The Paper Dart Rethrown

Update: The Paper Dart design is now evidenced from 1786

In my post ‘Like quills upon the fretful porpentine’ I presented evidence that traced the Paper Dart back to 1828. Assiduous readers will have noticed that the evidence presented for the existence of Paper Darts at that date was a reminiscence of throwing them into a schoolmasters wig ‘Very many years ago’. Another similar reminiscence published in 1835 stated, ‘This was about the year 1786.’ I suppose that this is in itself good evidence that Paper Darts had already been invented in the late 18th Century, but I wanted to wait until more definitive primary evidence emerged before making that claim.

I am pleased to be able to report that it has. A third description of a wig stuck full of paper darts appears in a story written by R Cumberland Esq, titled 'The Advantages of Public Education exemplified in the Story of Geminus and Gemellus', in the September 1786 issue of 'The European Magazine and London Review' (the moral of which is that going to school is better than being tutored at home). The story was clearly popular with editors of the time and was quickly published elsewhere, for instance in the third volume of 'The Observer' from that same year, and in the October 1786 issue of 'Walker's Hibernian Magazine'. It seems that throwing Paper Darts into schoolmasters, or tutors, wigs was a common occupation for mischievous boys of that time.

The relevant passages from this story are reproduced here (from 'The Observer', because the font is easier to read):

I sympathise with the excuse that the culprit offers. This sort of thing has often happened to me.

It is worth taking a moment to place this evidence in context. Only a few years ago we believed that the earliest evidence for the existence of the Paper Dart was found in ‘Every Little Boy's Book’, published by Routledge, Warne and Routledge in 1864.

We now know that the Paper Dart is not merely one of the many recreational paperfolding designs that emerged in Europe in the mid-19th Century but one of only a select few that we can trace back to before 1900. This gives the design a clear historical significance that it did not have before.

It is also interesting to note that we know of only twelve recreational paperfolding designs from Japan that can be evidenced from before 1786. Unlikely as it may seem, the Paper Dart was being thrown around by English schoolboys some years before the classic 'Senbazuru Orikata' (Folding a Thousand Cranes)‘ was published in Japan.

(Incidentally, the illustration that includes a schoolboy throwing a Paper Dart that appears at the top of this page is an engraving in 'Histoire d'un Enfant' by Alphonse Daudet, which was published in Paris in 1877.)