The Wonders of Queen Mary's Dolls' House
This week in the historic Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, Queen Camilla hosted a reception for authors, illustrators, and bookbinders who contributed 20 new books—each measuring only 1.8 inches—for the 28-inch-high library in Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. A marvel of miniaturization, artistry, craftsmanship, and technical prowess that continues to amaze everyone who sees it, Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House made its debut in April 1924 in the Palace of Arts at the British Empire Exhibition in London’s Wembley Stadium.
“Snapshot of contemporary literature in Britain”
One hundred years later, Queen Camilla applied her passion for books to imaginatively commemorate the Dolls’ House. She was inspired by the 170 miniature books that had been handwritten for the library by prominent early 20th Century authors including Thomas Hardy, James Barrie, A.A. Milne, Vita Sackville-West, and Rudyard Kipling, who created original drawings for some of his poetry. She commissioned new books as a 21st century “mirror” to the original books and a “snapshot of contemporary literature in Britain.”
The 20 authors wrote by hand in little blank booklets—bespoke tales, poems, and plays as well as excerpts from their work—that were delicately bound into volumes of leather or “alternative materials.” Camilla contributed her own tiny book, a slender 16-page handwritten Foreword to the collection, bound with leather stamped in gold leaf with her royal cypher. Among the new works are The Mantelpiece by Alan Bennett (whose amusing novella The Uncommon Reader imagined Queen Elizabeth II as an insatiable reader), Koyla’s Glove by Sir Tom Stoppard, and Richard, my Richard: a play, by Philippa Gregory. None of these new books will supplant any of the nearly 600 books in the Dolls’ House library. They will be on display in Windsor Castle separately from the Dolls’ House throughout 2024 and then will be kept together as a collection in the Castle’s Royal Library.
The Royal Collection Trust has a website for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, complete with photographs and video tours of rooms. But I have found a trove of rare photos that appeared several months before the 1924 Exhibition, along with fresh details about features of the Dolls’ House and perspectives on its masterminds: Queen Mary, the esteemed architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, and King George V’s cousin, Princess Marie-Louise—like George V a grandchild of Queen Victoria, and a friend of Queen Mary since childhood. The rooms today are essentially what they were in 1924, but objects have been added and moved, so it’s fascinating to have an unfiltered look at the original creation.
An insatiable collector of “miniature objets d’art”
The Royal Collection Trust likes to emphasize that the Dolls’ House was conceived as a tribute to Queen Mary’s “help to the nation during the First World War and the economic difficulties afterwards,” in the words of one curator. That idea may have come into play, but the fundamental impetus came from Princess Marie-Louise’s discovery that Queen Mary was an insatiable collector of “miniature objets d’art,” as the princess recounted in her autobiography, My Memories of Six Reigns.
The Queen had filled vitrines in Buckingham Palace and the monarch’s Norfolk residence, Sandringham House, with what her biographer James Pope-Hennessy described as “tiny golden tea-sets, minute chairs in mother-of-pearl, infinitesimal carriages in gilt and tortoise-shell.” The princess asked Lutyens, a good friend, to design a dolls’ house as a gift for Queen Mary. The Queen took an active role in the furnishings, décor, embellishment, and artwork in the house, which required three years to complete. She donated many objects from her personal collection, among them a miniature chest that had belonged to her mother, Mary, Duchess of Teck.
Standing five feet tall to the top of the parapet, the house is eight feet six inches long and five feet deep, with four floors as well as a basement. The scale throughout is one inch to a foot, and its architecture is Georgian. The house was meant to “enable future generations to see how a King and Queen of England lived in the twentieth century,” wrote Pope-Hennessy. In that sense, he added, it was a “microcosm of Queen Mary’s taste” and did not “reflect the taste of the age, since modern paintings and objects were as rigidly excluded from the doll’s house as they were from Windsor Castle itself.”
“The most marvelous contrivance in the palace”
It was a labor-intensive and ambitious enterprise, enlisting the skills of more than 1,500 prominent artists and craftsmen, as well as the leading manufacturers of the time: Hoover for the vacuum cleaner (a recent invention in the 1920s), Singer for a working sewing machine, and scale-model cars made by Rolls Royce, Daimler, Sunbeam and Vauxhall. To emphasize its modernity and the high quality of British workmanship, the house featured running water (with tanks beneath the house to collect wastewater) and electricity. There was even “a lift with external control…held by many to be the most marvelous contrivance in the palace,” according to The Illustrated London News. The four exterior walls could be mechanically raised to allow all the rooms to be perfectly seen. The wine cellar was stocked with more than 1,200 bottles of champagne, wines, spirits, and beers. The collection contained “43 varieties of actual vintages (one of 1872),” in “proper bottles, with tiny labels, corks, and sealing wax.” A final touch was the addition of “cobwebs from the smallest spiders.”
Luytens supervised the construction and furnishing of this miniature masterpiece in his large town house on Mansfield Street in London’s Marylebone neighborhood. Queen Mary periodically visited to keep track of progress. The selection of photos below shows some of what she saw, and her private diary entries and correspondence describe how she helped decorate and arrange the rooms…
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