Towards the end of the 1880’s, improvements in lithographic printing meant it became possible to produce books with coloured illustrations relatively cheaply.

And one of the first markets was children’s books – often given the increasing interest in folklore in England at the time, the books were either fairy stories or tales set around the Lancelot and Guinevere theme, or sometimes loosely based retellings of the Greek myths.

One of the principal illustrators, there were others, was the arts and crafts movement artist Walter Crane.

Walter Crane worked with William Morris and others in his arts and crafts group producing faux medieval paintings. When he turned his hand to children’s fairy tales not surprisingly he stayed with the faux medieval theme drawing fairies and princesses with flowing tresses and impractical drapery.

(Incidentally, through his association with Morris he probably met Madeleine Smith, except by then she was known as Lena Wardle and married to George Wardle, Morris’s business manager. Whether Crane knew or cared I don’t know)

William Morris was what we could describe as a gentleman socialist – and while he was not a member, influential in the founding of the Fabian Society (Incidentally Lena Wardle was also involved the the Fabian Society in the early days), and later was instrumental in the founding of the Socialist League.

Morris was the sort of man like my grandfather who was full of the romance of revolution – holding my mother up at the window of their apartment to see workers with red flags and banners marching down the street and telling her that she was seeing the future being made – but who would have been horrified by the bloody insanity of full blown revolution.

Walter Crane was not one of these.

When the Socialist League split split into factions he went with those advocating revolutionary change, and not only produced art work in support of the revolutionary anarchist factions, spoke out in defence of the workers executed following the Haymarket affair at some cost to himself. (It’s important to remember that in the nineteenth century the term anarchist was used as short hand for socialist groups advocating revolution, whether or not they advocated violence.)

He also protested about the Boer war and contributed to various anarchist newspapers,

and produced various illustrations and woodcuts, almost all in the arts and crafts style, in support of political change. In short he seems to have been a true believer.

Nowadays much of his work is out of copyright and has been raided and reused to illustrate articles about the contemporary phenomenon of “fairy porn” – young adult romantic fantasy fiction where fairies and elves have moderately explicit sex – perhaps not the future he would have expected for his work …