Sometimes England is so weird.
Like the time the whole place was devastated and dejected and injured and dead in the wake of World War I, and Princess Marie-Louise thought building a huge dollhouse for Queen Mary filled with tiny British merchandise would boost the nation's morale and give a kick to the economy, and so Edwin Lutyens and thousands of craftspeople spent three years making a dollhouse for the Queen, who was married to King George V, who only in 1917, in the middle of the Great War that had caused this depression and destruction, decided maybe it would be best if the royal family dropped their German name, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and go with, oh, I don't know, what's the name of this castle we're living in during the war, let's just go with that. Windsor.
Anyway, Queen Mary's Dolls House is still on view at Windsor Castle, where Queen Mary and her son George VI and his family camped out during their country's second major war with their homeland.
Queen Mary's Dolls House [wikipedia]
image via The Worker's Dollhouse I, Carl Douglas's interesting 2009 post about dollhouses as embodiments of the Benjaminian division between private home and workplace [diffusive.wordpress.com]
