Top hats off to Usborne Publishing for their beautiful new edition of A Christmas Carol.
This is the second time I’ve worked with them on Charles Dickens’ Ghost Story for Christmas. About ten years ago I did an abridged version for the Young Readers series. I like working on these and Usborne takes great care with the adaptations; capturing the essential characters and story to entice budding readers. But I was delighted to be asked to illustrate the complete and unabridged story. There’s so much more in the detail even when you read a story you think you know.
I don’t find Dickens an easy read but he does repay the effort, and his characters, their names alone, cry out to be illustrated. They are often described as ‘grotesque’; they are vivid, certainly, but I think of them more as ordinary people in grotesque situations; fashioned and constrained by circumstance.
I’ve always liked working on mysterious and gothic stories. There is something about watercolours that really suit atmospheric, ghostly subjects; the washes so readily suggest crepuscular light, half formed figures emerging from dark spaces, foreboding shadows, mists and uncertainty.
The ghosts in the story are fantastic and frightening and profound: There’s Marley, of course, bound in the chains of his former life and career, who comes to warn Scrooge that he will be visited by three more spirits. Then comes the Ghost of Christmas Past; perhaps one of the strangest creatures in literature; ‘ - like a child, yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium.’ It’s a shapeshifter and more strangely has a jet of light coming from the crown of its head for which it carries its own extinguisher.
The Ghost of Christmas Present, preceding Coca-Cola’s red-coated evocation, is a Father Christmas figure, full of the joy of good things, but different from him in that he is aware too of darkness and hurt in the world; harbouring, as he does, children called Ignorance and Want in his robe.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come; cloaked in mystery, shows Scrooge his possible, desolate end; disregard from his fellow man and a neglected gravestone. It’s the darkest moment in a story that ends happily when the repentant Scrooge begs on his knees,’ Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!’
Alan Marks
