The Queen's Doll's House

On the freaky model world of the Dollomites; plus—more lucid dreaming and a roundup of recent favorites.

The Queen’s Doll’s House, 1924.

Last weekend I hit the holy grail of estate sales: a former electrical engineer and computer fanatic with hoarder tendencies had passed, leaving an attic full of meticulously-organized back issues of IEEE Spectrum and MacWorld, wall-sized ASCII art printouts, three-ring binders full of satellite data, ancient Radio Shack manuals, books on electronic spycraft, computer simulations, and systems thinking.

I made multiple trips, hauling home dusty computer magazines and aerospace convention newsletters that will likely populate my own future estate sale. I guess I have light hoarder tendencies myself, but what can I say? Every home is an archive.

And anyway—you never know what you’ll find. On impulse, I also grabbed a ‘70s coffee table book about dollhouse collecting (regular readers know I have a weakness for plays of scale). Paging through it on a Sunday afternoon, I fell into a lost world; the book turned out to be a serious history of “the hobby” as well as an index of its leading practitioners. In 1976, it seems, miniature-making was still a cottage industry, anchored by monomaniacal craftspeople—the kind who’d happily spend a month hand-carving a tiny Edwardian dresser—who did robust mail-order business advertising in hobbyist magazines like the Nutshell News. Delightful, obviously.

The Queen’s bedroom; 1/12th scale.

But not even the most gifted among them would have been good enough for The Queen’s Doll’s House. This eight foot-tall mansion, presented to Queen Mary of England “by her loyal subjects” in 1924, is almost certainly the most intricate dollhouse ever built. It has electricity, working elevators, and a basement livery full of royal limousines. Its silver taps run hot and cold water. The wine cellar contains real champagne, sherry, and kegs of beer. The paintings hanging throughout the house were produced by famous English painters of the day, and authors like Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, and Joseph Conrad each contributed tiny leather-bound, hand-written books to the dollhouse’s 200-volume library. Every major firm in England produced 1/12th-scale versions of their products for the occasion. The entire inventory of the dollhouse spans two large volumes.

One of these volumes, The Book of the Queen’s Doll’s House, contains a fascinatingly weird essay by the engineer Mervyn O’Gorman on the “effect of size” on the dollhouse’s world. It’s a known bugbear in miniature-making that certain materials don’t perform well at scale: an inch-wide cotton coverlet sits on the dollhouse bed like a piece of cardboard, for example. But Mr. O’Gorman must have been the first writer to seriously consider the physics of the miniature. According to his calculations, the little people living in the dollhouse—he called them “Dollomites”—would have the strength of ten men. They’d eat six meals a day, leap staircases in a single bound, and have hearts like hummingbirds. Their voices would be inaudible to us; the gramophone and working pianos in their house would cause more pain than pleasure to their tiny ears. To the Dollomites, the paint on the walls would be a half-inch thick, and a single drop of water from the tap the size of a pear. Every glass of wine would be so viscous they’d have to suck it down. And forget about soup. “Cream or thick soup,” O’Gorman warned, “would be so sticky that the soup spoon would be found to lift the plate with it from the table.”

Illustration from The Book of the Queen’s Doll’s House, by A.C. Benson and Sir Lawrence Weaver, 1924.

Of course, I find all this wonderful—I love it when someone takes an absurd premise seriously. But there’s something about this attempt in particular that I think gets at the fundamental appeal of miniatures, that is, the impossibility of ever inhabiting them. In attempting a rational scientific study of the Queen’s dollhouse, O’Gorman accidentally created something utterly monstrous: a dollhouse world populated by whispering, ravenous, cream-sucking, super-strong freaks. It’s unholy, and that’s because dollhouses are not made to be lived in; they’re barely fun to play with. Dollhouses are for looking. As the poet Susan Stewart observes, dollhouses are “consumed by the eye.” They’re shadowboxes of simulated order, a way of distilling the complexity of life—in this case, an empire—into a complete whole that can be enjoyed at a glance. The most famous dollhouses, writes Stewart, were “meant to stop time and thus present the illusion of a perfectly complete and hermetic world.”

Of course, it’s hopeless; everything changes, everything moves. A dollhouse only gives the illusion of possessing that which we can never truly inhabit. But the empire reels in pain. History marches on. From birth to death every cell in our bodies sloughs off into an undifferentiated world. Every home becomes an estate sale. Rot and repeat.

A few weeks ago the writer Theresia Enzensberger and I held a public conversation at the Goethe-Institut in Los Angeles; as someone who tends to daisy-chain from one fixation to another, I rarely have the opportunity to talk about my work as a whole. At one point I was struggling to connect the dots and our moderator, the science fiction scholar Sherryl Vint, made the very astute observation that what seems to capture my interest is the gap between models and reality. I felt deeply seen by that. It’s true!

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In other news, Noema magazine just published a new long-form piece from me.

Illustration for "Living in a Lucid Dream” by Brindha Kumar for Noema Magazine.

Readers of this Substack will quickly recognize in it the months-long obsession with lucid dreaming that played out, in part, in these pages. In the Noema piece, I talk to two philosophers and a cognitive scientist; we get into animal dreams, the seams of reality, and ancient traditions of temple dream incubation. As ever I am grateful to find outlets that will give me space to go long on my utterly noncommercial ideas.

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Speaking of noncommercial ideas: the original Bumper Stickers for Your Phone, Volumes I and II are now available as a bundle. To quote Jason Kottke, “lol, tiny bumper stickers for your phone.”

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Finally, a few things I’ve really enjoyed, recently:

• Zoë Schlanger’s new book, The Light Eaters, a survey of new research in plant behavior and intelligence, had me apologizing to my tomatoes.

• This 2019 talk from the designer Jen Hadley about the history of type design for television broadcast made me think about the persistent and often hidden materiality of technology. Did you know that scrolling credit sequences were once printed on literal scrolls of paper?

• I can’t get enough of the Studs Terkel Archive Podcast, an unofficial feed of interviews conducted by the legendary oral historian Studs Terkel on his four-decade-spanning Chicago radio show. Two of my favorite episodes: Studs talks to Quentin Crisp, in London, about being out in England before the War, and to James Baldwin, right after the publication of Another Country, in 1962. Baldwin ends his interview with a fragment of a poem by Marianne Moore, which I’ll leave you with now:

The weak overcomes its

menace, the strong over-

comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap

went through that little thread

to make the cherry red!

xo

Claire