Victorian Nursery Tiles

It is the childlike part of us that produces works of the imagination. When we were children time passed so slow with us that we seemed to have time for everything. —William Morris

CFA Voysey Hey Diddle Diddle Arts and Crafts nursery

The Victorian Nursery

Like many Victorian parents, Voysey took his job as a parent as a God-given trust: He believed that what a child sees in those early years goes into the child — not as a theory, but as a conviction — and that the domestic room was therefore a serious training ground. Victorians cherished the concept of a childhood of innocence, as you can hear in the Morris quote above. Yet the childhood for most Victorian children was closer to an occupation: The work of a child was to grow up, to become a God-fearing and productive member of society. Working class children were assigned a trade early on and were often competent before reaching puberty. Upper class children had it little better: A series of nannies, tutors, and private schools. The finer things were indeed a requirement: A young lady should be able to play a musical instrument, be competent in drawing, her handwriting must be both legible and beautiful.

By most accounts, C.F.A. Voysey was a severe man, doctrinaire about his faith and uneasy with the wave of socialism that ran through the Arts & Crafts movement, a wave that William Morris himself had set in motion. Voysey’s tiles for children appear warmer than he was and yet, for his own nursery, he chose Rook and Holly — somber, serious tile, more Victorian Gothic in tone than Arts & Crafts.

The design was not chosen out of mere temperament, however. Featuring three blackbirds perched in a bare winter tree with holly sprigs, Rook and Holly is emblematic of Voysey’s own early life, shaped by his father’s public heresy trial and loss of an ecclesiastical living.

In contrast, the more popular Hey Diddle Diddle is a classic Victorian nursery style that actually predates Voysey by centuries. Indeed, the image was made for his hand: a cow in silhouette against a moon, flat and clear, the kind of shape that reads from across a nursery and stays.