Andrea Immel

Some children are lucky enough to know an adult with the skills to make them special toys and games. Sometimes those objects survive against the odds are offered to lucky curators. This little set of Schwarzer Peter cards (a Continental variation on Old Maid) is just one such find. It has twenty-seven instead of the usual fifty-two cards, but it seems to be complete because it fits perfectly in the blue box. The lid has an illustrated title label in German that reads in English: “This game of Black Peter was painted for her dear friends Ernst and Anneliese Grossenbacher in St. Gall.” It is signed Gertrud Lendorff, who just might be the Swiss art historian from Basel (1900-1981).

The cards cannot be earlier than the 1930s: one of the pair with the Union Jack in the upper left hand corners shows “Margaret Rose aus England.” Margaret Rose, a little girl in a blue coat and hat with a green scarf, must be the late Princess Margaret (1930-2002), Queen Elizabeth II’s sister.

A famous character from children’s books also makes an appearance here: Beatrix Potter’s Hunca Munca from The Tale of Two Bad Mice, identified only as “nach einem Englischen Kinderbuch,” that is, “from an English children’s book.” It’s amusing that the illustrations of Hunca Munca were redrawn from ones where this bad little mouse was behaving well relatively well. My guess is that little Grossenbachers for whom Lendorff made the cards might have been reading The Tale of Two Bad Mice in German translation. But perhaps Lendorff was introducing them to a childhood favorite of her own. The cards don’t provide any clues about the circumstances in which they were made or how they were received, but they are testimony to Potter’s appeal outside her homeland.

Most of the cards illustrate toys made of porcelain, clay, celluloid, and wood, such as Hansli and the matryoshka doll Tatyiana and her five daughters below.

One thing we find unacceptable today is Lendorff’s inclusion of toys that perpetuate offensive stereotypes. The title label depicts a black baby doll and Lendorff’s model might have been a Heubach bisque character doll. She redrew the same doll on the card with the caption “Der Schwarze Peterli! Nicht der Schwarze Peter!” [The little Black Peter! Not the Black Peter!]. It is an opprobrious caricature with unnaturally bright red lips. But unlike some Heubach black baby dolls, it wears what looks like a knitted onesie instead of some spurious form of “native dress.”

The “Schwarzer Peter”—that is, “Black Peter”–mentioned on the title label is the name that the Old Maid card goes by in German, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, and Finnish. The card with Black Peter is the hot potato that all the players try to get rid of as quickly as possible so it won’t be in their hands at the end of the game. In this particular set, the Black Peter is depicted offensively as a black rag doll (possibly inspired by Florence Upton’s famous character, the Golliwog) instead of the more usual chimney sweep.

The Black Peter card in the manuscript Schwarzer Peter deck. Dieses spiel vom schwarzen Peter malte für ihre lieben St. Galler Freunde Ernst u. Anneliese Grossenbacher. [Switzerland?, [not before 1930?] (Cotsen)

In spite of the unpleasant images, this card set is a fascinating addition to Cotsen’s collection of manuscripts made for children over the last three hundred years..

See more Beatrix Potter at the Cotsen virtual exhibitions page

In the 1680s antiquarian John Aubrey was the first Englishman to mention the observance of April Fool’s Day. He stated that it was celebrated all over Germany, but folklorists assume that the holiday was imported from France, where seems to have been well-established by the 1650s. They also speculate that this mock-holiday arose to fill the gap as the tradition of sanctioning all kinds of misrule during the Christmas holiday season waned (think the cruel jokes perpetrated on Shakespeare’s Malvolio during Twelfth Night). In comparison, April Fool’s was a more civilized occasion for mischief-making, being confined to one day and the only kind of horseplay authorized was to trick others into making public spectacles of themselves.

In the eighteenth-century England, perpetrating hoaxes upon the unwary was ubiquitous on April 1, if we can believe contemporary writers. Age and class came into play because children were allowed to try and deceive adults and members of a higher class could impose on those of a lower class. Making an April fool of someone was not below the likes of Jonathan Swift, who in 1713 sat up late with some friends cooking up a prank. A favorite ploy was to convince someone to go on a “sleeveless errand” (aka a wild goose chase) for things that didn’t exist, like pigeon’s milk or the biography of Eve’s mother. .

The first description of an April Fool’s sleeveless errand was described in a notice in the April 2^nd 1698 issue of Dawk’s News-Letter: “Several persons were sent to the Tower Ditch [ the moat around the Tower] to see the Lions washed.” One of the city’s great tourist destinations, visitors since the reign of Elizabeth I went the royal menagerie to gawk at caged lions, tigers, bears, elephants, etc. The lions were kept in the barbican called the Bulwark, which eventually was renamed the Lion Tower. The fast-talking trickster would try to persuade a gullible victim that every year on April 1 the lions were taken down to the moat for a bath. All someone had to do to enjoy the spectacle was enter by the White Gate. Of course, there was no such gate or any wet lions… In the nineteenth century, the merry sometimes distributed fake admission tickets and one is shown above.

In honor of the day, here are two accounts of washing the lions from two eighteenth-century children’s books, which may be unknown in the literature on the holiday. Cotsen has copies of both, but to give readers an idea of the look-and-feel of children’s books during the period, the facsimiles are reproduced from the British Library copies on Eighteenth-Century Collections On-Line. The first account comes from the last chapter of Travels of Tom Thumb Over England and Wales (1746), where the intrepid little narrator confesses to being taken in by the story about the lions’ annual grooming ritual. He also mentions that the most common visitors to the Tower lions are pregnant women, who wanted to know the sex of their babies!

The second, longer description of washing the Tower lions comes from chapter 8 of Richard Johnson’s The Picture Exhibition (1783). The narrator is a school boy, describing a picture he drew of an April Fool’s prank in progress. He clearly disapproves of the incident and there is something unpleasant about the watermen’s gratuitous cruelty towards the poor country bumpkin. While the tone of the narrator’s lecture about appropriate behaviour is too prosy for modern tastes, he was expressing quite enlightened views at a time when blood sports were tolerated and jokes based on highly offensive gender and class stereotypes perfectly acceptable.