The following essay discusses Florence Upton and her mother, Bertha Upton.
Few Americans are familiar with the Golliwogg, though some may know "Golliwog's Cakewalk" from Claude Debussy's Children's Corner suite (1908). The Oxford English Dictionary defines golliwogg as a "name invented for a black-faced grotesquely dressed (male) doll with a shock of fuzzy hair." Golliwogg, both the fictional character and the word itself, was first introduced in The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls--and a "Golliwog" (1895), by Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton. The Uptons, a mother and daughter team, produced thirteen books about a black male rag doll and five wooden Dutch dolls between 1895 and 1909. The books were published in both the United States and Great Britain, but in Britain they enjoyed their greatest success. However, like Little Black Sambo, the Golliwogg has become a relic of nineteenth-century racism and is no longer respectable.
Bertha Upton, who wrote the verses for these books, was born in 1849 in Great Britain.
