This week’s discussion about the images in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was really useful to me.  I have next to no experience interpreting images, so that was the thing I was most anxious about going into this course. I’ve spent years building my skills at interpreting and analyzing words, but doing so with images is a whole new world. It was really helpful sitting together as a class and working through the images together to see what purposes we thought each image served.

One thing that really stood out to me regarding the images themselves is the way John Leech used his interpretations of the characters to illuminate Dickens’ themes. My group had looked at the image “Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball” and one of the things we noticed right away about the image was how much detail and colour was put into the drawings of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig. On the other hand, his workers were drawn with less detail, very little colour, and seemed to blend in to the background. The different ways Leech drew each character highlights the disconnect between the upper and lower classes in Victorian England that was so integral to the text. As I  said in my blog post last week, I have read the novella before many times, but never paid much attention to the images. Doing so whilst reading it this time really intrigued me by opening my eyes as to how illustrators like Leech use their pictures to further illuminate themes in the text.