UGLY TOYS

Shannon News, 12 March 1929, Page 4

UGLY TOYS

CultOfßizarre A NURSERY PROTEST A writer in the London “Daily Telegraph” makes a protest against some of the toys provided nowadays for children, and .uses the expressions ‘ • Mentally Defective Dolls ’ ’ and ‘ ‘ Vulgar Toys.’’ She continues thus: “The president of the Royal Academy is concerned about our children. We have managed things so badly that tbeir little tastes are debauched and corrupted in early youth. Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it Being accustomed from their tenderest years to distortions and discords they grow up hardened or perverted, and the hideous Joes not shock them as it should. I a.n with the president. I don’t think children, are having a fair chance. lam not to be persuaded that it is good for the infant mind to keep company with a great many o£ the grotesque and burlesque objects which are now fashionable in nurseries. These are things whie halarm the president, and he sighs for some power to prohibit them. # , “In my own small experience 1 find that lots of people are _ incapable of understanding this objection. The grosser the caricature of humanity a doll is, the • more hideously deformed the representation of an animal, the funnier they think it is. If the burlesque doll has something of a leer, or the grotesque animal a suggestion of a disgusting human ugliness, they like it all the better. People like me and the president of the Royal Academy, who are not amused, who are actually annoyed, seem to them preposterous creatures who can’t see a-joke or who have a maudlin, sentimental turn of mind. They will tell you that the modern child likes the grotesque infinitely better than the pretty-pretty; in tact, asks for ugliness and SGGB that hG gets it. This seems to -be one of controversial mixtures of truth and nonsense which require analysing rather than refutation. Perhaps it would be well to recognise that the grotesque has its place and always has had a place in childhood. The old wooden horses, for example, the old Dutch dolls, were loved for their absurdity, But they were always funny without being vulthey are offensive is the real force of the charge against the ugly dolls and toys of these times. Ido not object to them because they are unnatural—l do not complain that they are funny—these pathological modern animals, these mentally defective dolls are matter not for laughter, but for tears. What troubles me is their vulgarity, by which 1 mean- their appeal to the baser side of human nature, those impulses which would have us laugh at dwarfs or cripples, or infirmity, and enjoy the degradation of people and animals. I don’t think myself that children are being damaged in such large' numbers, or so seriously as the president suggests. You have certainly observed a large reserve of sanity in human nature which enables children to grow up tolerably rational, however silly their parents. The root of some such miracle as the president longs for the hideous toys were forbidden, children would still be subject to the influence of hideous homes. The only remedy in which I have any faith is individual ridicule.”