I must apologize to anyone who has checked in on this blog recently, because I've taken a (hopefully brief) hiatus from this illustration project. I'm working on some paintings, including a commissioned piece, and I've also been doing some costume and backstage work at a local theater. And there are only so many hours in the day.
This is from Stave 3. After visiting the lighthouse, Christmas Present flies with Scrooge over the ocean, where they see a ship.
I made my drawing after studying this Dutch drawing of a barque (my eternal thanks to Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and their contributors!) : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barkskibs_staende_rigning2.png
I am also indebted, once again, to Turner, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. They aren't the only artists I look at, but they're pretty good.
"The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his robe, and passing on above the moor, sped—whither? Not to sea? To sea. To Scrooge’s horror, looking back, he saw the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks, behind them; and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as it rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.
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.
In Stave 3, the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge on a tour of Christmas, as it can be experienced in all manner of situations. He doesn't shy away from showing Britain's industrial poverty to Scrooge - shy is the last word one could use to describe Christmas Present - so that Scrooge can see that everyone deserves Christmas cheer whether rich or poor. After a tour of London, including a stop to bless the home and family of Bob Cratchit in Camden Town, Christmas Present and Scrooge fly over Britain and then out to sea.
Industrial Britain was powered by coal. Coal mostly comes from underground. Somebody has to dig it out, if it's to be used. So, after seeing so much Christmas cheer in The City :
"...without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest night.
'What place is this?' asked Scrooge.
'A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth,' returned the Spirit. 'But they know me. See!'
A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and stone, they found a cheerful company assembled round a glowing fire. An old, old man and woman, with their children and their children’s children, and another generation beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire. The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind upon the barren waste, was singing them a Christmas song—it had been a very old song when he was a boy—and from time to time they all joined in the chorus. So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got quite blithe and loud; and so surely as they stopped, his vigour sank again."
Here is my image of the mining country :
It's a composite image. The background is gouache over pencil. The mining pump at the left is an overlaid addition, drawn after an actual British mine pump called Fairbottom Bobs, which I had the opportunity to see in person. It is on permanent display at the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, Michigan. Fairbottom Bobs was no longer in operation by the time of "A Christmas Carol", but it was still on site. In fact, it was not taken down until it was shipped to Michigan, a gift from Lord Stamford (who owned it) to Henry Ford. This information is from Wikipedia, and the full article, with a late nineteenth-century photograph, is here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairbottom_Bobs.
Other influences on this image are the inestimable J.M.W. Turner, the Japanese printmakers Hokusai and Hiroshige, and the Massachusetts painter William Bradford (for some of his arctic scenes; do check out his work at http://www.william-bradford-gallery.org).
