Toys that are too good for children and only for the rich

‘Prayer books are the toys of age,’ wrote Pope. Maybe so. But it’s surprising how many old people â” grown-ups â” like children’s toys as well. This Christmas West End shops have stocked up with expensive toys to attract the Russian new rich, what is called the Fabergé Trade. It was always thus. In the New York Metropolitan Museum there is a beautiful dog, carved from ivory, shown running and with a bouncy strip underneath it so it can be made to move â” a mechanical toy in short â” which dates from the Egyptian 18th Dynasty (1554-1305 bc). This was the time of Rameses II, richest or most spendthrift of the pharaohs, and of Queen Nefertiti, wife of Amenhotep IV, who changed himself into Akhenaten and founded a new religion. Nefertiti, a beautiful creature whose painted limestone bust (minus an eye) is the pride of the Berlin Museum, had six daughters by old Akky, and maybe the dog was carved for one of them. But my guess is that she had it made for herself.

Equally, when Marie de’ Medici, regent of France, had 300 beautiful and elaborate silver infantrymen made for her little son, Louis XIII, did anyone seriously expect he would be allowed to play with them? No; they were for her own Florentine-style delight. An obsession with miniature-scale objects is a well-known characteristic of a certain type of acquisitive adult, especially female. The outstanding example is the late Queen Mary. She drooled at the mouth when she saw tiny precious objects â” minute Chippendale chairs in walnut and mother-of-pearl, silver-and-gold tea sets, tortoiseshell carriages with gilt fittings an inch high, and Venetian glassware for privileged dolls. In the early 1920s Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Marie Louise, to suck up to her old poker-back, asked Sir Edwin Lutyens to design her ‘the finest doll’s house ever conceived’, so that Queen Mary could have fun furnishing and playing with it.