The book inspired many whittlers to fashion Hitty dolls of mountain ashwood as gifts for little girls who enjoyed the doll's story. Through her many trials, she remains calm and stoic, and ever ready for her next adventure. She recounts meeting Charles Dickens and John Greenleaf Whittier and she records that she had been lost, stolen, borrowed, exhibited, sold at auction, and abused by fire, water, and neglect. Hitty describes 100 years of adventures, beginning in Maine but extending to travels to New Orleans and Bombay, India. This is the story of Hittys years with Phoebe, and the many that follow in the life of a well-loved doll. Young Phoebe was very proud of her beautiful doll and took her everywhere, even on a long sailing trip in a whaler. The story is written from the doll's point of view and recounts how Phoebe shortened her name to Hitty. Hitty, or Mehitable as she was really named, was made in the early 1800s for Phoebe Preble, a little girl from Maine. She created a story of the doll-named Mehitabel by her first owner, Phoebe Preble. Field garnered inspiration for her story from a wooden doll she saw a wooden doll seated in the window of a New York City antique shop. The Hitty doll is the central character in Rachel Field's 1929 "Hitty: Her First Hundred Years," a children's book that received the Newbery Award.
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