Intermediality and “Art for All” in the Work of Walter Crane

Abstract

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was a British artist credited as one of the most influential illustrators of children’s books for his generation. However, he was also responsible for the circulation of many political prints for the socialist movement during the last decades of the nineteenth century. This thesis approaches these two areas of Crane’s work, not as mutually exclusive entities, but as connected parts of the artists “art for all” mentality. I argue that Crane was an intermedial artist whose pragmatic socialism was distinctive from his peers. Through an analysis of Crane’s Queen Summer: or the Tourney of the Lily and the Rose (1891), one of the flower books penned and pictured by the artist, I demonstrate how Crane incorporated his own socialist iconography into the floral fable in order to present a socialist utopia in capitalist commodity.