The book’s conclusion returns to the commercialisation of Alice in Wonderland by considering the controversy surrounding Jonathan Miller’s 1966 Alice film, screened by the BBC. The art film offered a surreal Victorian dreamscape of childhood, as much for an erudite adult audience as for a child audience. It was a representation that was highly unlikely to have concerned Dodgson at all but was considered controversial enough to provoke public responses of hostility and incomprehension, attracting protests about a liberality that ought to be banned. This controversy allows us to reference changed understandings of childhood. Particularly in light of Disney’s rendition of Alice and the development of the BBC’s institutional role in the 1960s, where there was ready acceptance of the children’s department remit, with the imagery of the child overlaid with expectations of marketing and age-appropriate merchandise. Many issues that vexed the BBC in this period are rooted in the paradox that underpins the whole book: the tension between exploitation and innocence; family and market; public and private; and the normalisation of the logic of commercialisation tied to intellectual property.

The tangled beginnings of the establishment of merchandising at the BBC are further developed in Chapter 7. The most troubling question for the corporation was how, in line with the organisation’s traditional public values and duties as expressed in its charter and broadcasting licence, it should respond to the exploitation of radio identities such as ‘Uncle Mac’, a persona linked to the radio star and BBC employee Derek McCulloch, that were, without authority, also being commercialised on everyday consumer goods by outsiders to the corporation. Internal dynamics at the BBC were further impacted by the development of commercial television and the unexpected success of television programmes such as Dr Who. As expectations shifted, rather than being criticised for commercialisation, it was the public corporation’s failure to pursue profit that became contentious. One outcome of this was the development of a new management unit separate from programming, the BBC Exploitation Department, later renamed as BBC Television Enterprises, which served as merchandising agent for third-party productions such as The Magic Roundabout and The Wombles. Both instances resulted in litigation.

In 1929, J. M. Barrie made a bequest to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children of his most popular creation, ‘Peter Pan’. Chapter 5 explores the dynamic of gift-giving for the benefit of vulnerable children and how this translated into licensing practices. A Peter Pan movie, to be directed by George Cukor and starring Audrey Hepburn, was never made because of the bitter relationship that developed between the licensor, the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and its licensee, the Disney Corporation, which resulted in litigation in the 1960s. By looking at the misfortune of a film that was never made, the chapter shows how licensing intangible properties involved not only a question of contract and property, but also a more complicated question of trust, sociality and the etiquette of managing commercial opportunities. The chapter engages in a deeper consideration of the impact of the Disney Corporation, not just in creating a highly effective managerial infrastructure to exploit the child as a consumer, but also in developing intellectual property strategies to gain a privileged position with consumers, who were now conceived of as being included within the Disney family.

Chapter 1 explores one of the most enduring popular works for children, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Charles Dodgson wrote it at a time when the very conception of childhood as a distinctive and cherished stage of human development was being explored and, through the popularity of Dodgson’s penmanship, being promulgated. Dodgson’s interest in children is also apparent from his (now controversial) photographs of children and from his obsessively detailed exchanges with his publisher, Frederick Macmillan, over the presentation of Alice and other works for children. Dodgson sought to curate the way young readers entered into and experienced the fantasy realm. He appeared to draw the line at ventures he judged could dilute the fantasy, such as mass-manufactured goods produced outside of Victorian artistic creative industries. Dodgson wrote at a time when authors could and did control the terms of engagement with their fantasy through the exercise of copyright. Management, agency and legal relations would supersede this authorial power and authority in the following century.

Tracing the character merchandising of Beatrix Potter, Chapter 2 explores why Potter is both a creative and an industrial author. She directly engaged with the idea of childhood where the parent was a consumer, an idea that affected the direction of her creativity. Potter’s forethought in registering copyright and design rights is much commented on by her biographers. However, at that time, intellectual property law struggled with the very idea of an ‘industrial author’. Although Potter popularised an expanded idea of authorship and intellectual property, she never used her rights defensively to protect the ‘Peter Rabbit’ range of merchandise from imitation and piracy. Rather, incensed by the piracy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in the United States and frustrated by her dealings with British doll-makers, she was drawn into debates about British manufacturing, the politics of international trade and the reform of tariff law. Potter’s legacy was to encourage the practice of authorising iterations of popular character designs across an ever-increasing range of goods circulating as appropriate gifts for children and decorative embellishment for the home.

Children play, learn and grow immersed in a commercialised world where distinctive toys and character merchandise cater for special occasions, idle moments, training for adulthood or just for the sake of making the mundane more enjoyable. Unsurprisingly, many intellectual property cases today centre around the intangible rights claimed over toy helmets, juvenile T-shirts, or ride-on kids’ suitcases, as there is a profitable industry based on children’s entertainment and their special attachment to the commodities associated with that entertainment.

Chapter 6 traces the rise of merchandising agencies as a distinct and independent profession in the United Kingdom. It focuses on the most influential independent agency of the period, Walter Tuckwell & Associates. A former Disney employee, Tuckwell fostered a network connecting and linking commercial and legal opportunities offered by television programmes and the emerging demand for child-related products. The chapter discusses the specific relationship between content creation and marketing that arose during the earliest days of television. This entails a discussion of Tuckwell’s role at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), where objections to the development of merchandising inside the corporation were managed. Commercial television changed agendas, leading to stabilisation in contractual practices between broadcasters, licensing agencies and sectors such as the toy, publishing and food industries; all eager to capitalise on the new communication medium. By the late 1960s, children’s participation in commodification was a fully integrated component of intellectual property practice and an integral part of television culture, regardless of the character of the broadcast licence.

Chapter 4 explores the foundation of extended business activities and tie-ins in the 1920s and 1930s that developed around Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. The term ‘animated properties’ acknowledges that these popular fictional representations were attributed subjecthood and, as such, came alive outside the celluloid frame. Felix and Mickey were pre-packaged as family-friendly viewing. Doll effigies and other merchandise literally took the characters into the heart of the home. The chapter discusses the ambivalent role of intellectual property registration in stabilising the character merchandising trade, exploring what was particularly distinctive about the Disney Corporation’s industrial system of production and distribution. This successful strategy was an organisational one with cultural ambitions, engaging franchise managers and licensees in educating children and the trade about the protocols of consumption attached to play. The Disney brand came to signify child-friendly cultural content of all kinds, with trust in the name secured by the deployment of a new legal creation, the phenomenon of ‘world rights’ exploited by a new managerial class, Disney Enterprises’ agents.

Meccano Ltd promoted a particular type of subjectivity: the ‘Meccano Boy’. This construction toy schooled the child in scientific education, social participation, civic roles, life within a profession and in building the material infrastructure of modernity. Playing with Meccano encouraged translation of an intangible idea represented in two dimensions into material forms through the production of three-dimensional compositions of machinery or models. We compare the legal interpretation of this form of play with its broader cultural significance in creating a base of socially connected consumers, orchestrated to extract commercial value from educational play. Meccano did not involve free play or simply making educational models. A toy for making toys, Meccano was marketed as training for adulthood. Through the establishment of Meccano guilds and the relevance of the Meccano Magazine, children, their fathers and a wider brotherhood were interpellated as active developers of Meccano. It was a brand and activity that Meccano designed for international appeal and where the child was happily engaged in play that supported a later life that contributed to international industrialisation.