About The Loring-Dresel Family Paper Dollhouse
Making paper dollhouses was a popular pastime for women and children during the Victorian era. The Loring-Dresel Family Paper Dollhouse dates to 1876 and, as such, is an early example of the craft. The dollhouse features many of the common themes inherent to the genre: domestic settings, wallpaper samples, and paper dolls displayed in traditionally gendered settings.
Though the creator is unknown, the provenance states that it was created by a child of the family of Ellis Gray Loring. Loring (1803-1858) was a prominent Boston lawyer most noted for his work as an abolitionist who aided runaway slaves and co-founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society. In the 1960s, when the Paper Dollhouse was almost 100 years old, Ellis’s descendants donated the dollhouse to the Schlesinger Library where the Loring Family Papers Collection (1824 – 1925) is housed. In 1969 the Schlesinger Library donated the Paper Dollhouse to The Boston Children’s Museum, where it currently resides. Fifty years later, in 2019, the Museum collaborated with Simmons University on a digital preservation project that entailed creating a digitized copy of the album, item-level cataloguing, and appropriate metadata—thereby creating a digital preservation record, and, in turn, providing access to the Loring Dresel Family Paper Dollhouse.
“About the School of Library and Information Science.” Simmons University. Accessed November 18, 2019. https://www.simmons.edu/academics/colleges-schools-departments/schools-departments/slis/about.
“Boston Children's Museum.” Boston Children's Museum, Accessed November 11, 2019. https://www.bostonchildrensmuseum.org/.
“Ellis Gray Loring Family Papers, 1824-1925.” Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. Accessed November 10, 2019. https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/4955.
“Schlesinger Library.” Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Accessed November 11, 2019. https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library.