In 1900, while he lay dying in a Parisian hotel, Oscar Wilde famously quipped: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has to go’. Wallpaper was, in the nineteenth century, a serious business and of all the artists who designed wallpaper for industrial manufacturers, and the mass market, Walter Crane (1845–1915) is perhaps the best known. Like his toy books, designs for ceramics, stained glass, printed fabrics, and embroidery, Crane’s wallpaper designs may have seemed innocuously decorative, maybe even poetic, but they were shot through with a complex political symbolism that had evolved previous to his conversion in 1884 to socialism which thereafter shaped his pictorial/political imagery. It would be straightforward to unpick the complex interrelationship between the poetic and the political in Crane’s career as a designer but problematically, of all his multifarious activities, Crane considered himself foremost a painter. Morna O’Neill’s new book Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting and Politics, 1875–1890 (Yale) sets itself the difficult task of deciphering the political from the poetic in Crane’s art through a close reading of his major paintings between 1875 and 1890. In addition to socialism Crane’s painting was influenced by the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne as well as the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer but by 1890, O’Neill postulates, Crane had devised his own ‘strikingly individual’ style and ideology (p. 1). Any study of Walter Crane’s work aiming to interrogate his use of political symbolism may have easily focussed on the possible tensions arising from his commercial designs and political prints. Crane was, after all, Herculean in his output designing and working for manufacturers such as the publishers Edmund Evans, George Routledge, Marcus Ward, and John Lane, the ceramic companies Wedgwood, Maw & Co., Pilkington’s, and Minton, the wallpaper and textile printers Edmund Potter & Co., A. Sanderson & Son, Jeffrey & Co., John Wilson & Sons, Thomas Wardle & Co., Templeton & Co., and Warner & Sons, as well as working for numerous political organisations such as the British Socialist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League, the International Socialist Workers, the Trade Union Congress, and the Independent Labour Party. His humanism was not limited to socialism proper either: in 1895, Crane apparently signed a clemency petition on behalf of Oscar Wilde. However, it is in painting that O’Neill contends Crane sought to reconcile all his ideas. For O’Neill: