You're Dead to Me - The Arts and Crafts Movement (Radio Edit)
Episode Date: May 16, 2025Greg Jenner is joined in Victorian England by Dr Isabella Rosner and comedian Cariad Lloyd to learn all about the ethos, practitioners and creations of the Arts and Crafts movement.Most people have he...ard of William Morris, one of the leaders of the Arts and Crafts movement that came to prominence in England in the last decades of the 19th Century. His abstract, nature-inspired designs still adorn everything from wallpaper and curtains to notebooks and even dog beds. And the company he founded, Morris & Co., is still going strong. But the history of this artistic movement, and the other creatives who were involved, is less well known.Arts and Crafts, which advocated a return to traditional handicrafts like needlework, carpentry and ceramics, was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and included a strong socialist vision: its practitioners wanted everyone to have access to art, and to be able to enjoy homes that were comfortable, functional and beautiful. This episode explores Morris and other creatives both in and outside his circle, including Edward Burne-Jones, May Morris, Gertrude Jekyll and Philip Webb. It looks at the ethos that inspired them, the homes and artworks they created, and asks how radical their political beliefs really were.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Jon Norman-Mason Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook
Transcript
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BBC Sounds music radio podcasts.
Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the radio for comedy podcast that takes history seriously.
My name is Greg Jenner.
I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster.
And today we are packing our William Morris footbags and heading back to the 19th century to learn all about the arts and crafts movement.
And to help us spin this story, we have two practitioners of very different arts.
In history corner, she's curator of the Royal School of Needlework
and a research consultant at Whitney Antiques.
She's an art historian of the material culture
of the 17th to 19th centuries.
You might have listened to her podcast, So What? It's a pun.
It's Dr. Isabella Rosner. Welcome, Isabella.
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.
We're delighted to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, she is a comedian, actor,
improviser, writer and podcaster. You may know her from her podcast, Griefcast, an award-winning show.
It's spin-off book, You Are Not Alone, her many TV appearances, her Weirdos Book Club podcast
with lovely Sarah Pascoe, or her new children's book, The Christmas Wishtastrophe. And you'll
definitely remember her from our episodes about Agrippina the Younger, Georgian courtship, it's the wonderful Cariad Lloyd.
Welcome back Cariad. Hello, I wanted to think of a sewing pun, but I couldn't. So nice to meet you.
You're an expert in the Regency period. That's your... I'm pretty good on, yeah,
Georgian Regency. No, you're very good. You're very good. But today we're in the Victorian era.
Yeah. And even into the early 20th century. So what do you know of the arts and crafts movement?
I know the arts and crafts movement. I love the arts and crafts movement
I have been to an exhibition of the arts and crafts movement when I was in Glasgow
Yeah, before they had the fire at the Glasgow School of Art
I did a tour and they had an amazing exhibition there and it was incredible like amazing chairs and tables
It's like proper like the good stuff and just the building itself. Yeah, so I'm a fan. I'm a fan of movement
Although I did I was saying to Isabella I had a moment on the way here when I was like, oh, yes
William Morris and I thought is it have I made that up?
Is he like Elizabethan? I googled it and confirmed it was
William Morris, he'd love to be Elizabethan. I googled it and it confirmed it was Elizabeth Morris. William Morris. He'd love to be Elizabethan. He would. He would. He loved it. He would love it. So what do
you know?
This is where I have a go at Guessing What You, our lovely listener, might know about
today's subject and I imagine most people will have heard of the big dog of the arts
and crafts movement, William Morris. His floral designs are still
printed on curtains, wallpaper, notebooks, pencil cases, even on football kits.
What's more, modern homeware brands like Cath Kidston owe a huge amount to the
Arts and Crafts movement and we see the design legacy in TV shows like Grand
Designs and Queer Eye. But the wider history of the movement is perhaps more
hidden.
Beyond the cutesy curtains, what was Arts and Crafts really about? Why did traditional manufacturing methods have a resurgence in Victorian Britain and what is a
strawberry thief? Let's find out. Right, Dr. Isabella, where do we start our story?
I think we should start with an overview. So the Arts and Crafts movement is an art movement,
as you could guess, that begins sometime in the late 19th century.
Nobody can agree on the exact start date. Some people put it at 1861, which is
when William Moore starts getting on the scene. Other people say it doesn't really
start until the 1870s or 1880, and it lasts until about the beginning of World
War I. The movement is a style of art, it's primarily domestic furnishings, and it promotes craftsmanship
and aesthetic unity between all sorts of objects in the home.
And those would range from textiles to furniture to ceramics to metalwork and everything in
between.
The name itself comes from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.
That's a very long name for a society, I think, but okay.
Not for Victorians.
They loved it.
They loved wordiness, didn't they?
So that exhibition society was founded in 1887 to exhibit decorative arts alongside
fine arts.
And there was one guy in it in particular, Thomas James Cobden Sanderson, speaking of
long Victorian names, who first coined the
term in 1887. William Morris is considered the head honcho. He's the daddy. He's the
grand pumba in the situation. It's his ideas and view of the world that inspires so much
of the movement.
There is a quote by Morris in an 1877 lecture. Do you want to read the quote for us?
Yeah. He says, and he's giving this lecture in December of 1877 to the Trades Guild of Learning.
And I think he summarizes-
What a great one.
Shout out to the Trades Guild of Learning.
It's one of the best Trades Guilds.
My favorite Trades Guild.
He summarizes his feelings about kind of everything really well when he says, I do not want art
for a few any more than education for a few or freedom for a few. He and the other arts and crafts people
are really invested in handicraft and utilizing really learned skills to create beautiful,
pleasant, pleasing, comfortable, useful objects. So is it kind of reaction to industrialization?
Have you read the script? No, I was just thinking like that. Is that where it's got like, you know, you've lost, you know, you have, oh God, my brain.
What's it called?
Encroachment?
What's the thing they do when they get all the land of everybody?
Enclosure.
So you have enclosure and then like you get industrialization and you've lost all these
skills, right?
These amazing weaving skills and sewing skills.
So is William Morris like harken back to good times? You should have been in the arts and crafts movement. I is William Morris like, harking back to good times?
Well, you should have been in the arts and crafts movement.
I would have loved it!
Yes!
I love the vibe!
It's all vibes. It's all vibes for me. But yeah, exactly. Like, Victorian London, Victorian
Britain saw a huge amount of change when it came to industrialization in good and bad
ways. So in terms of the population, by 1851 the census tells us that more people
live in cities than in the countryside. That's a big change. You have huge
numbers of people flocking to industrial city centers, but the conditions are bad
oftentimes. People are living in slum conditions, in slum housing with
overcrowding and a lack of sanitation, and generally just bad living situations,
lots of disease. And industrialization is good for some people, for a lack of sanitation and generally just bad living situations, lots of disease.
And industrialization is good for some people, for a lot of people, in that it means that there are more affordable items available to more people.
But the actual manufacturer is gnarly.
We have then a movement that comes along
that's reacting to the trauma of the Industrial Revolution.
You know, it is a trauma, right? Absolutely, yeah.
These artists are responding in a way that feels like they're looking for escapism
and they go hunting for escapism in the past.
They're interested in Elizabethan,
but it's the medieval world that they're particularly drawn to.
Oh, medieval. Obsessed, obsessed.
Nice hats, hats, good hats, pointy hats.
Nice hose, good old pointy shoes as well.
Sure.
So they are idealizing and dreaming about this system
where objects were produced in small-scale workshops rather than these large anonymous brutal factories.
And they're looking for artisan sourdough bread.
They literally are the cottage core folks of the late Victorian.
They would be happy in East London now.
We should probably mention Ruskin. Do you know Ruskin?
I've heard of William Ruskin. No. It's all Williams London now. We should probably mention Ruskin. Do you know Ruskin? I've heard of William Ruskin? No.
It's all Williams to you now. Try another man's name from the period. George Ruskin? John Ruskin.
John Ruskin, well done. There you go. Get there in the end. I've heard of him. He's an extraordinary figure in the 19th century.
He's slightly debated these days. Philosopher? Everything. Amongst everything else. Absolutely everything.
Architect, critic, painter, writer, philosopher, poet. Oh, multi hyphenate.
And he's kind of an inspiration for the arts and crafts movement.
Definitely.
He's an intellectual kind of figurehead.
Yes. And he thought that society would be morally better, which is a bold move already,
if art, design and industry were reimagined along pre-industrial lines. He was like, let's
just get rid of mechanisation. We'd actually all be emotionally and morally better people. And he saw that the best, the most good period
was the medieval period. And he said, for art and design to be successful and morally
uplifting, an artist needed to be involved in every single step of the artistic process.
He's like a nightmare director.
Let's move on to William Morris. We've already
name-checked him already. I think many people would recognize a William Morris print. Who
was William Morris? Where was he educated? How did he get his start?
So he was basically, as we've already discussed, the guy when it comes to the arts and crafts
movement. And he's born in 1834 in Walthamstow to a wealthy middle-class family. His dad is a broker in the city of London.
His mom comes from a bourgeois family in Worcester.
He's comfortably fancy.
He was an architect, a designer, a practitioner of several self-taught crafts.
He taught himself how to paint, how to make furniture, how to make tapestries.
He was also a really acclaimed and talented writer, a poet, a translator.
He was actually offered a largely honorary but still very impressive professorship of
poetry at Oxford, but he turned it down.
Sure, we've all been there.
We've all been there.
You just got too much to do.
I know, I understand.
Too busy.
William Morris is an interesting fella and much like the Bloomsbury group that we spoke
about in our 100th episode, the Arts and Crafts movement again is a bunch of university pals going, hey, I'm a bit posh and fancy like
you and we are all friends and let's do arts.
It's actually pretty wholesome because he just kind of lucked into being friends with
all these people kind of. So in 1852, he goes to Oxford, he's at Exeter College, and he
really soon meets Edward Byrne Jones, who is another ends up, you've at Exeter College, and he really soon meets Edward Burne-Jones, who is another
ends up, you've heard of this guy, right?
Big arts and crafts figure as well.
He's a trainee architect after university, and between his time in Oxford and his time
as a trainee architect, he is kind of surrounded by all these people who share his ideals and
his ethos.
And so Edward Burne-Jones is there, and then he marries Georgiana MacDonald, Edward does,
and then when they get married, Georgiana McDonald, Edward does, and then
when they get married, Georgiana Byrne Jones joins the social circle.
There's also the architect Philip Webb.
There's also the pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the embroidery
artist and model Jane Burden.
Jane Burden is the daughter of a stableman, and she is quote unquote discovered at the
theater in Oxford by Rossetti and Byrne Jones and she starts modeling for Rosetti and then
she starts modeling for Morris and they actually get end up getting married. They
marry in 1859. In 1861 one of the friends this painter named Ford Maddox Brown
suggests that he William Morris, Byrne Jones, Webb, Rosetti, and some other folks that they
establish a design firm, and they do. And it's called Morris Marshall Faulkner and Company.
And then by 1875, it's Morris and Company. And that's what we still have today. But what
I love is that they simply called it the firm. The boys are in the firm.
They were doing everything from furniture to embroideries, jewelry, carpets, woven textiles,
tapestries, metal and glassware, and wall hangings. Like if you wanted it, you could get it from them.
They were the Ikea of their day, except it was four guys who were also socialists.
Yes, and they had amazing skills. And the meatballs are delicious.
Maybe they also made great meatballs. I don't know.
They were really mindful about their employees.
So they actually started hiring and training as apprentices
boys from the industrial home for destitute boys on Houston
Road in central London.
But it wasn't just boys.
I mean, women were involved in Morrison Company
from the very beginning.
Decorative tiles were being painted
by Lucy and Kate Faulkner, who were sisters of Charles Fa Faulkner who was one of the other members of the firm.
And then Georgiana Byrne-Jones, she was involved in the tiles as well. And like every woman in
Morris's family was involved in the embroidery. So his wife Jane embroidering, his sister-in-law
Elizabeth or Bessie Burden embroidering, his two daughters, May and Jenny, embroidering. It was a whole family affair.
They were involved.
His daughter's like,
I'm done, I was thinking about accountancy.
No, get your needle.
Your arts and crafts.
Okay, sorry.
Luckily for him, one of them loved it.
Oh yeah.
One of them, yeah.
I don't know as much about Jenny because she had epilepsy.
So she was just you know
She was ill a lot of the time but may Morris she was a keen embroidery bean
Amazing Carrie we were used to artists being useless
Yeah kind of falling apart and some money men having to come in and be like we'll sort it out you idiots
No, this this goes really well. They expanded to bigger premises in near Wimbledon. Yeah Merton Abbey. Oh, yeah
That's in 1881. I'm gonna be an agent provocateur
here Isabella, because as a historian, I'm gonna have to say one of the reasons the company
flourishes is because of the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, oh good point. I mean come on, they're
rejecting it. Put that in your tapestry and we get virus. I know I'm being annoying, but
we have to be true. The Industrial Revolution creates a middle class. It creates wealth that you can have a house that you
want a tapestry for. Right. Yeah, they're reacting against it and they're also benefiting
from it because by the 1860s and 70s there is a lot more wealth than there was before.
So by one estimate the average income per head of household doubles between 1850 and 1900 and the
middle class triples in size. So yeah, more people with more money meant that
there was more interest in buying more objects. They have really, I think, very
admirable ideas and goals, but their process, this movement is not
helping or affecting the people who are most hurt by the terrible working conditions of Victorian England.
Yeah, and that's always the case, right? You can have grand lofty ambitions, but the economics are always going to underpin, does this work or not?
There's another artist we should mention, because she's slightly different in that she went outside.
Gertrude Geckel, who did interior, but she also did gardens. Yeah, she's most well known for her garden design,
but she also was doing all sorts of interiors,
including designing embroidery
and doing the embroidery herself.
And she had a great name, Gertrude Jekyll.
It's a great name.
Yeah, I mean, there's quite a lot of good names
in this episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But she really encapsulates this arts and crafts interest
in blending together outdoor space and indoor space.
What's interesting about Morris,
he's obviously self-taughtught as we've heard all these things
he's picking up. He's also getting other people to teach themselves. He's inspiring others.
We know of an artist called William De Morgan. He teaches himself ceramics. He has a minor
mishap.
Just a little one.
Do you want to guess what happens?
Does he blow up a kiln?
Yes, he does.
It's every ceramics' nightmare.
But not even just the kiln, like
his whole workshop. Oh my gosh. It's like his house is on fire. He lives though, he survives
and then he just moves. He's like, see ya! He moves to Chaney Walk, very fancy, love
that for him. And he then actually has success with his various experimentations and he becomes
renowned for his stained glass windows and his tiles with Islamic decoration and his furniture. William Morris had created a world where other
craftsmen were all working together to furnish big houses and churches. He's the
Beyonce of the arts and crafts movement. If he does a country album everybody
thinks hey maybe we can all add this influence to our genre. Yeah he's a
beautifully said. He is the Beyonce. I think he's a beautifully said, he is the Beyonce.
I think he would love to know that he is the Beyonce.
The thing that I find quite interesting is the Arts and Crafts ethos moves beyond Morris's
control.
You see that in music, you see that in comedy.
You start a cult, you can't keep hold of it before you know it, they're starting their
own cult.
But we get a sense of an Arts and Crafts movement out of England, into Scotland, into Wales,
into Ireland Ireland maybe internationally
I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, there is the movement goes across the Atlantic and hits the US as well
Via things like journals and lectures from people who are in the movement. It was going to the US after World War one
It was going to Japan. It had
Implicate it kind of had ripples everywhere and it brought up all of this
desire to preserve handicrafts generally. So there were all of these movements
within Britain that were founded in this period to keep craftsmanship alive.
There was the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887, there was the Art
Workers Guild in 1884 and they were a debating society where people just sat and debated
about the principles of art and design.
Yes, please.
Very hardcore.
I'm there.
Sign me up.
I would not be there because debate makes me stressed if I hate confrontation, but you
can go for me.
You can tell me about it after.
There was the Fine Needlework Association, which was an organization founded around the
same time to give employment to-
I really hope the Fine Needlework Association and what was the other one you said?
The aesthetics are like met on the street and it was like, dada, dada, with their like
needles.
There was so much drama.
It's got like knitting needles.
There were so many like embroidery societies.
There was like the Royal Embroidery Society.
There was the Royal School of Needlework.
Like it's...
There's the Fine Needlework Association, but these people are...
I mean, I like the Fine Needlework Association, but they're no Royal Needlework Association.
Like, their work is fine.
There's also another amazing- we've had some amazing names.
We've already had Thomas Cobden Sanderson, who gave us the phrase Arts and Crafts Movement,
but now I have to present to you Miss Eglantine Jeb.
Wow.
Seems like a name you got in like a name generator.
I think, you know what?
Why are there no Eglatines anymore?
Yeah.
Bring it back.
Let's bring back Eggie.
So Mrs. Eggentine Jeb is the-
Eggie Jeb.
Oh, I love Eggie Jeb.
Eggie Jeb.
She sets up the Home Arts and Industries Association.
And they're doing like largely great stuff as well.
So they're also set like, with that, the Home Arts and Industries Association, they are
setting up handicraft classes in cities and villages.
They're supporting local schools. They're alleviating seasonal unemployment.
Unemployment is a nice word that I just made up. Unemployment. And they're basically trying to
keep people out of the pub. So largely admirable, slightly in-your-face moralistic vibes going on.
Yeah. Well, in the Victorian times, was there anyone not having a moral in your face vibe?
Yeah, well, so that's very well said because all of these organizations are basically founded
for two reasons.
One of them is this Victorian philanthropy.
So they're trying to help the poor, they're trying to help the underserved in a moralistic
way.
And then they're also trying to preserve these handicraft skills that they're scared industrialization
will destroy.
Will destroy, yeah. So we get the kind of the broadening out of the movement of the ethos beyond
the arts and crafts movement of William Morris's control. It gets into Edinburgh's social union
in 1885, it's in Ireland by the 1890s, you know, it's really gone beyond his control, but in a good
way, right? It's not, you know, he's not trying to hold it. Yeah, it's kind of morphed into its own
thing. Yeah, which is amazing there's one
question I suppose we should address is that although there's the sort of
democratic element of recruiting the boys from the school for the destitute
and trying to bring women in all of the artists we've met so far
Amen! Well no we've had Goatric cool but I'd say they're of a certain class oh
yeah we'll get into the women in a second okay Okay. They shop at Waitrose, I think.
It's very white male, middle class.
Yeah, a little bit.
Yeah.
So I'm just, I'm wondering if they walked the walk
as well as talking the talk when it came
to genuinely changing who could be an artist
and who could buy this stuff.
Is it middle-class people for middle-class people?
I think they walked the walk as well as they could.
And it did end up being middle-class people
making stuff for middle-class people
simply because of what was feasible and what the logistics were, but I think they wanted
something bigger.
It did have a radical philosophy that wanted to change the landscape of industrial production
and make art available to the masses, but when it comes down to it, craftsmanship, this
really high-quality handicraft that they were advocating for, it takes time and therefore it takes money.
So not everybody could afford that finely crafted stuff.
And yes, you're right, the practitioners, the people involved were usually from the
middle class.
But yeah, the movement did not by and large change the lives of people who really needed
their lives changed in Victorian England.
I think the movement had really good ideas, but the world of capitalism
in which they found themselves meant that they couldn't really free themselves from
that system.
So a heart in the right place, I think, Cariad.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it depends how much you make of your ethos being like, this is
for everyone, guys. So I agree with you. They're born and working in a system which will not
allow them to be free.
But it's interesting that that's also what they marketed themselves.
It's classic gentrification as well, isn't it?
Like you were saying, they move into an area that is destitute and has been ignored.
They live there cheaply and then they destroy the area for people who've lived there for
generations because it becomes a cool area where the artists are and then the house prices
go up and then no one can afford to live there anymore.
And women in the movement, were they given equal weighting? Were they given equal respect,
stature? I mean, we've heard lots of names, but they're often the wives of or daughters
of famous men.
Yeah, I would say sometimes this was an opportunity for women to be more present than in other
art movements for sure. So if I talked about all of the women, I would be here all day, but I'll give you some quick names. There was the stained glass designer, Mary Lownes.
There was the metal worker, Charlotte Newman, painter and enameler, Edith B. Dawson, and May
Morris. She was not only an embroiderer, but she was a textile historian and a designer.
And she actually took over the management of Morris & Company's embroidery department when
she was 23. Wow. Iconic, but sexism was definitely still present.
So the membership to the Art Workers Guild was only open to men.
There had not been a female member of the Royal Academy between 1819 and 1922, so that's
all of the years of the arts and crafts movement.
And Mae Morris and people like her were pretty sick of all of that, so in 1907 she founded
the Women's Guild of Arts.
I should say that generally this art movement and the fact that it puts craft
on the same level as art means that there is more room for women
because it's oftentimes women who are doing those crafts.
Women were exhibiting and designing alongside men.
And there are some interesting connections between this movement
and the British fight for women's suffrage, which is pretty cool.
Sure.
And then there are also some like fun little moments of gender equality.
Gender equality is a little treat.
So like Thomas James Cobden Sanderson, our boy who comes up with the name, he and his wife actually end up sharing their surname.
They like do the equal thing of making a joint surname Cobden Sanderson.
And it's like these, I don't know, a little rare act glimpse
into how some people in this movement viewed the gender divide and how things should actually be.
Wow, okay, this is positive. They can stay.
How does the arts and crafts movement finish? I mean, do people just go, that's enough,
thank you. Time to tidy up guys, look at this mess, come on.
I've invented acrylic plastics.
We need to eat on this table. Yeah. So I mean, nothing changes things like war.
So World War One comes in and the aesthetic changes massively. People don't have the need
or desire for any of these, any of this fine craftsmanship anymore. The war comes and all of
a sudden it's modernism and deco and deco and like what comes after it. So while the arts and crafts movement technically ends at World War One here in Britain, it
does have ripples in other places.
And even though, yeah, the movement is definitely over, we are still in a world where we are
kind of constantly seeing arts and crafts images.
So is it really over?
Is it?
No, I don't think it is.
I think we still, as we've just said, it's very apt for modern life.
Yeah.
It fits.
It's back in fashion. Maybe it never left.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Maybe it just wasn't paying attention.
Maybe it's the friends we made along the way.
The nuance window!
Time now for the nuance window.
This is where Carrie-Adde and I recline in our drawing room with our embroidery samplers
While dr. Isabella has two minutes to tell us something we need to know about the arts and crafts movement
We haven't heard already. So my stopwatch is ready. Take away
Really your stopwatch. I'm scared. Okay
Yeah
If you ever see a William Morris design whether it be on wallpaper an advent calendar or a fridge magnet
Chances are it's probably Morris's work called Strawberry Thief.
Not only is it Morris's most beloved pattern,
it's also one of the most popular text on designs ever.
It's inspired everything from a novel to a video game.
You can find Strawberry Thief covered products
on the shelves of John Lewis, Waitrose, M&S, Waterstones,
and even pets at home, truly fulfilling Morris's desire
to make his art accessible.
With Strawberry Thief, Morris captures the thrushes that he caught stealing fruit in his garden at Kelmscott Manor.
Amidst multicolored flowers, scrolling vines, and frilly leaves are pairs of birds.
Those with yellow and pink wings have their mouths agape. Are they shocked that they've been caught mid-tweet or mid-munch?
The birds with blue wings are the thieves in question, looking very satisfied with plump strawberries hanging from their beaks.
Morris felt that everyone should have access to beautiful surroundings, rest, and work
that inspires satisfaction and pride. And he was deliberate about what sorts of products
should be made from each of his designs. In its original form back in 1883, Strawberry
Thief was a printed cotton furnishing textile, intended to be used for curtains, walls, or loose covers on furniture.
Morris printed it using the Indigo Discharge Method, a many centuries old technique primarily used in Asia that took an especially long time to produce.
Because of this, Strawberry Thief was one of the most expensive printed furnishings available from Morris & Company.
But the price didn't stop those little strawberry-stealing birds from becoming one of Morris's most commercially successful patterns.
Clearly, the commercial success of Strawberry Thief lives on.
140-ish years after the textile was produced, some things are different, though.
That pattern isn't limited to furnishing fabrics, and it isn't expensive.
This is the case for other arts and crafts movement designs, too.
William Morris did intend his work to be widely available, but he was also strategic and specific about how and on what objects his designs should be used.
The aesthetics of the arts and crafts movement are more accessible to us now than ever before.
And I wonder what those artists and makers would think about the ubiquity of their designs adorning everything from dog beds to forks.
Beautiful. Look at that. Look at that. Two minutes and two seconds.
I'm sweaty now. Wow.
It is so ubiquitous.
Everywhere.
That it's almost gone back round to being like a bit passe, dare I say?
Strawberry thief?
Like, because it's on notebooks and pens and every gift shop in every National Trust property
in the country has all the strawberry thief you can desire.
That would be my slightly snobby opinion.
But then, ironically, it's back to mass production again.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's the sort of memeification of the craft.
But to be fair to any Morris, it is a banging pattern.
It's a good and the first time I think you realize what it is because I think we've all
seen it and do you mean and then I went first time I was like, oh, I see that's his like
he designed that that's a thing like rather like, it's just a pattern, like who, you know, a pattern you see every day. I think you do
go, Oh, that is a really good pattern. There is a reason it's so successful. It's so charming,
isn't it? Yeah, it is still still very charming. It is. Listen, if after today's episode, you
want more Carrie ad Lloyd in your life and you can check our episodes on Mary Wollstonecraft,
well, craft arts and craft. Yeah, baby. Got therecraft. Arts and Wollstonecraft, yeah, baby.
Got there in the end, sorry.
And if you wanna hear more about British artistic movements,
why not listen to our 100th episode
on the Bloomsbury Group?
And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast,
please leave a review, share the show with your friends,
subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sound
so you never miss an episode.
But I'd just like to say a huge thank you
to our guests in History Corner.
We had the incredible Dr. Isabella Rosner
from the Royal School of Needlework.
Thank you, Isabella. Thank you so much for having me. I've had the best Dr Isabella Rosner from the Royal School of Needlework. Thank you Isabella.
Thank you so much for having me.
I've had the best time.
And in Comedy Corner we had the cracking Cariad Lloyd.
Thank you Cariad.
My arts and crafts are now fulfilled.
Thank you.
And to you lovely listener join me next time as we reupholster another neglected historical
subject but for now I'm off to go and teach myself ceramics and maybe blow up my house.
Bye!
Hello I'm Robin Ince.
And I'm Brian Cox.
And this is the Infinite Monkey Hedgerow.
He just wasn't able to write a funny joke for the introduction.
That's the reason for the pun.
The new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage.
Science with funny bits.
Science with bits.
Funny science plus bits.
So the reason that the Neanderthals died out, you're claiming, is because they weren't
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Is that...
Yes, exactly. That's why.
This is how we investigate cybercrime. We look for the yachts.
The new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage.
From BBC Radio 4, listen now on BBC Sounds.