Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds—born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the water—rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.
But even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in itself."
Maritime trade was, of course, critical for the development of modern Europe, and especially for the development of Great Britain. Before the widespread introduction of railroads, sea routes provided the fastest means of transporting goods. Coastlines, however, don't care one way or the other for the safety of human travel, and numerous coastal regions have lots of underwater hazards.
I modeled my lighthouse after J.M.W. Turner's watercolor painting of Bell Rock Lighthouse, off the east coast of Scotland. Dickens doesn't give a specific location for the lighthouse, so my choice was influenced by Turner. I like his blending of realism and abstraction, so I looked for an image by him of a lighthouse, preferably in a storm, and found it. My version of Bell Rock Light is from the air, and I've tried to interpret the same wave action shown in Turner's sea-level view. I made this image before I made the mining country image (see the previous post, Post 10, of this blog), and Hokusai and Hiroshige also influenced my image of Bell Rock Lighthouse. My image above is gouache on watercolor paper.
Bell Rock and other lighthouses were relatively new things, despite the longstanding historical need. Lighthouses had often been constructed as aids to navigation, and as warnings of subsurface hazards. But it wasn't until the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the engineering difficulties of building long-term storm-proof structures on sites like Bell Rock began to be overcome. Bell Rock was completed in 1810, and Turner painted his watercolor in 1819. The costs were staggering - 42,000 pounds, according to Wikipedia. Wikipedia in turn references Lynn F. Pearson's Lighthouses Volume 312 of Shire book (Osprey Publishing, 2003) for this number. This was no small amount of money during the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. Obviously, lighthouses of this type were high-priority national infrastructure investments.
The construction began only 35 years before A Christmas Carol. I'm writing this in 2016 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where we have a number of lighthouses, which are nothing new to us here and now. But, I think, in 1843, a lighthouse like Bell Rock would have been a symbol to many people of the progress that could come from industrial technology and human willpower overcoming the forces of nature.
The Wikipedia article on Bell Rock Lighthouse can be found here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Rock_Lighthouse. It has links to Wikimedia Commons for both Turner's watercolor, and an 1824 technical illustration showing the construction as of 1809, drawn by Bell Rock's designer, Robert Stevenson. It also has an additional link to a Wikipedia article on the earlier Eddystone Lighthouse off the coast of Cornwall.
Turner's watercolor is located in the National Gallery of Scotland.
Following is my preparatory sketch.
