Another myth about the Victorians: the Frozen Charlotte doll

The Victorians didn't cover piano legs out of prudishness: that was a joke they told at the expense of straitlaced Americans.

They didn't pose their dead relatives in family photographs and there was no such thing as Brown Windsor soup.

I've just come across another example of spurious 19th-century history: the Frozen Charlotte doll.

Bonnie Taylor-Blake sets out the myth:

Innumerable websites, newspaper articles, magazines, and scholarly pieces tell us that 19th-century American parents gave their children small, rigid, pale-white porcelain dolls named after Charlotte, a vain young woman who rejected her mother’s advice to dress more warmly and who consequently froze to death in an open sleigh on her way to a ball. 

Further, the theme holds that Victorian children recognized the symbolism inherent in these small, corpse-like dolls and used them as playthings, sometimes even placing them in tiny coffins. 

In fact, we’re told that the motif of this particular frozen woman was so pervasive in the 19th century that our counterparts named a dessert after her and baked representations of her into cakes.

And then she demolishes it:

Today we accept these claims because this bizarre narrative fits with our perception of Victorians as moralising and obsessed by death. 

But this specifically modern belief falls apart when it becomes apparent that no one has provided contemporaneous evidence that Victorian parents and children viewed small china dolls as the fabled Charlotte. 

And a survey of American newspapers, magazines, and books of the period fails to find 19th- and early 20th-century mentions of dolls named 'Frozen Charlottes.'

She goes on to speculate on how this false history came about:

Once doll collectors in the mid-20th-century connected the stiff, pale-white female figurine of the 1850s with the 19th-century legend and ballad and casually introduced the consequent nickname to the public, we invented complex death-inspired histories for the doll, the adults who purchased her, and the children who played with her. 

In the end, while there is no real harm in referring to a penny doll as a Frozen Charlotte, we should at least be clear about the doll’s original place in American popular culture: for Victorians these were inexpensive, accessible playthings, easily lost and easily replaced, and not much more.

If you are interested in the theory that the Victorians were much less Victorian than we imagine, I recommend Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians.