The Golliwogg's Bicycle Club by Upton, Bertha - 1896

UPTON, FLORENCE. The Golliwog's Bicycle Club. London: Longmans, 1896CCloth spine, pictorial boards. Decorated endpapers. 32 full page color plates (including the title page), numerous illustrations in text. Minimal bumping for its age (have not seen better copy). Covered in mylar covering. Small blue ink mark on bottom of few pages but not on the pages themselves. Cannot see it..no marking, highlighting, writing, tearing, or missing pages Not an ex-library book. From a private collection of non-smoking office encased in glass. Beautiful collectors copy!! One of a very few left in this condition. Rare. 66pp.

London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1896
The golliwog, golliwogg or golly is a black fictional character created by Florence Kate Upton that appears in children's books in the late 19th century usually depicted as a type of rag doll. It was reproduced, both by commercial and hobby toy-makers as a children's toy called the "golliwog", and had great popularity in Europe and Australia into the 1970s.
The doll is characterized by black skin, eyes rimmed in white, clown lips and frizzy hair. Though home-made golliwogs were sometimes female, the golliwog was generally male. For this reason, in the period following World War II, the golliwog was seen, along with the teddy bear, as a suitable soft toy for a young boy. The image of the doll has become the subject of controversy. Its depiction of black people has been accused of being racist, along with pickaninnies, minstrels, mammy figures, and other caricatures. The golliwog has been described as "the least known of the major anti-Black caricatures in the United States". In recent years, changing political attitudes with regard to race have reduced the popularity and sales of golliwogs as toys. Manufacturers who have used golliwogs as a motif have either withdrawn them as an icon or changed the name. In particular, the association of the golliwog with the pejorative term "wog" has resulted in the use of alternative names such as "golly" and "golly doll".
Florence Kate Upton was born in 1873 in Flushing, New York, the daughter of English parents who had emigrated to the United States three years previously. Following the death of her father, she moved back to England with her mother and sisters when she was fourteen. There she spent several years drawing and developing her artistic skills. To afford tuition to art school, she illustrated a children's book entitled The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg. The 1895 book included a character named the Golliwogg, who was first described as "a horrid sight, the blackest gnome", but who quickly turned out to be a friendly character, and is later attributed with a "kind face." A product of the blackface minstrel tradition, the Golliwogg had jet black skin; bright red lips; and wild woolly hair. He wore red trousers, a shirt with a stiff collar, red bow-tie, and a blue jacket with tails -- all traditional minstrel attire.

The Golliwog The second Golliwog title from a turn-of-the-century picture book series, noted for its artistic design and the stylish black doll character who is considered controversial today. Born in 1873, Upton, returned to her native Great Britain and began work as an illustrator. Returning to the U.S., she and her mother made a book together which featured a set of peg dolls and the dramatic black doll, they named the golliwog. The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls (1895) became a great success and so were all the others in the series, which took the golliwog and his companions to all kinds of places around the world.