Penny Dolls (or penny babies) were small, cheap dolls produced for children and sold for one penny (Meissner, 1997; Cook, n.d.). They gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, shortly after the Civil War (Meissner, 1997). Measuring from one to four inches, they usually came as the ‘frozen Charlotte’ type.
‘Frozen Charlotte’ refers to a doll with ‘frozen’ limbs in a single position. The name stems from a nineteenth-century poem ‘A Corpse Going to a Ball’, by Elizabeth Oakes Smith. The poem talks about a girl who refused to wrap her coat around her ball gown to travel on an open sleigh, so by the time she arrived at the ball, she froze on the way (Meissner, 1997).
Usually, penny babies did not come dressed, so the children could dress them up in clothes made from all kinds of materials: fabric scraps, clothes, etc.