Remember this postcard of the English Snow White set from 1938 I posted a few weeks ago? A reader of the blog, Peter, found a lot more about it:
[The Dwarfs' cottage was built for the 1938 Ideal Home Exhibition (an
annual show sponsored by the Daily Mail newspaper, and held at Olympia
in April). Although not featured in the illustration, it is listed as one of the
exhibits on this advertisement:
http://www.fulltable.com/vts/e/exhib/c.jpg
Here is a review of the exhibition (from The Catholic Herald). The
cottage is mentioned, but the reviewer, lacking a young person in tow,
was too embarrassed to go in!
http://archive.catholicherald.co.uk/article/14th-april-1938/13/for-those-who-are-thinking-of-marriage-an-ideal-ho
Finally, a quote from Annette Kuhn's academic paper "
Snow White in 1930s Britain":
"Among
the promotional ideas set out in a UK press book for the film is a
short article on the dwarfs’ house and the expertise behind its
creation. Alongside pictures of items of furniture from the house is
proffered the suggestion that ‘practically everything in this fantastic
but charming abode could be easily adapted to a modern country home or
mountain lodge’. This rather far-fetched notion may indicate the depth
of misunderstanding in Burbank, California, of daily life in Britain in
the late 1930s, when not all Britons were strangers to aspirations of
domestic perfection. At a time when hundreds of thousands of new houses
were being built on the fringes of Britain’s cities, dreams–especially
among lower-middle-class women–of the desirable (albeit suburban-modern
rather than rustic) home found expression in the annual Daily Mail Ideal
Home Exhibition in London
[Ryan 1995]. It is perhaps not
surprising, therefore, that the 1938 exhibition featured a replica of
the dwarfs’ house, its scale suggesting that it was made for small
people–dwarfs and children. This suggests something of how Disney’s film
and its promotion, at a time when consumerism had barely begun to
emerge in Britain, keyed into popular, and perhaps profound, imaginings
of ‘home’ and ‘homeyness’ to sell a dream of possessing
things–tableware, ornaments, and the like–and above all an ordered and
beautiful home. And indeed there is contemporary evidence to suggest
that Snow White’s domestic topos and its homemaking scenes made a
considerable impression at the time on audiences of all ages, an
impression at least as marked as that made by the film’s vividly
recollected ‘frightening’ passages."]
