CHILDHOOD WITHOUT TOYS.
14 R. KNOWLES has done the benevolent public a service.
He has hit upon an object for charity such as they are always seeking, one to which they can give much or little, as they please, with a perfect certainty that whether they give much or little they are sure to be doing direct and appreciable good. There are six thousand children in the great pauper schools of London, who are not responsible for their own pauperism, whose unhappiness in no way benefits the community—as a great many people think the unhappiness of adult paupers does—and who possess no adequate supply of toys. The Guardians give them a few—contrary to the law—the visitors sometimes send them a few, and the matrons in many cases make efforts to collect a few ; but the supply is wholly insufficient, and just now has from some accidental cause run unusually short. " We are now virtually destitute of toys," writes the head of one school, with 1,600 children in it, "even for our infirmary cases." We "have scarcely any toys, except a few left from those you kindly sent us some time ago," says another, with 600 little ones to take care of ; and all profess the greatest willingness to accept and distribute toys, a willingness we can easily believe, as a hundred children with their fingers in their mouths must be a handful to keep in order. Mr. Knowles, therefore, asks for money for toys, which may be sent to Messrs. Roberts, Lubbock, and Co., Lombard Street ; or for gifts of toys, old or new, which may be sent to Miss Townshend, 7 Great College Street, Westminster. • We heartily hope Mr. Knowles will get as many toys or as much money as he wants for his poor prote.ge's, and have very little doubt he will. The misery or possible misery of a pauper child in London out of school-hours, with no one to pet him, nothing to do, and no green fields to run about in, is of a kind which the English pater- familias can understand and sympathise with to the full, —and thank God ! there are heaps of people who are posi- tively the happier for an excuse for giving, if only they can be sure that in giving they are not doing mischief, a doubt which spreads so fast that it will before long affect all the chari- ties in the country. They need not be perplexed in this case, for children necessarily herded together in crowded rooms, insufficiently watched, and made bitter by want of outlet for their spare energies — you cannot let children even jump by hundreds—must be the better as well as the happier for innocent amusement, or indeed for anything which arrests their permanent tendencies towards savage little bickerings or apathetic sullenness, and we have no scruple in violating what is otherwise a very fixed rule with us for their sake. Let those who have toys send them to Westminster; there is use for tons, as there is use also for hundreds of pounds. Only we do wish Mr. Knowles, and still more the writers who support Mr. Knowles, would not spoil their kindliness for sensible people by couching their appeals in terms of such sickly sentimentality. The possession of a toy is not, as Mr. Knowles says it is, " the brightest gleam of the brightest season of life ;" nor is a " childhood without toys "a "youth without joy,', as another man writes, nor is there any essential or mystical con- nection between childhood and toys, as everybody seems to assume. The childhood of a pauper bap. school is not hisbrightest time, but a very chilly, darksome, tedious, much put-upon time, which, when he is a sailor, or a labourer, or an artisan, he would not go through again for the world ; and childhood is not youth, or like it in any way whatever, the special impulses of the two periods being radically and permanently different, till the distance between a child and a youth or a little girl and a big one is frequently greater than the difference between a child and a man or woman. Nor do the children want toys be- cause toys have an inherent relation to children, or because, as one man writes, dolls are darlings, or because children are natu- rally joyous. Children are not all joyous, any more than their parents, though their facile movements and impulsiveness give that impression ; and their desire for toys is, we believe, in the main very human indeed, being simply the desire to get rid of ennui in amusing occupation. " Grown-ups" suffer somewhat from total inaction, but they have memories and thoughts and cares, and so can get through a vacant hour or other space of unoccupied time without grievous dis- tress, though, be it observed, they complain savagely of being " kept waiting,"—that is, in idleness, whether at home or at a railway-station ; but children, being without internal resources, suffer dreadfully. They want something to do which, if it does nothing else, shall give direction to their instinctive desire of movement. We shall bring down a shower of letters by saying so, but an active child with nothing to do and no companions to play with will become positively ill with ennui, and lie perfectly sick with a sickness which any distraction will dissipate almost in a moment. The headache is forgotten when the companion ap- pears, and the pale face grows rosy as the box of bricks, the best toy perhaps ever invented for sedentary children, is undone. The real good of toys to children is the semblance of occupation they afford, occupation which does not tire, but does keep them in movement. This is true even of dolls, which of all toys afford least occupation to children too poor to dress them, but which enable the child to play little dramas which divert its mind, and give it in some feeble way the sense of petting and petted companionship, which to children, as to little dogs, is always the first object of desire. We believe that the toys which do most to interest children are always those which give them something to do, and do not produce that sense of weariness which elaborate toys yielding nothing but a momentary pleasure to the eye constantly excite. This some- thing to do includes, of course, the toys which, like dolls and little horses, help the child to make-believe very much, for making-believe, that early and concrete form of day-dreaming, is in itself an occupation, and a happy one. This is the reason why children in the country, where there is always plenty to do, grow so indifferent to toys, and long for tools and play- things which induce them to run about ; and the reason, too, why materials for making toys, peep-shows, and the like are so much more valued than the toys themselves. Once occupied, children care very little about toys, and grow often capriciously dis- dainful of them,—a mood generally follolived by a destructive- curiosity as to how they are made. A good deal of pity is often wasted upon street children for their want of toys, whereas they always find something to do, if it be only making dirt-pies—the exact amusement which enchants better-dressed children by the sea-shore, where they call dirt-pies " sand- castles "—and are comparatively happy, as happy as the- labourer's children who, in the open air, with plenty of childish things to do, do not suffer half as much as children in poor schools. It is children forced by circumstances to be sedentary- or solitary who need toys most, and the toys they most need are those which give them any kind of occupation, a point in which modern toys strike us as defective. They are very ingenious, many of them, but not half as amusing as whipping-tops, marbles, bricks, knucklebones—an endless amusement for boys, which seems to have become disused—or we would add, if we were not certain of grave remonstrance from people whose motives we respect, small packs of cards. We do not mean to decry elaborate toys. Toys: like the magic mouse, of which the Daily News writes, which mite the sense of surprise and comicality, amuse children as much as their elders—and we have the highest respect for Mr. Novra's re- pertoire of puzzle-toys, and toys for juggling—but still, these are- drawing-room toys, note the toys for every-day life in the nursery. There the toys that are useful are those that cause effort, effort and movement, and fill up the time which would otherwise be lost in a weary and tearful hunt after the occupation which, children need and sigh for even more than the " grown-ups." A thousand marbles, costing hardly anything, will do more to- sweeten the tempers and quiet the vagaries of a schoolful of pauper children than any amount of supervision, or we may add, than any amount of the bits of lath and coloured paper so often- considered the fittest " toys " for the very poor. The most• difficult case of all to provide for is, of course, the infirmary. Here movement is not the thing required, and noise must be steadily prohibited, and toys which chiefly amuse the eye are- therefore indispensable. Even here, however, it is the sense of tedium which has to be relieved rather than the sense of joyous- ness which has to be gratified, and pictures and picture-books give the nearest practicable approach to pleasurable occupation, a much nearer one than the infinite majority of the so-called toys. for the sick-room.
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