Some people are so famous for so long that they become enmeshed in all our lives. Raymond Briggs, who died on Tuesday, was one of those people. Briggs illustrated his first book, Ruth Manning-Sanders’s Peter and the Piskies: Cornish Folk and Fairy Tales, 64 years ago, and quickly set about creating a string of classic books, many shot through with his trademark melancholy. Fungus the Bogeyman revelled in a quiet British mundanity; When the Wind Blows was terrifying enough to scar an entire generation emotionally, and Ethel & Ernest managed to convey the small hopes and thwarted ambitions of mid-20th century life in a way that would put to shame many important authors covering the same period.
And yet, despite this breathtaking output, The Snowman looks set to be Briggs’s defining work. First published in 1978, The Snowman was a wordless picture book that Briggs saw as a counterpoint to the murk of Fungus, something he designed as “clean, pleasant, fresh and wordless and quick”.
