Simply the Best (Known)

 I've now returned from Paris, but whilst there I got into a very interesting and lively discussion with Mr and Miss Walker.  It was after an exhausting trip to the Louvre - a wonderful museum with a terrible map and appalling signage - and we had collapsed in the Opéra Café to eat fine French food.  

Our trip to the Louvre had two objectives:

(1) Miss Walker wanted to see some Ancient Egyptian sculpture and grave goods

(2) Mr Walker wanted to see the Venus de Milo

Two very simple requests, I think you'll agree.  Personally, I just wanted to visit my old friend, the tomb of Philippe Pot…

 

Tomb of Philippe Pot (c.1480)

I absolutely love it, especially taking pictures up their cowls which I find very creepy. I always wonder what I’m going to see! Turns out, it’s this:

Excuse me, just being nosy...

Anyway, I digress.  We found the Egyptian grave goods easily enough but tracking down Venus from inside the sculpture galleries proved a bit of a trek – if we had gone to find her first we would have been fine because there are signposts to her from the entrance, but once in, it becomes a little tricky.  Anyway, I knew when we had finally found her because of the crowd…

As you can see of my picture of the tomb of Pip Pot and his hooded chums, there were a few people, but they were just passing through the gallery.  The picture above was taken by Mr Walker as Lily and I had gone to sit down, unable to cope with the massive crowd around the armless, gorgeous lady. We didn’t even bother to attempt to see the Mona Lisa, which I had squinted at from afar in a previous visit, but the crowds were there obviously because Venus is A MASTERPIECE. So, our lunchtime discussion became who decides what is a masterpiece, is this manipulated in any way and does this ever change?

I know, I know, this is a can of worms, but it links in to my last post and also to the experience of anyone who loved the Pre-Raphaelites before the twenty-first century. It’s all very well now, the Pre-Raphaelites are the Macbeth of exhibitions (the one you put on if you need to cause a stir as people really love them) but thirty years ago, you got a funny look if you said you liked them.  You were meant to like eighteenth century art, and not the fun stuff either, the really grey pictures of sad fish.  If that’s your thing, good luck to you, but not for me. Not only that, but when I first started doing art history, I bought books with names like ‘World’s Best Art’ and ‘100 Greatest Works of Art’ which invariably had the same pictures in them.  So, what is the best work of art in the world then?

Las Meninas (but with cats)

Luckily, your friend and mine Jonathan Jones joylessly listed them in 2014 solving this mystery for all time. He gets extra points for including the Chauvet cave paintings, marvellously pretentious, but his list is 90% European (da Vinci cartoon, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Picasso, Michelangelo, Cezanne plus the cave paintings and the Parthenon sculptures) and Jackson Pollock. Whilst that list has the appropriate level of JoJo dullness (sorry Mr Jones, I think you need a some cake and a giggle) he does touch on some big hitters (although he picks da Vinci’s cartoon rather than the Mona Lisa) and reflects the fact that the vast majority of Good Art ™ comes from European white men.  Apparently.

The Birth of Venus. Sort of.

Also helpfully, in 1980 the BBC broadcast 100 Great Paintings which is more than I have time for now (and seems to have actually involved 220 paintings which is cheating).  Overwhelmingly, in their opinion, the best pictures in the world ever came from the twentieth century, outnumbering every other century by a mile.  The nineteenth century did quite well but you will be massively unsurprised to hear that the best pictures of that century were not English, with only two Pre-Raphaelites present (I was surprised they did that well).  The sole representation of the Pre-Raphs were Millais's Ophelia and Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, which I have to admit was a bit of a shock.  No Rossetti, let alone Burne-Jones. You will also be wholly unshocked to hear that only six Great Artists were women, with only Mary Cassatt and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun representing pre-twentieth century female artists.

Rubber Duck with a Pearl Earring

One thing I noticed when searching for the ‘best art works ever’ is that some of the results interpreted that as being ‘most famous’ which I think might be the point of many of these lists. If you take ‘most famous’ for being synonymous with ‘best’ (I know it isn’t but bear with me) then the list is fairly consistent; we get the Mona Lisa, Girl with Pearl Earrings, Van Gogh (Starry Night if you are edgy, Sunflowers if you are basic, apparently), Picasso’s various unfortunate looking ladies, Renaissance Venuses and maybe a bit of Andy Warhol/The Scream/Northern Renaissance peasants.  Las Meninas consistently scores well, even Johnny Jones likes it, and I think it can be labelled the most edgy of all famous paintings, but the question has to be asked whether Vermeer would chart if the book and film hadn’t raised the consciousness?  Add to that list Klimt's Woman in Gold which has started to outshine The Kiss since the movie about the former.  I think there is definitely a case to be made for relabelling ‘best’ for ‘best known’ but that is only half the story.

Detail of Millais' Ophelia

Where are the Pre-Raphaelites? You cannot tell me that Ophelia is not worth a mention for the face alone. In Time Out’s 2025 list, they even included estimated financial values (rude) which adds a another dimension to a painting’s ‘worth’. I find it interesting that on an awful lot of lists, Whistler’s Mum is included as one of the world’s best but no Millais/Rossetti/Hunt etc. So come on, does no-one (beyond the BBC2 exhaustive list) think the Pre-Raphaelites are among the greatest and the good?

Hokusai's The Wave (Nom Nom Nom)

Hang on, I’ve just had a phone call from Hokusai. I’ll rephrase my question – does no-one think the Pre-Raphaelites are among the best Western paintings? Apologies to all artists in the East because if you didn’t paint that wave (or that dodgy one with the woman and the octopus) you don’t get a look-in.

Won't somebody please think of poor John Singer Sargent!

Turns out, this site includes a few Pre-Raphaelites including Hunt, Millais, one of Rossetti’s Prosepines and even a Burne-Jones.  To be fair, they listed loads of pictures so it would have been a bit rude had they not shoved in a couple – everyone gets a look in, including John Singer Sargent who I had not noticed was neglected in other lists. Why had I not noticed that Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was not on the lists when it is a brilliant painting? The Victorians, especially those working in England, have been alarmingly ignored, So possibly, due to their familiarity, the Pre-Raphs will now appear among the establishment in the lists of the best-known art works, but still that’s not ‘best’ is it? Which leads me to this conclusion…

Fair Rosamund, not on any lists, which is rude

In my last post I spoke about how Rossetti didn’t like his portrait being painted, and I wondered if that affected how we view him. I think that Rossetti’s peers desperately wanted to honour him and felt that he was a Great Artist™ (his poetry being somewhat more controversial) but his avoidance of that, for whatever reason, means that his value is lost to his future critics.  If other artists were able to express that they felt Rossetti was great maybe it would never have been a question. Likewise, I feel that because of the controversies surrounding Millais and Rossetti and their complicated love lives, all the Pre-Raphaelites have become tarred with the Reality Telly brush and the stories about who slept with who overshadows the brilliance of their art. 

I think the answer is a slightly impossible one - we should stop attempting to produce 'Best Art' books because they are flawed and massively influenced by what is known and societal norms. I'm happy for journalists to ask people what their favourite works of art are, but no-one has the right to make you feel stupid just because you don't think cave paintings in France mean more to you than dogs playing snooker. Then again, if you like those cave-horses because they strike you as amazing and heart warming, then that's awesome too. See all the art and love what resonates with you, famous or not.

Let me know your favourite works of art, and here is one of mine...

The Temptation of Sir Percival (c.1894) Arthur Hacker

Everytime I see it, it makes me giggle because it is so beautifully painted and utterly, gloriously silly. What more can you ask for in life?

Following Fanny's Footsteps

 Bonjour!  I am in Paris, which is awfully fancy and filled with delicious things to see and eat. Other than trying to see how many moelleux au chocolat I can pack back, I am also in hot pursuit of Fanny Cornforth.  I grant you I am 161 years late, but still Fanny Cornforth's adventures in Paris are something I think we should all be talking about.

Venus Verticordia (c.1863) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The year is 1864, two years after the death of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth and two years since Fanny Cornforth became Rossetti's exclusive lady friend, with a house just round the corner from Cheyne Walk.  Yes, she was still married to Tim Hughes, but for the most part, she was Rossetti's world, his model, muse and lover.  She was the face of his art, appearing in numerous domestic sketches as well as Fazio's Mistress, Woman Combing Her Hair, the precursor for Lady Lilith and Venus Verticordia, not to mention The Blue Bower. Therefore, when Rossetti travelled to Paris on 28th October 1864, he took Fanny with him.

I talk about this in Stunner but it really isn't discussed anywhere else, and no surprise really as Rossetti only talked about it in a letter to George Price Boyce, about how he and Fanny had just returned from Paris. In no other correspondence from the actual trip does he mention Fanny's presence, but then he was writing to his family and so that is unsurprising because (a) it's Fanny and (b) the last time he went was his honeymoon, which would have all seemed a bit distasteful.  Honestly, that detail does make me cringe a little - let's go on holiday to the same place as you honeymooned with your recently deceased wife! Such larks! Anyway, let's start with the Grand Hotel...

When Fanny and Rossetti arrived in Paris, they first stayed at the Grand Hotel on the Rue Scribe, at right angles to the Opera House.  The Opera House, or Palais Garnier (because you are worth it) was under construction from 1861 to 1875, so some of it would have been apparent. When they arrived in 1864, the hotel was a mere two years old and was part of the reconstruction of Paris under Baron Haussman. With 800 rooms on four floors, it was vast and luxurious and caught the public imagination, with royalty staying there, Victor Hugo hosting parties and Emile Zola's character Nana dying of smallpox there. Smashing. I didn't catch smallpox, but I did visit the same square...

Say hello (or rather Bonjour) to the Intercontinental Paris Le Grand, a five star experience which will set you back rather more than we spent on our hotel.  According to The Diamond Guide for the Stranger in Paris (which is not as filthy as it sounds) from 1867, it had a majestic dining room, a reading room, coffee room, telegraph office and rooms that cost between 4 and 40 francs a night which translates as around what it starts at now (a couple of hundred pounds a night) so maybe it isn't a surprise that Rossetti and Fanny only stayed there a couple of nights, moving to the Hotel de Dunkerque et de Folkestone at 32 Rue Laffitte...

We walked around a kilometre beyond the Opera House, past the Galeries Lafayette and up the endless, uphill Rue La Fayette until you reach the crossroad with Rue Laffitte.  I took a picture looking up towards Notre Dame de Lorette (covered in scaffolding I think). Fanny and Rossetti stayed in number 32 which I am pretty much outside of but has long since been replaced by a modern building. Dunkerque and Folkestone was a much older hotel, listed in Bradshaw's Illustrated Travellers Handbook as being small and well-kept with 'every kind of attention paid to its visitors'.  English and German were spoken and the food was plain and good, which is not exactly what you'd hope to read but is reassuring.

The couple were in Paris for around a month before returning to London, and whilst there they visited the zoological gardens in the Jardin des Plantes, a 6km walk (or carriage ride). At the zoo, they tickled a wombat, who liked it (according to Rossetti). They also visited Louisa Desoye's shop at 220 Rue de Rivoli, which is the extremely busy and expensive row of shops outside the Louvre. Louisa Desoye was a leading importer of Japanese objects and was frequented by many artists at this time (see here for more information on the Desoyes).  Unfortunately for Rossetti, James Tissot had beaten him to it and bought all the costume, so no kimono for Fanny, sadly. Rossetti settled for some books and the piece of gossip that his rival collector Whistler, another of Desoye's customers, was terribly jealous of Rossetti's blue and white collection, which leads me to wonder if that was the spark for The Blue Bower...

The Blue Bower (1865) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Also, while in Paris Rossetti visited with fellow artists and galleries, seeing works by the Impressionists which Rossetti did not care for at all calling them 'scrawls'. I think what I am left with by this visit is that Rossetti could take Fanny out and about in the city without anyone asking questions or feeling judgemental.  I have a few questions about why Rossetti would take Fanny to a city that he had taken his wife to only a couple of years earlier but I get the impression that it was a work trip of sorts for Rossetti. He loved the work of Delacroix (who had died the year before), and wanted to see his work on show in the capital. Henri Fantin-Latour had wanted to include Rossetti in his painting Homage to Delacroix...

Homage to Delacroix (1864) Henri Fantin-Latour

Just as a side note, Rossetti was meant to be in this picture but Whistler (in the middle, stood up) couldn't persuade him.  Likewise, Julia Margaret Cameron was desperate to take Rossetti's picture, but again he refused.  He hated G F Watts' portrait of him so much that he gave it to Fanny.  I wonder if he had sat for all the portraits he was asked to do, Rossetti might be taken more seriously today, but I also wonder if his refusal to have his likeness taken was a symptom of his declining mental state. I digress...

Fanny Cornforth (1868) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Walking in Fanny's footsteps in Paris was an interesting experience, not least because it was her only experience of foreign travel, something unthinkable for her, a girl from rural poverty. Although the hotels promised English speaking staff, she would have been in the company of people who did not speak English, including her companion. How would she have felt? Would she have known if they were talking about her? The noise and bustle of Paris would not have been any different than that of London but, of course, it was totally unfamiliar. It was 1864 and Rossetti was beginning his long walk towards substance abuse, mental instability and eventually death, but were they, at that moment, happy? It would be quite the experience to find yourself in a foreign land with a man whose affections were uncertain, whose mental state was unreliable and would start his obsession with Jane Morris within the year, not to mention swapping Fanny's face for that of Alexa Wilding. I hope Fanny ate, drank and was thoroughly spoiled in Paris, enjoying the attention of other artists and the man she loved, Rossetti. 

Because, as the Palais Garnier says, she was definitely worth it.

How Cicely Mary Barker Saved Scalextric

 Recently, I was clearing out nonsense from our attic and came across something very precious indeed...

This is, of course, a letter from the tooth fairy, Fairy Primrose and dates from the late 1970s.

Now, when I told Mr Walker what it was, he gave me a look that I am very familiar with - It was the look of a man who really doesn't want to point out how odd my family is, but he married into it so really, it's his own fault. As far as I was concerned, as a child, the tooth fairy was called Fairy Primrose and when I lost teeth, I sent her a little letter along with leaving the tooth under my pillow.  Occasionally, she would write back.  Before you all point out the obvious, yes I am very much aware that it was my father who wrote the letters (although he denies it to this day) but the reason they are from Fairy Primrose was because I absolutely loved Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairy books. 

This post feels familiar as we will be treading similar ground to my post on Kate Greenaway and to a lesser extent Edith Holden, the Edwardian Lady of Diary fame, covering how I inadvertently absorbed Victorian culture in the 1970s and '80s childhood.  I'm not saying that is why I am the way I am today, but it might answer some questions.  It also makes me feel like I need to write a book on all the pieces of Pre-Raphaelite influence that crept upon us in the latter part of the twentieth century. Today's subject is the originator of my good friend Fairy Primrose, Cicely Mary Barker, and how she ended up saving the beloved toy manufacturer, Hornby.

Cicely in pursuit of fairies, in a boat

Let's start with Cicely, born in 1895 in Croydon, which doesn't fill me with visions of fairies (apologies to Croydon). She was the daughter (and granddaughter) of a seed merchant so it can be guessed that there might have been a fair amount of plants around the Barker home. As a child, Cicely had epilepsy and was too delicate to attend traditional school with her sister Dorothy (who was 2 years her senior).  Instead, little Cicely read and drew at home, until her father enrolled her at Croydon Art Society in around 1908, together with a correspondence course on art. In the Mitcham Advertiser in 1909, there is a report of a Miss Cicely Barker winning 1st prize for an outdoor sketch in a children's art competition in Epsom.  She went on to win an honourable mention at the 1910 Art Society show with her still life, aged only 15, and again the following year with a water-colour of a figure.

First edition of Flower Fairies of the Spring (available on Abebooks)

The Croydon Times was a supporter of Cicely from the start, posting in 1924 how she was a young writer and illustrator to watch, after the success in 1923 of her first book Flower Fairies of the Spring. There were certain elements that came together for this winning formula which was to make her name and keep her a household name for over a hundred years.  Firstly, and most simply, after the death of her father in 1912, Cicely, her mother, her maternal grandmother, and sister Dorothy all lived together at 17 The Waldrons in South Croydon where Dorothy ran a school. This gave Cicely an inexhaustible amount of child models to be her little fairies. Secondly, in 1917, two little girls in Cottingley, Yorkshire, got hold of a camera...

Frances Griffiths and Fairies (1917)

There wasn't an universal belief in fairies, no matter what some accounts tell you, however in a world rather ravaged by war and a pandemic, I think the public wanted a bit of a distraction and so fell for Fairy Fever. In the newspapers that reported on the photographs, a decent amount of scepticism about the 'alleged "fairies"' (Leeds Mercury, December 1920) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyles "Evidence" (Shipley Times and Express, 1922).  However, the sheer amount of enjoyment that the public obviously got from the whole tale shows that Cicely was pushing on an open door. According to the beautiful Flower Fairies collection published in 2016 by Frederick Warne, Cicely was not only deeply religious but also a lover of the Pre-Raphaelites and wanted to keep her fairies as close to nature as she could manage. She travelled to Kew Gardens to find the right plants to sketch, and I think the joy of her work lies in the fact that her plants are wonderful studies and highly realistic, lending a sort of verisimilitude to the little poppet with wings beside it.

In 1924, Cicely published Spring Songs with words and pictures, together with music for the songs by Olive Linnell (1880-1957). Flower Fairies of the Summer naturally followed in 1925 and was welcomed by an enchanted public. When Autumn followed, the books began to be sold as sets, and each was accompanied by Olive's music.

For more on Olive, see this lovely page.

Just a note, but I was delighted to see that in the 1921 census, Cicely is recorded as an artist.  It makes such a difference. Onward to the 1930s, and throughout 1930 the Kent Tuesday Express published a fairy poem every month in their newspaper.  This was an interesting move, as Cicely wasn't a Kent resident (I think she was living in Surrey which I grant you isn't far) but I think it was a reflection of how broad the appeal of the poems was, aside from the images. We tend to think of Cicely as a painter who wrote some words to accompany their art rather than an illustrated poet, but maybe we should think of her the other way round? By 1931, children were acting out the fairy poems as entertainment. At the Rose Hill Wesleyan Church in Derby, children between 2 and 10 years old performed as part of the bazaar. A year later in the Dundee Courier, an Easter party for children was reported to contain the 'Spring Songs' by Cicely and Olive, performed by the Ogilvy family, including Lord and Lady Ogilvy.

In 1933, Cicely was praised for the release of her book A Little Book of Rhymes New and Old, which includes poems by Shakespeare, Blake, Lamb, Keats, Coleridge as well as Lewis Carroll and Walter de la Mere, with numerous illustration and twelve colour plates and released just in time for Christmas. The same year, she also released the Little Picture Hymn Book, containing three dozen hymns illustrated but without music (presumably already known to the reader). 1934 saw the release of the Flower Fairy Alphabet and it is clear that Cicely had become a household name for safe, charming entertainment, perfect for gift-giving and, no doubt, Sunday School prize-giving.

In 1939, Cicely, Dorothy and their Mum all appear together on the pre-war register, still living in the school-house in Croydon, although Dorothy had retired. The same year, Cicely held an exhibition of her holiday sketches of landscapes, at the Craft House in Reigate. She also exhibited some sketches of children but I noticed that added to these were some of the original sketches for the flower fairies, which were not for sale. I wondered if she had to include them to guarantee an audience, like a musician who always has to play their most famous song. 

The Primrose Fairy (1923) Cicely Mary Barker

The 1940s were not financially kind to Cicely, who wrote in the Daily Express that due to the colour printing in her books, she did not earn very much money from her high sales, some years earning less than £200 (which equates to around £8000 in today's money), bearing in mind that she was the only bread winner in the house of three women before the introduction of the Basic State Pension in 1948. The only one of her paintings in a national collection comes from this period and contains no fairies at all...

Out of Great Tribulation (1948)

This is the sort of thing I would expect to see in the little Bibles we were given as children, but also makes me think of the mural in this church after the Great War. She also decorated panels for St Andrew's Church in Croydon, which are still there today. An interesting move she made in the 1950s, possibly to diversify her income streams, was a portrait of General Sir Ernest Cowell, as reported in the Croydon Times in 1952.  Sadly, I can't find a copy of it because I'd love to see what she made of him.

CMB in older age

Cicely's mother died in 1950 and Dorothy followed in 1954.  Cicely designed stained glass in memory of her sister for the now-demolished St Edmund's at Pitlake (really useful page here) and until the end of Cicely's own life in 1973, she remained in the public consciousness as the flower fairy painter. At her death, people knew who she was and there was renewed interest in her works which fitted perfectly into the floaty 1970s, with the Blackie Publishing group slipping them into Christmas offerings alongside modern things like Topsy and Tim. The books grouped nicely with Kate Greenaway and all things Victorian, skipping neatly into the 1980s, where sets of prints were advertised to hang in your child's bedroom (no doubt on their 'apple white' walls).  The Stratford and Avon Herald advertised flower fairy presents from 30p for Christmas with jigsaws and a birthday book being favourites.  It seems inevitable that someone would think of turning them into dolls but it is who and what happened next that is surprising.

In 1984, toys for boys ruled the marketplace, mainly because boys tended to collect things whereas girls had a doll or toy that could have small accessories (or furniture etc) added on special occasions. This changed with the introduction of My Little Pony which was the biggest selling toy of that year, making girls' toys rule for the first time since Sindy's heyday in 1979, sparking a girl economy revolution. Big sellers included Palitoy's Care Bears, Poochie from Mattel and Charmkins from Hasbro, all of which were American properties, so British companies scrambled to create their own whimsical lines. Hornby, based in Margate in Kent, were famous for their trains but with the growth of home video games, heirloom toys like the pieces they offered were falling from fashion and so they diversified not into other boy toys, but towards girls with things that were more ephemeral.  They created Pound Puppies (small soft collectable dogs), but also, in 1984, just in time for Christmas, a range of flower fairies...

The Suffolk and Essex Free Press were effusive - 'The magical world of fairies has captivated and delighted millions of children all over the world for countless years.  Now this make-believe has come true with the introduction by Hornby Hobbies of an enchanting range of exquisite dolls and flower costumes, which, with an extensive range of accessories, creates an exciting dimension in imaginative play...' The range started with six fairies; Guelder Rose, Heliotrope, Almond Blossom, Sweet Pea, Narcissus and Pink, standing around 6 1/2 inches tall with joints at the head, shoulders, slant waist, hips and click knees.  They were marketed on their pose-ability, making it easy for them to be placed in 'life-like' situations and posed like Cicely's pictures.  Soon the fairies were joined by more, plus a home, a garden and a fairy pool (with real working shower!) and animals to ride, giving the variation into cuddly toys. They were priced around £3.50 each (translating to around £12.50 now, which is not bad as the average Barbie is nearer £20) and it easily competed with Cabbage Patch Dolls for the 1985 Christmas market.  This was partly due to Hornby's full commitment to the brand of Flower Fairies and making it a success.  They allowed further diversification on behalf of Cicely's estate into bags, boxes, soap, clothes and pomanders which in turn provided marketing for the dolls.  The Christmas of 1984 brought Hornby £1.7m in revenue.

A 1985 music box

Blackie jumped aboard the resurgence of the brand in time for the 60th anniversary of the original titles and reissued the books for £2.95 each in hardback with full colour dustjackets, or £11.95 for a boxset.  This was March 1985, after which The Bookseller reported, Blackie Publishing planned to spend around £15k on the production of a range of point of sale materials for bookshops, which they showed off at the London Book Fair that Spring.  This included window display stages, cut out fairy figures, window stickers, posters and leaflets which would be sent out to bookshops that placed an order over £150. Looking to Christmas of that year, Blackie had great plans to produce different adaptations of the books and send them all over the world as the foreign rights market were clammering for fairy fever, with the biggest market being Japan.  Japan had at this time just exported its own Victorian themed toy, the ever popular Sylvanian Families, so went wild for the dolls, although the Bookseller ended on a rather racist note about changing the fairies faces for foreign markets, and the rather odd statement 'Let us hope Cicely Mary Barker is settled comfortably in her grave.'

Hornby saw boys return to trains and unlike some of its other British competitors, it flourished.  By 1986, Pedigree had given Sindy a disasterous rebrand then passed her over to Hasbro (I remain devastated) and Palitoy had ceased as a British company and vanished, as noted in the New Socialist (don't tell me I'm not flexible in my sources).  Hornby's very British face, its factory in Kent and the success of both its boy (trains and Scalextric) and girl toys was a source of industrial pride.  Not only that, the interest it all created led to the publication in 1985 of A Regency Lady's Fairy Bower by Amelia Jane Murray (or Lady Oswald as she was also known (1800-1896)), published for the first time 90 years after her death with obvious links (and reference in the reviews) to Cicely's work.

Not only that, but the success of one lady illustrator's work as a doll emboldened Hornby to create a second line based around Mabel Lucie Attwell's Boo Boos. Unfortunately, they did it like this...

Well, that is just haunting, but if you would like more visit this page.

Hornby's Flower Fairies have been named one of the last British girl dolls, which is hard to argue with and Hornby's fairies continued until 1989.  Hornby put their hopes in their fashion doll Cassy, a seven inch supermodel who loved horses and disco and would rival Barbie.  Sadly, she did not.

Candytuft figure, c.1999 available on eBay

The Flower Fairies persevered and became the domain of aunts and grandmas, existing in delicate, beautiful little statuettes for your mantlepiece, and decorative plates.  The books remain ubiquitous, proof that in England on sunny afternoons, fairies will be swinging off your begonias (not a euphemism). The Woodland Trust produced a range of enamel brooches that supported their charity, and Cicely M Barker and her fairies have been absorbed into the national consciousness, like Peter Rabbit and Paddington Bear, somehow saying something about our character, our dreams and values.  The reason I find things like the flower fairy dolls fascinating is that, years after their creation and the death of their author, these characters live on as things children can hold in their hands and create more stories and rhymes about.  This is even more true of the fairies than of Pedigree's Kate Greenaway terrifying moppets, as they are so tactile and endearing.  I made the mistake of buying an assorted lot for tuppence on eBay and now our house is crawling with them.

Honestly, this one is no help at all, but is everso cute...

So, in conclusion, Victoriana in the 1970s and 1980s is fascinating and possibly you could argue that it is no coincidence that these debutted the same year as the big Tate exhibition on Pre-Raphaelite art. Also, the introduction of toys like these, like the Kate Greenaway dolls and even Sylvanian Families opened my generation back up to all things Victorian, which for older generations were seen as unfashionable. I know I have readers here who are in their 70s and 80s (even 90s) who love all things 19th century, but my dears, you are in a minority and anyone who was taught art history in the 80s and 90s will remember being told how awful everything in the UK post-Turner was. There must be more in the way of toys that embraced the Victorian aesthetic and I will continue my hunt. I found the comment that Cicely would not be easy in her grave with all that monetising of her work, but honestly, I think she would have been delighted, only sorry it hadn't happened earlier.  The idea that artists and authors aren't commercial creatures is a rather privileged one, considering Cicely's letter about her finances.  I like to think that because of her little fairies, she saved Scalextrics and the fortunes of one of the few remaining British toy companies, which everyone should thank her for.