From Swansea to the illustrated press
Michael was born in Swansea in 1881 and grew up partly in Merthyr Tydfil, where his family ran a hotel. Early drawing lessons led to study at Swansea’s School of Science and Art. He moved to Paris in 1899 and contributed to French magazines before working in London, where book and periodical illustration became the core of his career.
His work appeared in The Illustrated London News and accompanied The War in the Air by H. G. Wells. He also wrote and illustrated An Artist in Spain, published in 1914. Later he settled in Guernsey and produced railway posters. During the German occupation, he and his wife were deported to a camp in Germany; they returned to the island after the war. He continued painting there and died in 1965.
Haggard’s romance in pictures
The Ghost Kings was illustrated by Michael during its 1907–08 serialisation in Pearson’s Magazine. The held Cassell edition of 1908 names him on the title page and contains eight illustrations. Haggard remains the novelist; Michael’s contribution is a separate visual interpretation, carried by the frontispiece and plates distributed through the book.
The illustration list moves between confrontation, an approaching royal death, a kiss and Rachel’s presentation as a queen of spirits. Michael joins the personal drama to the novel’s supernatural adventure. His plates give visual form to a British imperial romance about southern Africa, with its imagined people, rituals and encounters.
