Charles Dickens and Friends

Williams retells five great stories here, starting with Oliver Twist and then going on to Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and finally A Christmas Carol. Her technique is to run brief, straight narrative boxes underneath riotous comic strip illustrations, so that the occasional grim subject matter of these stories is counter-balanced by pictures where nothing is taken seriously. Death, deprivation and despair are therefore made bearable by illustrations whose good humour and inventiveness are never in doubt. Characters who have since become harmful sterotypes, such as Fagin, now appear as no more grotesque than anyone else, villain or hero. Williams describes in a short preface how she first fell under the spell of these stories after hearing them read at school. Now there no longer seems time in the curriculum for such verbal feasts, giving this book to a child would still be an excellent second best.