Imagining Other Childhoods: Dolls and the Museum of Childhood as an Imperial Space

Abstract

This article considers how museums of childhood in Britain were imagined as racialized spaces, designed to simultaneously project both a notion of universal childhood and of racial hierarchies. The legacies of this work matter for efforts today to decolonize museums. The case study is the ethnographic doll collections of Edward Lovett (1852–1933), an amateur folklorist best known for his collection of home-made dolls. The ways in which these dolls were collected, described, cataloged, and displayed reveals the racialized assumptions of British imperialism in the early 20th century, including the infantilization of other cultures and the widely held belief in evolutionary biology. These doll collections are still displayed for children, and this article considers how contemporary museums negotiate the conflicting impetuses to decolonize museums, to teach today’s young people about the prejudices of their ancestors, and to engage with the widely accepted idea that all childhoods are defined by play.