Baby house, dolls' house

This baby house was originally owned by Lady Anne Blackett, wife of Sir Edward the 4th Baronet. The Blackett family owed their fortune to coal and lead mining interests in Northumberland and County Durham.

Edward may have given his wife this dolls' house as a gift to celebrate the birth of their son William and daughter Mary in 1758. The couple were married in 1751 and lived at Matfen Hall, Anne's family home in Northumberland. They had two other children, twins also named Edward and Anne, who were born in 1752. The Blacketts were a landowning provincial gentry family, but also had links with London through Edward's involvement in commerce and politics. Edward served as MP for Northumberland between 1768 and 1774. The family frequently travelled south to their second home in Thorpe Lea, Surrey.

'Baby houses' as they were known in this period, were commissioned by wealthy families as social status symbols. They were often made as miniature replicas of real houses or featured elements of them. Baby houses were made for adults to display in drawing rooms rather than for children to play with in nurseries. Dolls' houses as toys were an advent of the late eighteenth century, although Anne's great-granddaughter Evelyn later recalled that even in her time, the Blackett children were not allowed to play with the dolls' house. In Anne's era parents would sometimes use these miniature houses to prepare their children for domestic life. She may have used it to educate her daughters in how to run a large country household.

The Blacketts' baby house is not based directly on Matfen Hall but provides an accurate picture of contemporary furnishings in a house belonging to a family of their social background. Elements of the façade do recall another Blackett family residence, Newby Hall at Ripon, Yorkshire. Aspects of the interiors also reflect the family's fashion-conscious tastes, which were no doubt encouraged by Edward's metropolitan connections. In the eighteenth century, London shops began to sell furniture and other accessories for dolls' houses. Some of the furnishings in this baby house are later additions, perhaps collected by Lady Anne or by her descendants. Others are more crudely made, presumably replacements for broken originals. Certain furnishings, such as the silverware in the dining room, are of disproportionate size to their surroundings adding a surreal quality to the interiors.

The house's pine façade is in the Palladian style and opens outwards to reveal silk curtains on the windows inside. These can be drawn using a cord. The basement and the attic rooms can be accessed through side doors. The dining room downstairs features hand painted walls depicting an Italian landscape with classical ruins. The drawing room and the bedroom on the first floor are covered by wallpaper patterned with a fashionable Chinese-style flower motif. In the drawing room a tea table and a screen can be seen. The screen is decorated with reproductions of playing cards illustrating Aesop's Fables. These are taken from a pack that was on sale in a toyshop in St Paul's Churchyard, London, at Christmas 1759. The kitchen downstairs features a working spit roasting mechanism over the hearth. The dolls in the basement doorway and the kitchen are dressed as servants; the one in the bedroom is perhaps supposed to be the lady of the house. The dolls' house was given to the London Museum by Ida Blackett in 1912.