the Second World War, were sufficiently disturbing in their time. Rackham’s undated letters to her describe the ‘bomb-craters on Parliament Hill’, the clatter of the anti-aircraft guns and the dangers of falling shrapnel: ‘I went to Wandsworth [where his mother and two sisters lived] yesterday. And right through town from here the road is full of groups of kneeling children with all manner of tools gouging & digging out the shrapnel from the wood pavement. Our guns keep going like hell.’ Inspecting the row of craters at the foot of Parliament Hill, near Gospel Oak, he talked to a man who had been in the Duke of St Albans’ public house when the bombs fell: ‘He says that it was all over before you knew. Bang! the glass in! Silence. The broken gas main flared up outside – but nothing much, he says. No time to be frightened. He didn’t appear to have minded in the least. A man of 55 or so.’ (Thus Cockney sang-froid, anticipating the ‘blitz’ of 1940.) A letter to his daughter of 1917 shows Rackham as a grass widower indeed, trying to cut the neglected lawn and prune the overgrown trees in his garden.
Rackham worked steadily through all these disturbances, and, apart from numerous minor publications of ephemeral interest, produced several books of lasting value during the war years. He is not usually remembered as an illustrator of Dickens, but A Christmas Carol (1915) was decidedly successful, for he contrived to adapt the tradition of ‘Phiz’ and Cruikshank to his own characteristic style in the pictures of Victorian London (see page 107) and at the same time found scope for his fantasy in the ghost scenes. We also find him here developing his special talent for silhouette, rare among illustrators. That he only once attempted Dickens again – with The Chimes for the Limited Editions Club in 1931 – may be a matter for regret, for he was well qualified by sympathy to interpret Dickens in certain of his moods.
With Little Brother and Little Sister (1917), Rackham added forty more stories by the Brothers Grimm to the sixty which he had already
