Walter Crane in the context of "Historiography of the British Empire"

⭐ In the context of the historiography of the British Empire, a key development in recent decades has been a scholarly emphasis on…

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⭐ Core Definition: Walter Crane

Walter Crane (15 August 1845 – 14 March 1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the later 19th century.

Crane's work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come. He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and produced an array of paintings, illustrations, children's books, ceramic tiles, wallpapers and other decorative arts. Crane is also remembered for his creation of a number of iconic images associated with the international socialist movement.

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👉 Walter Crane in the context of Historiography of the British Empire

The historiography of the British Empire refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of the British Empire. Historians and their ideas are the main focus here; specific lands and historical dates and episodes are covered in the article on the British Empire. Scholars have long studied the Empire, looking at the causes for its formation, its relations to the French and other empires, and the kinds of people who became imperialists or anti-imperialists, together with their mindsets. The history of the breakdown of the Empire has attracted scholars of the histories of the United States (which broke away in 1776), the British Raj (dissolved in 1947), and the African colonies (independent in the 1960s). John Darwin (2013) identifies four imperial goals: colonising, civilising, converting, and commerce.

Historians have approached imperial history from numerous angles over the last century. In recent decades scholars have expanded the range of topics into new areas in social and cultural history, paying special attention to the impact on the natives and their agency in response. The cultural turn in historiography has recently emphasised issues of language, religion, gender, and identity. Recent debates have considered the relationship between the "metropole" (Great Britain itself, especially London), and the colonial peripheries. The "British world" historians stress the material, emotional, and financial links among the colonizers across the imperial diaspora. The "new imperial historians", by contrast, are more concerned with the Empire's impact on the metropole, including everyday experiences and images. Phillip Buckner says that by the 1990s few historians continued to portray the Empire as benevolent.

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Walter Crane in the context of Grosvenor Gallery

The Grosvenor Gallery was an art gallery in London founded in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife Blanche. Its first directors were J. Comyns Carr and Charles Hallé. The gallery proved crucial to the Aesthetic Movement because it provided a home for those artists whose approaches the more classical and conservative Royal Academy did not welcome, such as Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Crane.

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Walter Crane in the context of Edmund Evans

Edmund Evans (23 February 1826 – 21 August 1905) was an English wood-engraver and colour printer during the Victorian era. He specialized in full-colour printing, a technique which, in part because of his work, became popular in the mid-19th century. He employed and collaborated with illustrators such as Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway and Richard Doyle to produce what are now considered to be classic children's books. Little is known about his life, although he wrote a short autobiography before his death in 1905 in which he described his life as a printer in Victorian London.

After finishing an apprenticeship, Evans went into business for himself. By the early 1850s, he had established a reputation as a printer of covers for a type of cheap novels known as yellow-backs. In the early 1860s, he began to print children's toy books and picture books in association with the printing house Routledge and Warne. His intention was to produce books for children that were beautiful and inexpensive. For three decades he produced multiple volumes each year, first illustrated by Crane, and later by Caldecott and Greenaway.

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Walter Crane in the context of The Happy Prince and Other Tales

The Happy Prince and Other Tales (or Stories) is a collection of bedtime stories for children by Oscar Wilde, first published in May 1888. It contains five stories that are highly popular among children and frequently read in schools: "The Happy Prince," "The Nightingale and the Rose," "The Selfish Giant," "The Devoted Friend," and "The Remarkable Rocket." The short stories are valued for their morals, and have been made into animated films. In 2003, the second through fourth stories were adapted by Lupus Films and Terraglyph Interactive Studios into the three-part series Wilde Stories for Channel 4. The stories are regarded as classics of children's literature.

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