Toys, Material Culture and Play Space in Ireland: The Iveagh Trust Play Centre

Abstract

This chapter explores the world of the Iveagh Trust Play Centre, Dublin, established in 1909. The Play Centre offered a space for urban working-class children in which they could partake in play activities with toys and books, designed to foster particular values and behaviours. An examination of the Play Centre provides a context from which to expose concepts and beliefs, identities and behavioural enactments that crucially influenced conceptions, representations and actualities of childhood in Ireland in the early twentieth century. Rutherford’s chapter describes the ways in which play space, including the toys and material culture encountered there, contextualised and mediated childhood experiences; provided structure and form to children’s lived experiences; and tacitly evoked exchanges and possibilities between children and children’s bodies.