Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [17]
Dodgson was confident enough by late 1863 to pursue publication at his own expense and to apply to one of the foremost cartoonists of the day to illustrate it. As illustrations had played an integral part in his conception of the book from the start – even in the MS, the story begins with Alice asking ‘where is the use of a book… without pictures or conversations?’ – and as he had no confidence in his own draughtsmanship, he needed a pictorial collaborator. Tom Taylor having cleared the way, Dodgson met Tenniel in January and heard from him on 5 April 1864 that he consented to ‘draw the pictures for Alice’s Adventures under Ground’. 86 The stage was set for a classic double-act. Though there have subsequently been numerous brilliant illustrators of the Alice books – including Rackham, Peake, Dali and Steadman – none have dislodged Tenniel’s foursquare Victorian embodiments of Carroll’s dream text.
Dodgson sent Tenniel the first slip for Alice’s Adventures in May 1864, and one reason for the close bond between text and image is the tight control he exerted over the production of the book. Throughout the next year there was a close, often tense collaboration between writer and illustrator, until the appearance in June 1865 of 2,000 copies of the finished book printed by Clarendon Press for publication by Macmillan and Company. A special presentation copy was sent to Alice Liddell on 4 July, exactly three years after the legendary boat trip to Godstow. Soon afterwards, however, Tenniel expressed himself ‘ entirely dissatisfied with the printing of the pictures’, and Dodgson decided to scrap it, ordering a total reprint and sending off the unbound sheets to D. Appleton and Company, New York, who issued the book in America in 1866. If he was dismayed by the cancellation of the first edition and what it cost him to withdraw it from circulation, he was more than satisfied by the second. Dated 1866 but actually published in November 1865, this second edition he found ‘very far superior to the old, and in fact a perfect piece of artistic printing’.87 It is an ironic token of Dodgson’s perfectionism that what was effectively the first edition of his classic was in fact a second edition.
Reviews were not long in coming and, though mixed, were mainly highly favourable. The Reader on 18 November described it as ‘a glorious artistic treasure’, ‘an antidote to a fit of the blues’ and thought it ‘sure to be run after as one of the most popular of its class’. On 16 December, the Athenaeum, however, wrote it off as a ‘stiff, overwrought story’ and the Illustrated Times as ‘too extravagantly absurd to produce more diversion than disappointment and irritation’. It was not long, however, before the public were won over to Dodgson’s book and Macmillan undertook the first of many republications during the author’s lifetime.
By 1867, Dodgson was engaged in arrangements for French and German translations and by as early as August 1866 he was telling his publishers he had ‘a floating idea of writing a sort of sequel to Alice’.88 Alice had well and truly entered the public domain, but in a sense her adventures there had only just begun.
Through the Looking-Glass does not advertise its own origins in the same way as the first book. The prefatory poem harks back to ‘the tale begun in other days’, that is the moment Alice’s Adventures was conceived rather than the new book. By representing the relationship with Alice so firmly in the past it hints at the break with the Liddells as well as establishing a new wintry tone to the story.
In February 1867, six months after first mooting the idea, Dodgson wrote to Macmillan saying he was ‘hoping before long to complete another book about Alice’.89 In ‘“Alice” on the Stage’, Carroll claimed that both the Alice books were ‘made up of bits and scraps, single ideas that came of themselves’. Nevertheless the essay confirms that the plot of Wonderland came to him on the trip to Godstow and became the magnet which attracted the ‘bits and scraps’ he subsequently added. Through the