Miss Charlotte Bronte meets Miss Barbara Pym: The Book Woman's Daughter

Miss Charlotte Bronte meets Miss Barbara Pym: The Book Woman's Daughter:   The Book Woman’s Daughter by Kim Michele Richardson   The Plantagenet Family I recently read this wonderful book for my AAUW book grou...

Christmas 2025; the State of the Doll Museum

 Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The solstice has come and gone, and it is truly winter.  I thought I would share some facts and thoughts about the Museum.

Sine we opened in 2019, we've had over 370 visitors and thousands if in kind donations.  On social media, we've had thousands more visit our social media on our Website American Doll and Toy Museum.org, Facebook pages, Instagram account ellen_tsagaris, Pinterest pages, ISSUU, tumblr, X or twitter, and Flickr. 

On our blogs, including this one, we've had well over 600,000 views since we began them in 2010.  On our old Google+ account we had over four million views.  That's a lot of interest in our museum of dolls and toys.

We are grateful for all our donors and supporters, including Rescued, QC Missing Persons, and  QC Discovery Shop.   

We are temporarily closed for renovations, including  large extension to be added behind our main building.  Thanks to all for your patience.

Peace in 2026, and stay tuned for our further adventures.

Recent additions from Santa

Gifts from a friend

From a friend

From a California collector, including show girl by Fiona

Two lovely French girls

Vintage angel

Vintage card, Merry Christmas

December Skyward by Dr. David Levy

 

 Skyward for December 2025

 

By

 

Doveed Levy.

 

As tho' a star, in inmost heaven set,
Ev'n while we gaze on it,
Should slowly round his orb, and slowly grow
To a full face, there like a sun remain
Fix'd--then as slowly fade again,
And draw itself to what it was before;
So full, so deep, so slow, …

As tho' a star, in inmost heaven set,
Ev'n while we gaze on it,
Should slowly round his orb, and slowly grow
To a full face, there like a sun remain
Fix'd--then as slowly fade again,
And draw itself to what it was before;
So full, so deep, so slow, …

 

Tennyson,--Eleanore, circa 1830.

 

            This Christmas article begins with an excerpt from Eleanore, one of the early poems written by Alfred Tennyson.  It is one of the finest pieces of verse I have ever encountered.  The poem tells a story about a youthful Eleanore, who falls in love.   But at a point in the fional third part of this poem, he turns his tale into a sermon about variable stars.  How could young Tennyson possibly know anything about stars that change in brightness?  The American Association of Variable Star Observers,  better known by its famous acronym AAVSO,  would not be founded for 81 years, in 1911. 

            Young Tennyson was almost certainly familiar with the work of   Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander, who today is accredited with launching the study of variable stars. It is probably that familiarity that led the young poet to insert his little lecture on variable stars.

            Some of Tennyson’s  early poetry, published in the early 1830s, was  reviewed in the Journal Quarterly Review:  It went badly:

            “We pass by two – what shall we call them? – tales, or odes, or sketches, entitled “Mariana in the South” and “Eleanore”, of which we fear we could make no intelligible extract, so curiously are they run together into one dreamy tissue – to a little novel in rhyme, called “The Miller’s Daughter”. Miller’s daughters, poor things, have been so generally betrayed by their sweethearts, that it is refreshing to find that Mr Tennyson has united himself to his miller’s daughter in lawful wedlock, and the poem is a history of his courtship and wedding.”

            Apparently Tennyson was sensitive to this sarcastic and negative criticism, and he was so affected and hurt by this review that he stopped publishing for almost a decade. His colleagues and friends feared that he had given up writing, and possibly his life, but, as he later told his son Hallam, he was busy revising his older poems, and “in silence, obscurity, and solitude he perfected his art.”

            I believe that the 1830s review was grossly unfair. It was mean.  I suspect that these reviewers were using poetry they didn’t like to demonstrate how brilliant they were. These reviewers are all long forgotten; I know of nobody who has not heard of Tennyson.  I know of many people, besides me, who are just as sensitive to criticism as he was.  (By the way, partly as a result of this ,I am not an objective reviewer.  I think that if someone has the guts to write for publication, she or he deserves every possible encouragement.)
          When I recited this extract to my friend Jean  Mueller, a well-known discoverer of  15 comets and 107 supernovae during the 29 years she worked at Palomar Observatory,  she noticed the variable star connection the minute I read it to her.  She agrees:  “Was there a specific variable star that he might have had in mind?” These lines teach their readers about variable stars, stars that change in brightness.   Such a star does “slowly grow/To a full face” (its maximum brightness) and then “fade again,/And draw itself to what it was before”  (its minimum).  

            I have been an active observer of variable stars for many decades.  As Leslie Peltier wrote on page 69 in his autobiography Starlight Nights, “A variable star was a completely new experience; it was not just something that was THERE, it was something that was HAPPENING!”    On the evening of 30 August, 1975, my interest in variable stars entered a new high when I independently discovered Nova Cygni, a 1.6 magnitude exploding star, and then three years later a second Nova Cygni.   Variable stars are magical to me, but this little poem from Tennyson is the first one I have found that directly addresses the observation of stars that regularly change in brightness.

            In  a way I wish I had known Tennyson.  But I am glad I do not, because that would mean that I am at least 175 years old.  But I do know the famous and highly regarded astrophysicist Jonathan Tennyson, Alfred’s great great grandson, and we have been friends since I met him at University College London a number of years ago. The Tennyson family is warm and friendly, and I think the poet from long ago would have enjoyed that, and that an appreciation for science still runs in his family. Alfred Lord Tennyson had the ability to take a scientific fact, that some stars vary in brightness,  and turn it into a verse that etches itself forever into our hearts.

 

American Doll and Toy Museum: Thank You, Anonymous

American Doll and Toy Museum: Thank You, Anonymous:   I wanted to say thank you to our anonymous donors who gave the museum some real treasures over the past two weeks.   Three or four Mondays...

Thank You, Anonymous

 

I wanted to say thank you to our anonymous donors who gave the museum some real treasures over the past two weeks.  Three or four Mondays ago, I arrived at the museum o find 12 boxes full of dolls outside our door.  These were mainly artist dolls, including one by Titus Tomescu representing Jesus with two children, some Ashton Drake, Boyd’s, all beautifully kept.  There was no note with them, just a mysterious, wonderful gift.

Last week, we received in the mail a small box containing cylinders for a composition phonograph doll.  There was a note describing what they were, but no name.  The return address used was that of the museum.

Then, on Sept. 20^th, I got a call from a very nice woman who wanted to donate her late sister’s doll collection  There were between thirty to forty dolls including Lady Anne Dolls of the former Williamsburg Doll Factory, QVC, Rustie, and similar dolls.  In all these donations, no two were alike, which is miraculous considering the museum’s very large collection of dolls, toys, puppets, books, and models.

We are expanding, and are working to lay the cement foundation for our building.  While we are closed to prepare for this renovation ill at least November 8^th, we encourage everyone to view our collection on Instagram under ellen_tsagaris, on Pinterest under American Doll and Toy Museum, on our website American Doll and Toy Museum.org, on our Facebook pages American Doll and Toy Museum, Dr. R., Dr. E’s Doll Museum and Antique Doll, and on our blogs, American Doll and Toy Museum, Dr. E’s Doll Museum, International Doll Museum Blog, and Dr. E’s Doll Museum in Greek, Japanese, and Spanish.

We are also on X under my name, under Antique Doll, under Dr. E’s Doll Museum, and on Tumblr under Antique doll.

Happy Collecting

From our guest blogger, Dr. Doveed Levy

 

Skyward for September 2025

 

By

 

David H. Levy

 

Aka Doveed.

 

Thirty-two years ago, Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker and I discovered a comet that was eventually named Shoemaker-Levy 9.  It was the ninth periodic comet that we found together, although there were a few other nonperiodic comets that we also located, plus the nine other comets I found on my own since I began my comet search in the fall of 1965. The discovery of this particular comet and its subsequent collision with Jupiter, coincidentally my favorite planet, were the most important parts of my professional life, second only to my meeting Wendee. Sixteen months after our discovery the 21 pieces of this shattered comet collided with Jupiter, in one of the most decisive science stories of the twentieth century.  I may not have been aware of how significant this was until, at this year’s Adirondack Astronomy Retreat, I watched the July 16, 1994 press conference during which Gene, Carolyn, and I tried to express the significance of this event.  I remembered how much smarter I might have been back then, being able to speak in complete sentences, compared to my waning personality now.  What I was not aware of back then is that what we were witnessing might have been an example not only for our own lifetimes but for the vastly larger history of the Earth we live on.

 

            Sixty-six million years ago, the Cretaceous period of Earth’s geologic history ended rather abruptly with the mass extinction of about three quarters of all the species of life on Earth.  The theory proposed by Luis Alvarez and his son Walter was based on the large amount of iridium that was found at exposed rock sites all over the world.  The discovery in the early 1990s of the 200-mile wide impact crater whose center was near the coastal town of Chicxulub Pueblo, in present-day Mexico, began a long stretch of evidence that leads most scientists to conclude that the impact of an asteroid (or less likely a comet) had a lot to do with the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.

 

            More recently, some evidence has emerged that the impact in the Gulf of Mexico was not the only one that occurred at that time. The 15-mile wide Boltysh crater in Ukraine, and the 12-mile wile Silverpit crater in the North Sea, not far from Great Britain, might have been formed at about the same time.  These structures, and others that have been found or speculated, are all between North latitude 20 and 70 degrees.   

 

Galileo space craft image of Fragment W hitting Jupiter

            Could these structures be impact craters, and if they are, could they have formed in connection with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction? This suggests the possibility of near-simultaneous multiple impacts.  But the operative word has to be suggests.  The evidence is there, but it is speculative and not strong, that the Chicxulub impactor might have been just one of a series of impacts.  According to a paper by Krisopher Dekan of the University of Gothenburg,  “To conclude that a mass extinction of this sort is not associated with immense extraterrestrial impact is to break the rules of a respected scientist.  There is too much evidence in favor of a least two large impacts and no other factor can explain the (Iridium) anomaly that is globally widespread in both sides of the paleomagnetism of that time, being normal and reverse near the K/Pg boundary.”  

 

 

We will never know what upended the Earth’s biosphere 66 million years ago, because we were not there.  But at this juncture I would like, not to ignore the methods of modern science, but to take science out for a walk in the desert. We will never know, but what if a Shoemaker-Levy 9-style multiple impact is what caused the elimination of most of the species of life on Earth?

Comet Shoemaker-Levy Discovery Films

March 23, 1993

 

What if? I think it is fun to speculate on this question.  From my own perspective, as I take that fictitious walk in the desert, my decision to begin hunting for comets when I was a teenager in 1965 might have led to a personal communion with a major event on the planet that has given me so much pain, and so much more joy.

 

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Over 400,00 Strong!!

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Over 400,00 Strong!!:  We are over 400,000 strong!  Thank you.  We have also picked up some new followers in our fifteenth year.  I love you all and am grateful. ...