Domestic Interiors Database

The work of Crane and other Arts and Crafts illustrators created a ... group of picture books for children in which illustration was integral to the books’ design. They presented a fantasy, nursery-rhyme childhood in which adults were peripheral or simply ridiculous. [The image here] is from a similarly conceived art book illustrated by J.G. Sowerby and Thomas Crane, At Home of 1881, which makes a direct and humorous analogy between childhood, home and book. It opens into a Queen Anne-style house of the type associated with the Aesthetic Movement where, page by page, the young reader is led through its rooms, finding little Lettice aged three who, distracted by here Aesthetic surroundings, refuses to learn her ABC.