To afford tuition at art school, she illustrated a children's book entitled The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg. There she spent several years drawing and developing her artistic skills. Following the death of her father, she moved back to England with her mother and sisters when she was fourteen. The Golliwogg's Auto-Go-Cart, a 1901 book by Florence Kate Uptonįlorence Kate Upton was born in 1873 in Flushing, New York, United States, the daughter of English parents who had emigrated to the United States three years previously. Alternative names such as golly and golly doll have also been adopted due to association with the racial slur wog, which many dictionaries say may be derived from golliwog. Robertson's marmalade in the UK) have either withdrawn them as an icon or changed the name. Manufacturers who have used golliwogs as a motif (e.g. Changing political attitudes with regard to race have reduced the popularity and sales of golliwogs as toys. The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia described the golliwog as 'the least known of the major anti-black caricatures in the United States'. The golliwog is controversial, being widely considered a racist caricature of black people, alongside pickaninnies, minstrels, and mammy figures. Since the 20th century, the word has been considered a racial slur towards black people. The doll is characterised by jet black skin, eyes rimmed in white, exaggerated red lips and frizzy hair, based on the blackface minstrel tradition. It was reproduced, both by commercial and hobby toy-makers, as a children's soft toy called the 'golliwog', a portmanteau of golly and polliwog, and had great popularity in the Southern United States, the UK, South Africa and Australia into the 1970s. The golliwog, also spelled golliwogg or shortened to golly, is a doll-like character, created by cartoonist and author Florence Kate Upton, which appeared in children's books in the late 19th century, usually depicted as a type of rag doll.

Florence Kate Upton's Golliwogg in formal minstrel attire in The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg in 1895

Golly meaning