As a Visiting Research Fellow at the CBCP, Sophie Thompson will investigate the Walter Crane holdings at the University of Reading, examining Crane’s pivotal role in shaping a distinctive Arts and Crafts aesthetic and educational ethos for children, informed by his socialist beliefs. Drawing on Crane’s correspondence with publishers, his work as Art Director of Reading College (later the University of Reading), and his children’s books and art education writings, the project will examine how these ideas were realised through publishing practices, visual design, and institutional contexts. Overall, the project will reassess Crane’s importance as a socialist and pioneering children’s illustrator and examine the emergence of a socialist-inflected Arts and Crafts culture for children at the turn of the century.
Sophie is currently completing her PhD thesis, Making Socialists: Writers, Childhood, and an Alternative Socialist Education, 1880–1911, funded by a CHASE-AHRC studentship, at the University of Kent. Her research examines how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers conceptualised socialist education and parenting, imagining children as future socialist citizens. More broadly, her work explores fin-de-siècle theories of child development, children’s play and games, parenting, children’s spaces, and utopian thought. From January 2025 to January 2026, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Romance, Revolution and Reform, producing Issue 8 on ‘Play in the Long Nineteenth Century’.