Games & Toys

The Edwardian child's toys and games were still largely made in Germany, as had been the case for their Victorian predecessors. The UK led in the production of wax dolls; the French made the most luxurious dolls; and while the USA toy industry was developing strongly, it consumed most of what it produced. So at this point no other country could compete with German toy production for sheer value for money; even some of the less well-off families could sometimes afford to buy a toy for their children. The main items in the toy seller's stock continued to be dolls, clockwork toys, boats, puzzles, trains, dolls' houses, toy animals and rocking horses.

But there were toys which really did originate in this era. Among them is the racing-themed board game Minoru. This was produced by one of the leading manufacturers, John Jacques, and named after King Edward's racehorse which won the Derby for him in 1909. As with quite a number of board games, the main skill it teaches is that of gambling!

And Frank Hornby had patented his new metal construction and engineering toy 'Mechanics Made Easy' in 1901, changing its name to 'Meccano' in 1907. Read more about Meccano...

Perhaps most famous of all was the teddy bear. The first jointed soft toy bear was designed by Richard Steiff of the Steiff company of Germany in 1902 and shown at the Leipzig Toy Fair in Germany in March 1903. It was The Ideal Toy Company, the first company to make such bears in the USA, which came up with the name 'teddy bear'. Its founder, Morris Michtom, is said to have been inspired by a 1902 cartoon by Clifford Berryman, 'Drawing the Line in Mississippi', which showed President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt refusing to shoot a captive bear cub on a trip to Mississippi. Read more about teddy bears...

Much of the Edwardian child's experience of cutting-edge technology was to be in the field of film and photography. It was during this decade that visits to the cinema, 'electric palace' or picturedrome began to become a familiar treat. Short films and photographic illusions had been available at fairgrounds and music halls for some years, but the Edwardian era saw the rise of the purpose built cinema: the UK's first is said to have opened in Colne, in Lancashire in 1908. They showed silent films in black and white and the heyday of the great favourites such as the Keystone Cops and Charlie Chaplin were yet to come. Many of the films were of familiar subjects: traditional stories or scenes from everyday life. But there were also some more exciting titles around, such as George Méliès's film A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) of 1902, based on the writings of Jules Verne - and Mary Pickford was already a popular attraction. The fact that films were sometimes referred to as 'living pictures' indicates the kind of impact that they had on audiences. But  'going to the pictures' for Edwardian children was one of the many activities that divided the social classes: most middle and upper class parents, while conceding that film could be educational in theory, decidedly disapproved of the picture palaces and the types of person (and the other activities) one might find there.

Top of the wish list for most Edwardian children, although only a dream for many of them, was the personal camera - the Box Brownie was introduced by Kodak in 1900, and named after a quirky cartoon character by Palmer Cox. While using a Brownie was considerably simpler than building a plate camera, it was still not an easy process taking pictures and developing them yourself, as was then the custom, and few of us now would be happy about ten year olds handling dishes of chemicals like the hypo (sodium hypochlorite - a fixative) in the process. Edith Nesbit seems to be writing from recent experience, in The House of Arden (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1908) describing how young photographers operate, and it's certainly a far cry from using a digital camera today: they have to assemble four pie dishes (one each for developer, rinsing water, fixative, and rinsing water) and laboriously exclude all the daylight from the room.

'Dear reader, do you recall the agitating moment when you pass the film through the hypo-and hold it up to the light-and nothing happens? Do you remember the painful wonder whether you may have forgotten to set the shutter? Or whether you have got hold of an unexposed film by mistake? Your breath comes with difficulty, your fingers feel awkward, and the film is unnaturally slippery. You dip it into the hypo-bath again, and draw it through and through with the calmness of despair. "I don't believe it's coming out at all," you say. And then comes the glorious moment when you hold it up again to the red light, and murmur rapturously, "Ah! it is beginning to show!"'