Black History Month; Composition Topsy Doll

 Continuing our club's virtual meeting honoring Black History Month, member Michele Thelen shares this composition cutie. Michele says that the 12-inch tall doll is unmarked and is wearing her original outfit. Beginning in the 1910s, a number of American companies began producing dolls out of composition, a mixture of glue and sawdust. The dolls were lighter and not as fragile as their bisque and china counterparts (although not washable!). Composition dolls dominated the American doll market from the 1920s through the early 1950s, when hard plastic dolls began to appear. There were many American companies producing these dolls and unmarked dolls were often sold to jobbers and department stores to dress and sell under their name.

Often Black composition dolls had two or more inserted pigtails of yarn and were marketed as Topsy dolls. Topsy originated as a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the book, Topsy is a brutalized and neglected child. When first introduced, she is a Black enslaved girl about eight years of age, clad in a filthy ragged dress and carrying the scars on her back of multiple beatings, Topsy has never known love or kindness in her short life; she does not even know who her parents were. All she has experienced are harsh labor and beatings, berated as being wicked and lazy. Topsy is amoral, having learned how to lie and steal in order to survive. The slaveowner Augustine St. Clare cynically purchases Topsy as a gift for his sister, Ophelia, to "educate." Although Topsy is clearly intelligent and resilient, Ophelia harbors prejudice against Black people and has no empathy for the child, treating her with distaste. It is only when Augustine's daughter, Eva, learns that Topsy has never been loved and treats her with true compassion and kindness that Topsy is inspired to learn and improve. In the book, Topsy was a symbol of the degradation and brutality of slavery, which affected not only the enslaved, but tainted the rest of society as well.

So how do we get from this pitiful abused, beaten, and neglected child to the cheerful Topsy dolls? Uncle Tom's Cabin was extremely popular and, thanks in part to lax copyright laws, minstrel shows seized upon Stowe's characters, putting on what became known as "Tom Shows." The shows, typically only very loosely based on the book, stripped out much of Stowe's strong anti-slavery and religious sentiment (there were even pro-slavery versions), although they kept some of the melodramatic scenes, such as Eliza carrying her child as she struggles to cross the icy Ohio River and into freedom just ahead of the slave hunters. For the most part Black characters, typically performed by whites in blackface, were mocked as exaggerated stereotypes and used as comic relief, often breaking into song or dance. In these shows, Topsy became the mischievous mirthful "pickaninny" with a head full of pigtails. Sadly, most of the images the American public has of Uncle Tom's Cabin are drawn from these Tom Shows, working their way into popular culture (including Felix the Cat and Bugs Bunny cartoons some of us watched as children).