What do we mean by the term ‘Arts and Crafts movement’? In the 1990s, my then colleague, Annette Carruthers, and I were constantly revisiting that question when we were putting together a series of catalogues for Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, one of the most important public collections of Arts and Crafts objects in Britain. According to Dr Imogen Hart, currently Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art, the term ‘has evolved into a phrase with the properties of an adjective’ – a quick search on the internet will bear this out. And as early as 1918, the designer W A S Benson, who, as Hart notes, was closely involved with the movement, remarked sorrowfully that the public was ‘bewildered by the widespread adoption of the name Arts and Crafts by innumerable minor societies and trades’. Throughout this book, developed from the author's doctoral thesis at the University of York, Hart refers to the ‘Arts and Crafts movement’ in inverted commas in order to question its existence as a coherent entity. Was it a ‘movement’ as such, or was it both a development from mid-nineteenth-century efforts at design reform and another manifestation of the Aesthetic movement?

Hart's objective is to integrate the Arts and Crafts movement into the history of late Victorian design, using objects as evidence. She includes a perceptive analysis of the various design manuals for the home – often written by women, as in the case of Mrs Lucy Orrinsmith's The Drawing Room. Her main focus, however, is on William Morris; her discussion of his three homes – Red House, Kelmscott Manor and Kelmscott House – is illuminated by a good selection of historic black-and-white photographs of the interiors. She also provides useful insights into the workings of Morris & Company, particularly when discussing the marketing of the firm and analysing a few of its products in depth. Her investigation of the London-based Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society concentrates on its initial phase in the last decades of the nineteenth century – one of great promise and slow decline – but largely ignores the revitalization of the Society in the twentieth century under the leadership of Henry Wilson.

As Hart points out, many accounts of the Arts and Crafts movement focus on the aims and ideas of individual designers to explain the movement, rather than on the objects themselves. However, she is somewhat selective in her secondary sources, relying, for example, on an early essay (1984) by the foremost Arts and Craft scholar, Alan Crawford, rather than his more recently published work. Instead of concentrating on approaches to design and the processes of making, she attempts to provide a fresh context for Arts and Crafts objects and an analysis of their qualities and characteristics. Her analytical descriptions of ceramics and metalwork by William De Morgan, Walter Crane and C R Ashbee in the Arts and Crafts Museum at Manchester Municipal School of Art set up in 1898 are particularly useful.

Although Hart makes it clear that she is concentrating on the nineteenth century, the lack of any in-depth discussion of developments in the early twentieth century leave this assessment of Arts and Crafts unresolved. It was in the first decade of the twentieth century, for example, that Ernest Gimson produced his classic furniture and metalwork designs, Arts and Crafts stained glass flourished under the influence of Christopher Whall and Edward Johnston revitalized the art of calligraphy. Despite this, Arts and Crafts Objects is a useful addition to the published work on the Arts and Crafts movement and provides a thought-provoking commentary on the development of design in the second half of the nineteenth century. It includes good-quality colour and black-and-white illustrations that are closely related to the text.