In a career beginning in the early 1850s and spanning fifty years, Dresser designed goods including wallpaper, glass, carpets, furniture, ironwork and pottery for at least fifty manufacturers. Many of his designs can fairly readily be placed in the context of the orientalizing and historicizing taste of the day, but his metalwork designs stand out as almost impossibly austere for the high Victorian era. In the 1870s and '80s he composed arresting geometric shapes that are often seen as harbingers of Modernism.

Born in Glasgow, Christopher Dresser enrolled in the government-run School of Design in London in the late 1840s, where he began to pursue an interest in the relatively new field of botany. The search for a hierarchical order in the plant world was a compelling metaphor for visual harmony, and had been explored by several design theorists, among them A. W. N Pugin (1812–1852). Dresser was a student and admirer of Owen Jones (1809–1874), the designer and architect who sought to establish principals for the use of pattern and color. He was awarded an honorary doctorate for his botanical studies from Jena University (Germany), and thereafter he signed his designs (and his production pieces, including this toast rack) "Dr. Christopher Dresser." He was the first commercial designer to consistently apply his name to his productions, one of many innovative aspects of his business acumen.

Dresser came of age during period of soul searching for British manufacturing and design. The country was immensely prosperous, and the successful Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations held in the Crystal Palace in 1851 was a showcase for the nation’s growing industrial might. Dresser, like many of his forward-looking contemporaries, was appalled at the unrestrained and injudicious use of historicizing ornament in many of the exhibits, but he was impressed by the rich patterns and colors of the Indian materials. This early exposure gave Dresser a taste for the exotic, an enthusiasm which culminated in his visit to Japan in 1876. His analysis of Japanese art and architecture, published in 1882, became an important influence in the broadening popularity of Japonism. Though most of his silver designs date from his post-Japan years, it is hard to see a direct connection between Japanese metalwork and Dresser’s designs. He admired the Japanese tradition of combining several metals, but could not introduce these techniques to English makers because hallmarking laws forbid the use of base metals in sterling silver. This crisp and minimally geometric toast rack has no obvious design precedent.

Dresser argued for the abstraction of natural forms into ornamental patterns, and supported "honesty" in materials. Unlike William Morris (1834–1896), and the other founders of the Arts and Crafts movement, who deplored industrial manufacturing, Dresser admired the capabilities of machine production. He believed that a designer must understand the materials and construction for every product, and throughout his career he designed with mass production in mind. The strongly geometric forms of Dresser’s metalwork designs may reflect his notion of efficient manufacturing. Like many of his generation, he maintained that good design should be affordable for the middle class, and he argued that embellishments to silver, which was costly to begin with, ought to be kept to a minimum. He distained cast ornament for most silver objects, but was clearly interested in ways of using sheet metal and square-cut bars and wires. If economy was his goal in designing vessels based on sheet, it was not always attainable. The manufacturer’s costing book for Dixon & Sons, which produced many of his metalwork designs, indicates that the rectangular prototype teapot now in the British Museum cost more than any other model. Hukin and Heath, the Birmingham-based silver manufacturer (founded 1855), appointed Dresser an advisor in 1878, and the firm registered the design for this toast rack the same year.