Baby's Own Aesop

Walter Crane, who lived from 1845 to 1915, was an English artist and illustrator, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement and admired for his colourful picture books for children. Baby’s Own Aesop, published in 1887, is one of the most charming. It presents the fables as one-stanza verses, each pictorially pointed by Crane, to use the words of the title page, and the book was meant to be shared between adults and very young readers.

Crane learned his craft as an apprentice to the master wood-engraver William James Linton, who also supplied the draft of the poems for Crane to edit. The result is a book in which text and picture work together, with the verses giving the moral in a few lines and the pictures developing the scene. Crane’s illustrations, printed in colour from engraved blocks, were typical of the high quality of Victorian children’s publishing.

The fables themselves are old and familiar. The fox and the grapes, the peacock’s complaint and the trees and the woodman are among the stories that have been told for many centuries, in many languages, and Crane’s short forms make them easy to remember.

The recording has six chapters, with titles in the old catalogue style, such as Fox and the Grapes, The, and it lasts about forty minutes. It is read by Denny Sayers, who died in 2015. A beautiful facsimile of the book, with its coloured engravings, is available online, so that children can read along while they listen. It is a short and lovely piece, and its sense of fun has not faded.