Stave 3 : The Norfolk Biffins

One of the things that makes A Christmas Carol so endearing is Dickens's detailed and often humorous descriptions of London life.  One brilliant example is when the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge on a tour of the sights and smells of grocery shopping at Christmastime.  I made this post's image from the following line in the text, describing some baked apples for sale : "...there were Norfolk Biffins, squat and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner."  I hope I've done them justice.

Stave 2 : "Another idol has displaced me."

I wonder about whether or not Dickens intended for specific allusions and references within his work.  I am by no means an expert on Dickens, or on anything else in the Victorian period for that matter, and so my drawings become, in a sense, an exploration of questions that I ask myself about Dickens and this story.  

For instance, in naming Bob Cratchit, he makes the pun between the nickname Bob as being for both a person and a British shilling : "and on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and stopped to bless Bob Cratchit's dwelling with the sprinkling of his torch. Think of that! Bob had but fifteen 'Bob' a-week himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present blessed his four-roomed house!"

And then, there is the word "cratch," which seems to be a relative of the French word "crèche" (I have never heard it used in American English) - see this article on Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_cradle - so I wonder, did Dickens expect his audience to make a second connection with the character of Bob Cratchit?  Lots of authors do this kind of thing (Shakespeare, Melville, and Joyce come to my mind), so I wouldn't be surprised if "Cratchit" had a deliberate second meaning.

This image is cut white paper on a black background, showing Scrooge's fiancée, Belle, breaking up with him in Stave 2 :  

From details in the text, I have decided, for my version, to place the offices of Scrooge and Marley at 9 Idol Lane, across the street from the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-East.  I have no idea whether Dickens intended this location, it's pure conjecture on my part.  But it's kind of interesting, or at least I think so.  And I hope the current owner doesn't mind.  Here's why I've chosen that location :

1. In Stave 1, there is this sentence, about the weather : "If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit's nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose."  I'll grant the obvious, that this line by itself doesn't indicate anything about the office's location, but Londoners would have known of this church, and being near the Thames riverfront, may well have been colder than further inland.

2. Another line in Stave 1 : "The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there."  St. Dunstan-in-the-East is gothic, damaged in the Great Fire of 1666, and repaired by Christopher Wren.  Here is the Wikipedia page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Dunstan-in-the-East.  I don't know how many other candidates there would be for the church near Scrooge's office, fitting the description, or, again, if Dickens even cared to be so specific.  The Great Fire certainly destroyed a number of medieval buildings, including churches, but many of the rebuildings (many by Wren) adopted newer architectural styles.

(St. Dunstan-in-the-West is also gothic, but it was built in 1842, a year before A Christmas Carol, and therefore isn't "ancient" as described by the text.)

3. This illustration is to accompany the following text, from Stave 2 :

He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
"It matters little," she said, softly. "To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve."
"What Idol has displaced you?" he rejoined.
"A golden one."

St. Dunstan-in-the-East sits between St. Dunstan's Hill and Idol Lane.  It may be coincidence, but I noticed that Belle's use of "idol" is in lowercase, but when Scrooge says it, "Idol" has a capital I.  Spending too much time at the office, to the destruction of something far more valuable : his relationship with the love of his life.  

4. And there is, at Number 9, Idol Lane, a building that was there in the period - it is a Grade II listed building, from the 18th or early 19th century.  The information can be found on these (and also probably other) websites : http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-199524-9-idol-lane-ec3-greater-london-authority#.V3qxqVdllyw and https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1064644

Maybe I'm reading too much into all this.  But this kind of delving makes for a fun virtual tour of London.  Well, for me at least.

Stave 1 : The Ghost of Jacob Marley and the Ghost of Jean-Michel

I used to live in New York.  This was a good idea, and a bad one, as most ideas are.  The problem with New York is, there is so much there, a person can forget What Else Is Out There In The World.  Fortunately, I failed as a New Yorker, and got to see something of What Else Is Out There In The World.

I have not based Jacob Marley on a historical figure.  I was inspired by a photograph I took in New York, on Great Jones Street, of a weathered stone architectural detail.  I think the street address is 43 Great Jones.  I have always thought of it as the Ghost of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who had a studio at the end of the block at number 57.  I always thought that the weathered face should have some kind of ornament fixed on it, or a crown.

So, anyway, I made a sketch from my photograph and built up Jacob Marley's features from the proportions in the stone, and expanded upon the surrounding scrollwork to form the door-knocker, where Marley's Ghost first appears to Scrooge.

Stave 1 : Repairing the Gas-Pipes, finished

Here is the completed image, an aerial view of the activity in the court outside Scrooge's office :

I have tried to depict one of the street kids at the brazier to match the following image (also shown in a previous post), which is the same brazier seen from the perspective of the child :

(You can see all of the images I've made to date at flickr.com or on facebook.  My screen name for both is V.A. Kenyon.  Please leave a comment here, or on my flickr and facebook pages.)

"...and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to."

I have only been to London once, and only literally, not really.  This was in June of 2014, and I was returning to the United States after spending four years in Thailand.  my family was kind enough to buy the plane ticket for me, along with an overnight stay at a hotel at Heathrow.  So technically I was in London, sort of, once, for a period of less than 24 hours.  But really, I saw nothing of it.  I wasn't even there long enough to eat anything with brown sauce.

The images on this blog are from my current body of work, a series of illustrations for Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol".  I hope this blog will generate interest in the project (I am now looking for a publisher), and provide something enjoyable and informative to anyone who casually happens across it.  Kind of like Dickens, as he wrote in his own preface.

There have been numerous adaptions of the book, including illustrated versions as well as films.  Most of them are quite good, and I am not familiar with all of them.  In fact, I am trying to avoid looking at other interpretations of "A Christmas Carol" because I don't want to take any ideas from them.  So I am doing something a little different.  I am trying to keep as close to the exact wording of the text as I can, and I am researching images from the period (c. 1830s - 1843) as source material.  Many of my drawings contain elements that I deliberately derived from specific artworks of that period and earlier.  This allows me to avoid accidentally plagiarizing works that are currently under copyright.  It also allows me to create a connection with the way people in the 1830s and 1840s viewed themselves and their world.

The image above shows the main entrance to the Second Royal Exchange, on Cornhill.  Initially, I got most of my information from Wikipedia (here is a link to the page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Exchange,_London ).  This building burned down in 1838, five years before Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol", and the Third Royal Exchange wasn't opened until 1844.  So this is the building that Scrooge would have known, and to which he would have gone after Jacob Marley's death ("And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.").

Here are the links to the images and texts I used as source material for this illustration.  Please note that one of the source images, the statue of King Charles II, is used under a creative commons license.  The part of my drawing, showing a statue of Charles II in the same pose, by the same sculptor, may therefore be used under the same license.  The sculpture itself is in the public domain.  Out of respect for the photographer (Michael Reeve, whom I do not know personally or professionally), I feel it is appropriate to offer use of that part of my drawing under a similar license.  The other parts of my image should be considered to be under my copyright, as it is my drawing.  All other source material for the image is in the public domain.  The Wikipedia article is also where I found the links to the texts on archive.org.  The work of Wikipedia's staff and contributors has been a really valuable resource for this project.  If any of you are reading this, THANK YOU.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Exchange,_London


Source images of the Second Royal Exchange : 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ONL_(1887)_1.499_-_The_second_Royal_Exchange,_Cornhill.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Exchange,_1779.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Image-RoyalExchangeThomasBowles1751_2.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Microcosm_of_London_Plate_067_-_Royal_Exchange_(tone_and_colour).jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Exchange_1760.jpg

https://archive.org/stream/royalexchangenot00masoiala#page/34/mode/2up

https://archive.org/stream/royalexchangenot00masoiala#page/n51/mode/2up


Source photo of a statue of King Charles II, taken by Michael Reeve : 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rhc-charles2.jpg

I believe this statue was cast from the same original as the statue that was in the Second Royal Exchange.  Both were by Grinling Gibbons, and the pose in this photograph seems very similar, even from the slightly different angle, as the pose in the low-resolution pen-and-ink elevation-and-plan drawing of 1779 (see link above).  The 1779 drawing shows very little detail of it, but A.E.W. Mason's description of it fits the statue photographed by Reeve (See Mason's "The Royal Exchange: a note on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Royal Exchange Assurance", pages 36-37, at https://archive.org/stream/royalexchangenot00masoiala#page/36/mode/2up ).

For the text on the statue's pedestal, see W.H. Pyne's "Microcosm of London (volume 3)", page 22 ( https://archive.org/stream/microcosmoflondo03pyneuoft#page/26/mode/2up ).  I simply drew lines roughly proportional to the text.


Source image for the statue of King James I, above the north entrance in the background : 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_King_James_I_%26_VI_(1618-1620).jpg

I chose James I for this niche based also on the text, page 22, of "Microcosm of London", but I could find no image that showed that specific part of the building.  So I looked at paintings of King James I, and decided upon this one.  I just liked the black-and-gold of the outfit, and I can't really say if this is what the actual statue looked like.


Text sources (via the Wikipedia article) :

https://archive.org/details/oldnewlondonnarr01thor

https://archive.org/details/microcosmoflondo03pyneuoft

https://archive.org/details/royalexchangenot00masoiala


As you can see, I did some research on this.  Not the kind of intensive research that an academic would do, but I think enough to provide a reasonably accurate view of the building as Scrooge would have known it.  After all, the reason for the research was to make the drawing, which in and of itself took some time.  The total time to produce this drawing was just over 28 1/2 hours.  Was it worth it?  Do leave a comment, or find me on Facebook (V.A. Kenyon).