bureaucratic\u2014using wigs and other props. The performance became immensely successful. In fact, the Lecture\u2019<\/em>s popularity led to Stevens becoming so associated with heads that whole bodies posed a difficulty for him from then on: \u2018a supplementary lecture on portraits and whole lengths,\u2019 as Thomas Campbell tells us in his Specimens of the British Poets,<\/em> \u2018had no success\u2019. I don\u2019t know whether I will be any more successful in putting together the \u2018whole length\u2019 of this Dalziel image, which as you\u2019ll see is of a jointed paper doll or puppet, but I\u2019m going to try my best.<\/p>\n

Putting together the image\u2019s \u2018whole length\u2019 could be, for a start, a matter of context: laying the Dalziel doll alongside its many siblings. We could look to the actual material record of paper dolls\u2014the Fuller brothers sold paper dolls called Fanny, Ellen, and Frank from their \u2018Temple of Fancy\u2019 on Rathbone Place in present-day Fitzrovia\u2014but also by tracing the sometimes surprising cast of paper figures immortalized by the giants of nineteenth-century literature. In George Eliot\u2019s most forbidding novel, Daniel Deronda brings paper dolls to little Adelaide Cohen, and helps her to arrange them \u2018in their dance on the table\u2019 while chatting with her parents. Robert Louis Stevenson scorns the boys who bought pre-coloured paper figures for toy theatres, instead of painting them by hand, and then drifts into an encomium to colouring-in: \u2018With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it\u2014crimson lake!\u2014the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear)\u2014with crimson lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded which, for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal\u2019. Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s tin soldier falls in love with a little paper dancer dressed in muslin and ribbons. And in his essay on childhood memories of toys, \u2018A Christmas Tree\u2019, Dickens finds something uncanny in the jointed pantin or Jumping Jack puppet, of which this Dalziel image is (I think) a specimen. \u2018The larger cardboard man\u2019, writes Dickens, \u2018who used to be hung against the wall and pulled by a string\u2019 had \u2018a sinister expression in that nose of his; and when he got his legs round his neck (which he very often did), he was ghastly, and not a creature to be alone with.\u2019 This cast of paper people brings a new angle to the question of what print looked like in the nineteenth century. Sometimes it had a face and body\u2014even a fine floral crown, like the Dalziels\u2019 figure.<\/p>\n

.Looking at these Dalziel illustrations, though, I can\u2019t help but think that parts can be much more intriguing than wholes. The illustration at right, for instance, turns a form that is often high-status and designed to last\u2014the bust\u2014into something miniaturized, much slighter (this is a children\u2019s toy) but also more intimate. Intimate because the young lady appears scantily clad, with only a few lines to hide her modesty. (She\u2019s not bad, she\u2019s just drawn\u2014or rather engraved\u2014that way, to quote Jessica Rabbit.) But also intimate because at this stage in production the doll is unfinished: a piece of DIY, if you will. Seeing the parts laid out side by side, before they become a \u2018whole length\u2019, gestures towards the nineteenth-century predilection for what the historian Ellen Gruber Garvey calls scissorizing\u2014<\/em>cutting up paper and assembling it into something else. The little holes, which show where the torso should be pierced to add new parts, are printed on the page, and it\u2019s up to us to pierce them and put the doll together. It\u2019s also up to us (like Stevens, dressing up his busts as a London blood or a connoisseur) to decide what this girl should be\u2014how will she look, once she\u2019s assembled? What<\/em> will she be?<\/p>\n

Parts from wholes can be uncanny, then, as Dickens suggests, but there\u2019s nothing of this about the Dalziels\u2019 paper woman. She seems, like Andersen\u2019s ballerina, to be a dancer\u2014her well-moulded leg at left looks ready to kick, her arm looks ready to wave its fan, and her Bardot neckline also hints that she might become (once assembled) a dancing girl. The Jumping Jack is a toy that\u2019s well suited to representing dance, not just because it can actually be made to move, but because the quality of that movement combines the organic with the mechanical, the carefully practiced with the seemingly spontaneous\u2014just like skilled dance.<\/p>\n

And, what\u2019s more, this doll and her constituent parts give us a way to think about the Dalziel albums that are explored in \u2018Woodpeckings\u2019. The albums provide lots of larger publications, cut up into parts and reassembled in unexpected ways, much as this doll demands us to do. These albums, which are professional records, nonetheless retain an aesthetic of juxtaposition that might be traced through other \u2018scissorized\u2019 productions in the nineteenth century; they hint at the scrapbook or the parlour album. And in these albums, as in the scrapbook tout court, <\/em>the parts seem just as evocative as the whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heads, Shoulders and Whole Lengths, by Hannah Field, responds to the Dalziel image pictured below, an illustration for \u2018To make dancing dolls\u2019 from Laura Valentine’s The Home Book of Pleasure and Instruction, published in 1867 (see image 11 of Design in our exhibition). This piece\u00a0was developed out of panel talks on the Dalziel Archive\u00a0at the… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3133,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions\/3133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}