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The article discusses an English folding screen decorated with a collage of paper cut-outs and other design elements associated with the British arts and crafts movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Background information on the history of furniture design, collages as an art form, and the 19th-century historical context of industrialization and consumer society is provided. The motifs and composition of the collage are described and analyzed as indicators of historical and social aspects of interior design for the middle class in Victorian Britain.

The British Surrealist painter, collagist and photographer Julian Trevelyan became involved during 1937 and 1938 with Tom Harrisson's anthropological research organisation 'Mass-Observation'. The images he created during his short periods of observational study in Bolton and Blackpool - or 'Worktown' and `Worktown on Holiday' - are powerful in their suggestions of the levels of unease repressed at this tumultuous time within the British psyche. The artist achieves these evocations of the unconscious mind, which, according to Freudian theory, was the director of behaviour, through an amalgamation of documentary and Surrealist visualities - in essence, through repeated portrayals of the 'everyday surreal'. The narrative scrutinises Trevelyan's attention to the psychological impact of the nation's material decline upon those believed by Mass- Observation to be most directly affected: the population of Northern England's industrial towns. This he pursues through a systematic visual registration of working- class behavioural patterns during 'spare time', a time when human beings were reasoned by the organisation to be most true to themselves. Ritualistic behaviour associated with the consumption of food and drink is considered. So too is the pursuit of leisure in Worktown, as well as the religious rituals to which its population adhered. The contribution made by Julian Trevelyan to British art and letters during the interwar period constitutes a fantasmic social psychology of that contemporary crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]