ABSTRACT
Lucy Crane was an English writer, art critic, and translator who wrote children’s stories and nursery rhymes. Basing her plea on the ideas of J. Ruskin and W. Morris, she suggests that appropriateness is the key to good design. She then gives a number of examples of inappropriate design including ‘a tea-kettle in the form of a drum, with the sticks for handles; a toast-rack formed of wreaths of ivy (what has ivy to do with toast?), or rifles piled in a very unmilitary manner; a biscuit-box in the shape of a coal-box; gilt chain cables for holding back curtains’. Although she acknowledges that there was a role for machinery to produce some items on a large scale, she puts it in a nutshell by stating ‘Division of labour is good for pins, but bad for works of art’. She then goes on to critique the division of labour again, this time in relation to jewellery works.
