While working on the annotations today for A Christmas Carol I got to thinking specifcially about how much in text goes over the mind. When you read a text so many times your mind goes at a spead that if you brush over a word that is not fully familiar to you it does not phase your reading. The activity we did today allowed us to individually slowly analyze the text and grab further context on the victorian era. I felt that looking through the annotations made my peers I was so much more informed on certain phrases and meaning.

I found this week’s focus on John Leech’s artwork for A Christmas Carol flooded with social commentary. In our group discussion we analyzed an illustration of Mr.Fezziwig from Ebinezer Scrooge’s paranormal encounter with the ghost of his past. As we analyzed the steel plate etching, we noted the detailed images of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig for being more vibrant and “jovial” in contrast to the other characters around them.

A point of interest for me this week was learning more about the historical context Dickens was writing in. Learning more about the material conditions of the Victorian working poor during the 1840s added a new layer of appreciation for the text. References to the “Poor Law” and the “Treadmill” in the first stave completely went over my head in my initial reading. It is clear to me now that Dickens was thinking about the conditions of working class people as he was writing A Christmas Carol, but also had a keen sense of his middle class audience.

What particularly interested me the most about annotating Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was reading the textual version of the story. When reading the graphic novel, I was able to visualize what events were happening but was not even as much of an in-depth analysis of the text. This way, I was able to consider specific sentences and words that were used in a deeper way, allowing me to see more characterization, themes, and settings. This method of reading the text also helped me understand John Leech’s illustrations.

In this week's class, we focused on annotating both the text and the images of A Christmas Carol. What I found most interesting from annotating the text was the content annotations. Craft annotations are typically what we have to do when engaging with a text in order to draw out meaning. However, looking out for words or phrases that feel uniquely applied or that are not familiar is something I will occasionally neglect.

I found it interesting how disparate Leech's illustrations for A Christmas Carol are (so much so that I assumed they were done by different artists upon first reading it) in terms of style, method, and tone. Stylistically, the illustrations range (depending on tone, it seems) from particularly caricature-esque and cartoony to more Gothic and realist -- "Mr. Fezziwig's Ball" and "Scrooge's Third Visitor" examples of the former style, and "Last of the Spirits" and the woodcut from the second stave examples of the latter stlye.

What I found particularly poignant about John Leech’s work on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is how each illustration brimmed with symbolism and countless interpretations which expanded upon the original text in ways I wasn’t initially aware of. During the annotation and discussion process, I observed various details that were incredibly engaging to look and featured plenty to analyze.

Although A Christmas Carol is such a popular well-known text, I hadn't read it before this class. Sure, I'd seen the movies during Christmas time and I know of the story but I hadn't paid much attention to it let alone the illustrations. I really enjoyed how the story was written. I was interested in Dickens's use of descriptive writing without seeming like he's droning to fill up space. I liked how he made references to other texts such as Hamlet and spoke to the reader instead of at them.

   Today's lecture focused on Charles Dickens' infamous novella, A Christmas Carol. Although, the text is quite popular with its various adaptations, I have never actually read the actual text before taking this course. One of the most interesting things I noticed while annotating this particular text is that Dickens has a fondness for flowery writing and can go on endlessly describing whatever he is focusing on. As a result, I came across lots of words that I did not know or had different connotations in the 1840s versus now.

For today’s class we were tasked with annotating Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol and working with John Leech’s illustrations for the novella. I found it surprising to learn that illustrations were included with the book when it was first published. This adds to the importance of looking at image, text and context in relation to each other. It was also interesting to learn about the different types of drawings Leech created for the novella and discuss as a class the impact of these illustrations.