Natural speed, please. Try to pronounce properly and avoid noise in the background.
Dolls have always fascinated me, and that's why, five years ago, I was delighted to be offered the job of running a doll museum.
Dolls have existed for thousands of years, and the earliest dolls we know about were found in graves in ancient Egypt. I only wish we could get one or two for our museum, but we haven't unfortunately got anything as old as that in the museum.
All the same, we have got examples from Europe from the twelfth century, but my favourite early dolls are actually from the seventeenth century. They interest me not just because they are early, or fairly early, but also because of the clothes they're wearing. They have their original clothes, and from them we know what the owners wore, since dolls in those days were always dressed like their owners. They were made of the only material readily available for things like this at the time: solid wood, and they were painted in great detail. In fact, on the best examples, like the ones in the museum, the detail includes the seventeenth-century make-up.
Dolls like these were very expensive then, and only the very rich could afford them. These days, they're popular with collectors and if you want one today, you have to pay anything up to ten thousand pounds for a doll in perfect condition from this time!
By the way, what makes them so valuable is that, as far as a collector is concerned, a doll is only worth collecting if it is in perfect condition, and that means having the original clothes.
Doll collecting has become very fashionable since the museum opened, with people interested in dolls from every period, including later dolls. There's great interest in nineteenth-century examples, when dolls were no longer made of wood, but began to have soft bodies and real hair. They were very delicate and few have survived, meaning such a doll would be worth about two thousand pounds, perhaps a bit more. Later, in the nineteenth century, you could often take off the doll's hair. If you can, you can often see the maker's name underneath, and of course the right one increases a doll's value.
There was a really big change in dolls at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the museum we have one of the earliest examples, from about 1909, of a doll that's a model of a baby. Previously all dolls, the earlier ones, were little adults. That's just one of the changes that have ocurred in the last hundred years.
Another, again, is to do with what dolls are made of. Although dolls with soft bodies continued, after about 1930, plastic began to be used. In fact, dolls from the 1930s and 40s are now very popular with collectors, some of them selling for very, very high prices.
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