Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [37]
This edition incorporated the two revisions to TLG marked in the revised copy-text Carroll sent the printers for the 1897 edition which Stanley Godman noted had not been incorporated into the final text. These are a peculiarly arresting comma after the first word in the penultimate stanza of ‘Jabberwocky’ (‘And, hast thou slain the Jabberwock?’) and a smoother final ‘e’ on ‘smooth’ in ‘Queen Alice’ (‘Smoothe her hair—lend her your nightcap’). I have also silently modified a very small number of errors of punctuation (such as unclosed inverted commas), reinstated the ‘Dramatis Personae’ to TLG which formed part of the 1872 and other early editions but was omitted in 1897, and put the 1896 Christmas Prefaces to both books in the Appendices. Otherwise, the text is that of the last edition Carroll supervised through the press.
Notes
1 W. H. Bond, ‘The Publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, Harvard Library Bulletin, Autumn 1956.
2 For a fuller account see Selwyn Goodacre, ‘The Textual Alterations to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland1865–1866’, Jabberwocky, vol 3, no 1, Winter 1973, pp. 17–20.
3 Selwyn Goodacre, ‘The Textual Alterations to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland1866–1867’, Jabberwocky, vol 17, nos 1 and 2, Winter/Spring 1988, pp. 3–7.
4 Denis Crutch, ‘The Writings of C. L. Dodgson’, privately printed, London, 1974.
5 Stanley Godman, ‘Lewis Carroll’s Final Corrections to “Alice”’, TLS,2 May 1958, p. 248.
6 Selwyn Goodacre, ‘Lewis Carroll’s Alterations for the 1897 6s Edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, Jabberwocky, vol 11, no. 3, Summer 1982.
A NOTE ON TENNIEL
Alice’s adventures are propelled by her dissatisfaction with the book her sister is reading, which has ‘no pictures or conversation in it’. Though Dodgson produced his own home-made illustrations for the original Alice’s Adventures under Ground, when he decided to have it published, he was intent from the outset on hiring a first-rate illustrator to provide the ‘pictures’ accompanying his own ‘conversations’. At the end of 1863, he wrote to his friend Tom Taylor, a Punch journalist and popular dramatist, to ask his advice on the matter:
Do you know Mr Tenniel well enough to say whether he could undertake such a thing as drawing a dozen wood-cuts to illustrate a child’s book, and if so, could you put me into communication with him? The reasons for which I ask… are that I have written such a tale for a young friend, and illustrated it in pen and ink. It has been read and liked by so many children, and I have been asked so often to publish it, that I have decided on doing so. I have tried my hand at drawing on the wood, and come to the conclusion that it would take much more time than I can afford, and the result would not be satisfactory after all. I want some figure-pictures done in pure outline, or nearly so, and of all artists on wood, I should prefer Mr Tenniel. If he should be willing to undertake them, I would send him the book to look over, not that he should at all follow my pictures, but simply to give him an idea of the sort of thing I want. I should be very much obliged if you would find out for me what he thinks of it.1
Since 1850, John Tenniel (1820–1914) had been a principle cartoonist for Punch and was already a successful book illustrator, with contributions to numerous anthologies and story-books and complete illustrations to De La Motte Fouque’s Undine (1845), Aesop’s Fables (1848) and Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1861). Dodgson finally got in touch with his preferred