Nostalgic panoramas of childhood: Toy objects in Ireland, 1851-1909

In the wake of the Great Exhibition of London in 1851, Irish adults increasingly created mythical and nostalgic panoramas of childhood in idealized forms through the production and procurement of material-semiotic toy objects that offered potentiality (Ruckenstein 2010). Reformed festivals, most notably Christmas, permitted adults and children to live these ideals; to unlock the doors of fantasy. “Exotic objects” filtered into shop windows, homes, and schools, and were increasingly represented through media discourse. Overlapping and complex personal desires and ideals of manufacturers, advertisers, pedagogues, and consumers, to which nostalgia is a response, were crystallized by toy artifacts that underpinned everyday cultural systems, human behaviors and relationships (Baudrillard 2005, 2). Childhood became seductive and powerful, bearing “the heavy burden of providing a source of identification and rootedness for adults” (Steedman 1995). This paper will uncover and map sites of childhood nostalgia (real and imaginary) in Ireland from 1851 to 1909 via critical discourse analysis, in Foucault’s sense, of toy discourses (Foucault 1981).