Christmas: Illustrated London News

"What I Saw in the Fire" - Albert Crowquill

My very best wishes of the season to all readers of JSBlog.

I was interested to find that the Internet Archive has full sets of The Illustrated London News for several years in the early 1860s - worth reading for the quaint illustrations as much as the text - and each year this magazine featured a Christmas supplement with seasonal engravings. One of my favourites is this trippy - in fact quite Boschian - piece by "Albert Crowquill", What I Saw in the Fire , from the 1861 supplement (see here for zoomable source). "Albert Crowquill" was the pseudonym of the inventive and prolific illustrator Alfred Henry Forrester (1804-1872), who worked for a number of magazines including Punch, as well as illustrating books.

More about him later maybe - but for the moment, check out the Christmas supplements of The Illustrated London News: 1860 / 1861 / 1863 / 1864 / 1865.

"What I Saw in the Fire" - detail

"The Private View"- JA Fitzgerald

"Uncle John with the young folk: 'All prizes and no blanks!' - AB Houghton

"The Bachelor's Christmas Dinner" - JT Lucas

"Outdoor Relief" - GB Goddard

- Ray

Dickensian Christmases lesser known

Whatever his social messages, Charles Dickens was a solidly commercial writer, and followed up on the success 1 of the 1843 A Christmas Carol, he followed up with a series of titles with a similar mix of social campaigning and good cheer. As the Christmas Books page at David Perdue's Charles Dickens site says:

Although subsequent Christmas books sold well at the time of their initial release, they have not enjoyed the staying power of A Christmas Carol.

They were: The Chimes: a goblin story of some bells that rang an old year out and a new year in (1844); The Cricket on the Hearth: a fairy tale of home (1845); The Battle of Life: a love story (1846); and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848).  Dickens stopped the series at that point, but continued to produce shorter-format Christmas works for magazines: see Project Gutenberg for the collection Some Christmas Stories, which includes A Christmas tree, What Christmas is as we grow older, The poor relation's story, The child's story, The schoolboy's story and Nobody's story.

1. One should say qualified success; as Why A Christmas Carol was a flop for Dickens explains, it was popular and sold well, but his demanding requirements for the binding and artwork consumed most of the profits.