Description

Read Baby’s Own Aesop (1887), with its cryptically political ‘morals’ and stunning illustrations by Walter Crane. Crane was not just a brilliant graphic designer and chromolithographer, but also an ardent socialist, close friend of William Morris, and a Marxist Trade Union supporter.

The Baby’s Own Aesop uses short, rhymed versions of the famous fables of the ancient Greek story teller Aesop. In Crane’s preface he tells us that he has produced his version of the tales from a manuscript kindly lent to him by the wood-engraver, William James Linton.

Crane continues, however, ‘I have added a touch here and there’.  Since Linton was as radical in his own Chartist-republican way as the more socialist-Marxist-Internationalist  Crane, it is virtually impossible to tell which of them is responsible for the very individual character of the morals the book prescribes.

The title page proudly reports that the rhyming fables come with “portable morals”. These morals are usually printed in capitals in the white space surrounding the rhyme, which is itself embedded within the page’s picture.

The fable of  ‘King Log and King Stork‘, for example, simply and clearly states: ‘DON’T HAVE KINGS’.

‘The Farmer’s Treasure’, meanwhile, shows that ‘PRODUCTIVE LABOUR IS THE ONLY SOURCE OF WEALTH’.