A doll. Either word was applied to the effigies sent over from Paris to exhibit the new fashions.
1795. She looked more like a doll from Boston than a live girl.—Gazette of the U.S., March 10: from the Connecticut Courant.
1800.
| I say, how could you thus return | |
| A Holland Doll? Who did adorn | |
| Your head in this prodigious dress | |
| Of foreign gewgaws, &c. | |
The Intelligencer, Lancaster, Pa.: from the Carolina Gazette. |
1807. The dresses of the annual doll-babies from Paris.—Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Wistar, June 21.
1854. The little girls, who had been petted by their fathers and mothers like doll-babies, were overhauled like so much damaged goods by her busy fingers, and were put into the strait-jacket of her narrow and precise system of manners and morals, in a way the pretty darlings had never dreamed of before.—J. G. Baldwin, ‘Flush Times,’ p. 292.
1857. “And so,” said Porte Crayon, recovering his utterance, “you’ve deliberately gone back to playing with doll-babies!”—D. H. Strother, ‘Virginia Illustrated,’ p. 102 (N.Y.).
1887. Let us light the candle and play with your doll-babies.—Mrs. Smedes, ‘Memorials of a Southern Planter,’ p. 101 (Baltimore).
