Hugely recommended feature on Charles Keeping from The Gentle Author blog:
The illustrations of Charles Keeping (1924–1988) burned themselves into my consciousness as a child and I have loved his work ever since. A major figure in British publishing in the last century, Keeping illustrated over one hundred books (including the entire novels of Dickens) and won the Kate Greenaway and Carnegie Medals for his superlative talent.
In 1975, Keeping published ‘Cockney Ding Dong,’ in which he collected songs he remembered sung at home as a child. Illustrated with tender portraits of his extended family, the book is an unusual form of autobiography, recreating an entire cultural world through drawing and popular song.
Recently, I visited the Keeping Gallery at Shortlands in Kent to meet Vicky and Sean Keeping who talked to me about their father’s work, as we sat in the family home where they grew up and where much of his work is now preserved and displayed for visitors. You can read my interview at the end of this selection of illustrations from ‘Cockney Ding Dong.’
Nesbit’s influence can be felt everywhere from the Chronicles of Narnia to Kate Saunders’s Costa Prize-winning Five Children on the Western Front, which takes Cyril, Robert and the rest from the eternal Edwardian summer of the earlier books to the First World War. Meanwhile, Jacqueline Wilson’s modern retelling, Four Children and It, is currently being made into a film with Michael Caine as the Psammead.The link between Wilson and Nesbit is closer than you might think. Wilson’s resolutely contemporary creations, Tracy Beaker and Dolphin in The Illustrated Mum, share the same determination and hopefulness that make Nesbit’s children, despite the knickerbockers and pinafore dresses, still as fresh and engaging still as they must have been a century. Nesbit’s clear eye for the way we interact makes her a startlingly modern writer.
