Optical toys
____ [A pair of handmade Victorian optical shades.] 1870s.

Handmade Victorian folding optical toy for illumination in lampshade form with scalloped edge fully lined with translucent parchment {height 21.5cm, diameter 44cm, composed of 6 pink gloss card segments each adorned with a detailed original pen-and ink-drawing in sepia featuring a different scene reproduced from Clara de Chatelain’s “Pussy’s Road to Ruin, or Do as You are Bid”, depicting anthropomorphic cats at a spinning wheel, pouncing on a mouse, stealing a string of sausages, and getting up to other mischief; in very good and sound condition with some inevitable crinkling to the parchment and light soiling to the frame.

Sold together with:

An additional handmade, and folding, Victorian optical object, again in lampshade form, fashioned from elaborately pierced pink card skilfully backed with pink tissue paper, height 22cm and diameter 47cm, expertly sewn along the joins with red thread.

This pair of unusual bibelots protected, and housed together, between contemporary handmade pear-shaped covers made from wire-framed red velvet, each with a metal handle, or stalk, both decorated with fine tracery of vine leaves and grapes in white, with the upper cover also hand-worked in seed beads and faux pearls.

The images inked to the parchment of the first shade are after those by Clara de Chatelain, which were published in Pussy’s Road to Ruin, or, Do as You are Bid, printed in Leipzig by W. Engelmann and in London by A. & S. Joseph Myers. This work, which is scarce, appeared in second edition in 1840.

‘Pussy’s Road to Ruin’ is not a comic story but a cautionary moral tale for children underlying the need for obedience and the dangers of associating with disreputable peers.

When the tale opens the principal character, Pussy, is a well brought up kitten living with her mother Dame Tabby in the household of a fruiterer. She is taught to catch mice and to behave prettily as all kittens should but is accosted one day by a stranger named Grimalkin. He is an older ‘man of the world’ who may have lived the rough life of a sailor and he leads her into a life of crime by teaching her to kill birds and chickens and inciting her to steal food from her master’s table and larder. To prove her independence Pussy decides to kill the family canary, expecting it to be a delicate morsel, but her master catches her in the act and confines her to a cellar where she must eat mice or starve.

The book was popularly transformed into the medium of 12 lantern slides in the 1850s and ’60s. There was, therefore, a precedent for viewing the work in optical toy form.