I found it very fulfilling to be able to look at A Christmas Carol, written by Charles Dickens and Illustrated by John Leech today in class with my fellow peers. I have read/seen all different types of versions of A Christmas Carol as a result of just simply growing up. To call it a classic is an understatement, but to be able to study it in a university class this semester is a full circle moment. The images curated by John Leech have extreme depth and they have the capacity to be analyzed to great lengths.

I found that collectively annotating A Christmas Carol was an interesting experience because it really brought numerous minds together and enriched the concepts and the novella even more so. I personally liked how annotating and researching about the image further reveals things that I haven’t really noticed or paid attention to prior—the significant details put into things.

In creating annotation for Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, I was most interested in the craft annotation.  It is simple enough to look up a word or phrase we do not understand and give it context; the annotations for literary aspects are more subjective for creativity and interpretation.  For example, my content annotation was on “coach-and-six,” an expression unfamiliar to me.

This week, we looked at A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, spending a considerable amount of time working with the various illustrations by John Leech. I found it really informative and helpful going over the images as a class and talking about how Leech used the images to create his own interpretation of Dickens’ words. I am definitely not well-versed in the world of art, so analyzing illustrations like we did today in order to find some deeper meaning was really difficult for me.

I really enjoyed today's exercise of annotating and analyzing the images and text within Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol.  Starting off the lecture with some context about how Christmas was celebrated in the 1840's allowed me to understand the text better. While reading through and annotating the chapter assigned to my group, it was interesting to find certain lines that would not make sense in today's context or words that we maybe no longer use.

The dead as a doornail passage called to mind the satirical works of Johnathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Swift's essay (published in 1729) addresses the topic of famine and the lower class being codified as a burden on society. The greed and self-righteousness of the upper class which Swift counters in his essay are still prevalent at the writing of A Christmas Carol. The question arises of whether this exploitation can be changed on a grand scale.

This week's class presented many interesting challenges as we began our first annotation assignment for Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. I found the process of annotation to be incredibly interesting and engaging. Through these annotations I was presented with a great opportunity to research and analyze the text in more detail than I otherwise would be. I was able to learn about the historical context of many of the themes presented throughout the text.

This week we focused more on the image and text relationship in The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. What I found interesting was reading my classmate’s annotation on the text and how they interpreted it from their point of view. I was especially intrigued by the historical contexts that one must be aware of (the Victorian period in this case) in order to fully understand and appreciate this story. For example, prior to this week’s class, I had no idea what the “Poor Laws” were, and therefore, did not get the reference when it was used by the character Scrooge.

I really enjoyed the annotated exercise because it was interesting to do a close reading of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I feel as though when I am required to read a text for class, I try to get through it as quickly as possible. Therefore, it was helpful to be able to do a close reading and dive into different words and phrases that were more complicated to grasp. I decided to write on the word “bore” for stave four. I decided to do this word because I realized that while encountering the sentence I didn’t know what the word meant, and I skipped over it and continued.