Even when we are about buying for a child the pretty toy, one thing we always say—“And yet children love their ugly old toys best.” It is not true, however, that children love ugly toys; they like homely toys, toys that can be clasped very close; and though homely does mean ugly, in the American and the obsolete English languages (because we would hurt a word rather than our ugly fellow-creatures’ feelings), yet what children like in homeliness is precisely homeliness, something not too bright or good. Ugliness is dreadful to a child, especially at first sight. He may learn to love it in a dear parent or dear nurse, as the little boy evidently loves the bottle-nosed man in Ghirlandajo’s delightful picture, but ugliness in a stranger is, in the strict sense, frightful. We are imposing our own sense of humour on children (as usual), and in its most ignoble form, when we give them grotesque toys. And as for guys, whereby we invert the natural veneration of images, the Fifth of November is a date which—for the sake of Sylvia—we all dread.

🥀 When Sylvia was three, she wept and shuddered great part of a day, and some part of a night, because a guy had suddenly faced her on the pavement. Now she is four, she cons the difficult task of assuring herself “They are boys, they are only little boys.” You may watch through her delicate face the horrible misgiving, the resolute reply, succeeding each other in that innocent, faltering breast. She says little of her fear, but gently leads the talk that way; and, when she is told that the boy-guys have each received a penny, her dear effort is to establish a human relation with them in her thoughts. “Pennies for them to buy nice sweets,” she says to herself. There is the thing in common with her own beauty and tenderness and her little appetites: sweets, then boys—not devils.

🥀 But if we wrong our children by the grotesque we do so more commonly by the gift of the worthless toy, a thing that will not last. The doll is perhaps as significant as the statue, the gargoyle, the coin; it is generally worse than even the statue. The manufactured image of mankind given to our little girls to play with is not only ill-designed, but so fragile as to cause more weeping than joy. The doll of commerce is very heartlessly made so that she often goes to pieces on the very day of presentation. Her brief arm comes off first; it had been ineffectually glued on. Piecemeal she comes apart. She does not preserve such poor individuality as she had, long enough to get a name. She is never named, never grows old, never gets the love of habit, never ratifies the rapture of possession, never justifies the first kiss. A little time—at the best it is not long—is all that we of larger than doll’s growth have for that ratification and for that proof. Well, it is hardly moral that the child and the doll should kiss but for an hour.

🥀 Why, the personality of an honest doll ought to outlast her head—nay, several (resembling) heads. It was so with the dolls of an elder day and a simpler country. When one head was unfortunately walked upon, the old cook took the trunk and the pieces into the town, and matched the type of beauty—he was very grave and intent, without condescension, over the business. The face was renewed, but the name and the affection held on with a persistence that was almost worthy of party politics.

🥀 There have been charming toys in literature, but none much dearer to the reader of good will than the little horse which Esther Summerson gave to Peepy after one of his misfortunes—Esther, contemned by the readers who think to crush Dickens by one word, “Sentimentality” (albeit this is an emotion that would be good for the majority, and the majority includes those critics), and by another word, “Caricature” (caricature being nevertheless a most admirable art). Dickens, of all the greater masters of our national Letters, has the most perfect memory of childhood. Not by his strangely over-praised “little Nell” is this proved, nor by any but certain brief passages of Paul Dombey, but in his much less famous children, and in the little fists of these are toys.