Walter Crane and the Imperial Federation Map Showing the Extent of the British Empire (1886)

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Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Felix Driver and Stephen Daniels for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, which is derived from work completed for an Arts and Humanities Research Board funded Masters programme in Landscape and Culture at the University of Nottingham.

Notes

Pippa Biltcliffe is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Brian Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), 283. The map and article are also reproduced in Paul Laxton, ed. The New Nature of Maps. Essays in the History of Cartography (London, The Johns Hopkins Press, 2001), 58. The map is also reproduced in Margaret Drabble, For Queen and Country. Britain in the Victorian Age (London, Andre Deutsch, 1978), after 64, and James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London, Reaktion Books, 1997), 20.

Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge and power’ (see note 1 ), 303.

Brian Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, in Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, ed. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (London, Routledge, 1992), 245.

Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, Routledge, 1978).

See Rana Kabbani, Europe's Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule (London, Macmillan, 1986).

See, for example, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (London, Guilford Press, 1994); and Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

The Imperial Federation Map has not been recorded within inventories of Crane's artworks. It is absent, for example, from Paul George Konody, The Art of Walter Crane (London, George Bell and Sons, 1902), and from Isobel Spencer, Walter Crane (London, Studio Vista, 1975).

The resemblance between details in the map illustration and design elements from Crane's broader corpus of work is pronounced. Particular parallels can be drawn, for example, between the depiction of the tiger that appears in the bottom left of the map and those featured in ‘Lilies turned to tigers’ in Flora's Feast: A Masque of Flowers (London, Cassell, 1888), one of Crane's best‐known children's books. Similarly, comparison with the animated figures of Crane's socialist cartoons shows they are closely akin to those represented on the map. See, for example, Walter Crane, Cartoons for the Cause, 1886–1896 (A Souvenir of the International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress, 1896) (London, Twentieth Century Press, 1896).

Harley briefly refers to the map's publishers in his endnotes (‘Maps, knowledge and power’ (see note 1 ), 305, n 30).

Spencer, Walter Crane (see note 7 ), 8. See also Greg Smith and Sarah Hyde, eds. Walter Crane 1854–1915: Artist, Designer and Socialist (London, Lund Humphries, 1989).

A detailed discussion of the Arts and Crafts Movement is offered by Gillian Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources, Ideals and Influence on Design Theory (London, Studio Vista, 1971).

Crane's assertions for the necessity of the decorative arts are outlined in his early papers. For a compilation of these, see Walter Crane, The Claims of Decorative Art (London, Lawrence and Bullen, 1892).

For details of Crane's socialist publications see Spencer, Walter Crane (note 7 ), 141–58.

See, for example, Walter Crane, ‘The architecture of art’, 12–13, and ‘Art and commercialism’, 127, both in Crane, The Claims of Decorative Art (note 12 ).

Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social‐Imperial Thought 1895–1914 (London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1960), 64–71.

M. E. Chamberlain, ‘Imperialism and social reform’, in British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. C. C. Eldridge (London, Macmillan, 1984), 151.

James Sturgis, ‘Britain and the new imperialism’, in Eldridge, British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (see note 16 ), 85–105.

John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1986).

Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999).

See Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988), 54; and John M. MacKenzie, ‘The imperial exhibitions’, in Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984), 96–120.

MacKenzie, ‘The imperial exhibitions’ (see note 20 ), 97.

Frank Cundall, ed., Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London, William Clowes and Sons, 1886).

T. B. Johnston, Howard Vincent Map of the British Empire Showing the Possessions throughout the World of the British People (engraved and printed by W. & A. K. Johnston, 1886).

See MaKenzie, ‘The imperial exhibitions’ (note 20 ), 148.

Captain J. C. R. Colomb, ‘Imperial federation’, The Graphic (24 July 1886), 90–94. For further information about the Imperial Federation League see Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (note 15 ), 56.

Colomb, ‘Imperial federation’ (see note 25 ), 90–91.

Harry Quilter, ‘Some “graphic” artists’, The Universal Review, 2 (September–December, 1888), 102.

Crane had produced a number of greetings cards for The Graphic in November 1874, and again, in February 1875.

Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, Blackwell, 2001), 188–94; Victor Bailey, ‘“In darkest England and the way out”: the Salvation Army, social reform and the Labour movement, 1885–1910’, International Review of Social History 29 (1984): 133–71; M. E. Chamberlain, ‘Imperialism and social reform’, in Eldridge, British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (see note 16 ), 148–67.

Colomb, ‘Imperial federation’ (see note 25 ), 90. See also Walter Crane, ‘Art and labour’, in his The Claims of Decorative Art (note 12 ), 61.

See, for example, the discussion by Driver, Geography Militant (note 29 ), 157–67.

Crane, ‘Art and commercialism’ (see note 14 ), 138.

An example is Crane's famous cartoon: ‘Mrs Grundy frightened by her own shadow’, which featured in the Commonweal in May 1886, the same year that Crane's map was published in The Graphic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pippa Biltcliffe

Pippa Biltcliffe is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London.