Dolly Varden (costume)

An 1869 fashion doll in the collection of the V&A Museum of Childhood is dressed in the Dolly Varden mode; unusually the outfit is in dark colours.

[2] The Gallery of Costume in Manchester holds a more typical Dolly Varden dress in its collections, made of white linen with a pink and mauve flowered print.

[5] In the 1870s, the Theatre Royal in London presented an entertainment called The Dolly Varden Polka, composed by W. C.

[6] Writing in 1880, Charles Bardsley reports that the forename Dolly (as a diminutive of Dorothy) had enjoyed peaks of popularity in England from 1450 to 1570 and again from 1750 to 1820, but had since fallen into decline.

"[7] A notable use of the name in theatre was Dolly Varden, a comic opera starring Lulu Glaser, which opened in 1902.

In Balthazar (1958), the second novel in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Scobie, a gay Binbashi, tells the protagonist Darley that when he cross-dresses he wears a Dolly Varden hat.