With its movable element and pieces of real fabric used to depict the heroine’s dress, this children’s book is a hybrid book and toy. As the book’s publisher puts it, the pictures inside are “equal to six dressed dolls.” In six hand-colored wood-engraved plates, Rose Merton tells the story of a young orphan who is lured away from her guardian aunt by a Romani woman identified as a “Gipsy woman” holding a spinning multi-colored wheel toy. That this wheel is the one element of the book which can be made to move by pulling a tab attached to it suggests its centrality to the story. Without Rose’s susceptibility to its novelty as a wheel that creates an optical illusion when it is in motion, the operative turn in her fortune that forms the basis of the story would not have been made.
The reader identifies with Rose by being similarly entranced by the book’s novel elements, and is compelled to follow the heroine through her trial, rescue and eventual return to safety. The colorful fabric pieces that comprise Rose’s dresses promote not only a sense of interactive tactility in the reading experience but also import elements of the “real world” into a make-believe one. While the depictions of Rose might be construed as paper doll-like forms, they are distinct from traditional paper dolls (such as the well-known The History of Little Fanny, 1810). Unremovable from the book’s pages, she is situated in a represented world with a backdrop of different landscapes, milieus, and other people. And while her dress is affixed to her as it is with paper dolls, it can not be removed. Mobility is instead found in the way Rose is moved through a story with different dresses to wear on each page that depicts her story.