Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [38]
As Dodgson recorded in his diary, Tenniel ‘seemed to think favourably of undertaking the pictures’, but he wanted ‘to see the book before deciding’.2 He must have approved of what he saw, and on 5 April he agreed to do the pictures, despite the pressure of personal troubles (his mother was ill) and other commissions – he was not only producing his weekly copy for Punch but sixty pictures for R. H. Barham’s Ingoldsby Legends (1864) and others for Dalziel’s Arabian Nights (1865). Dodgson sent the first slips less than a month later in early May, and found Tenniel’s slow progress immensely frustrating. It seems probable that Tenniel saw Dodgson’s own illustrations, and as the text grew, Carroll sent him rough sketches and even occasional photographs of models, as well as suggesting numerous alterations and additions to Tenniel’s first drafts. Given both men were obsessive perfectionists, with strong ideas of their own, it was a protracted and difficult as well as a productive collaborative process. Tenniel sent back the first twelve proofs complete in December (his first picture was for the Pool of Tears), while the last proofs did not arrive until June 1865.
When the book came back from the printers in July that year, Dodgson heard that Tenniel was ‘dissatisfied’ with the state of the pictures. It is a sign of the perfectionist Dodgson’s commitment to the visual dimension of the book that this was enough to lead him to cancel the entire first edition and, at his own expense, order a complete reprint in August. The new impression won Tenniel’s approval in November, and the book was published for Christmas 1865. Though the Athenaeum thought the illustrations ‘square and grim, and uncouth’, most reviewers and readers sided with The Times, which said he had illustrated the story ‘with extraordinary grace’.
It was a measure of the success of this initial double-act, that when Dodgson finished the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, a few years later, having first tried Richard Doyle (‘Doyle isn’t good enough’, he told Mrs MacDonald) and then Noel Paton, he approached Tenniel once again, and after some initial reluctance to renew the troublesome collaboration with the finicky author of Alice, the illustrator was eventually persuaded in 1868 to do so, provided he could do them in his own time: ‘The second volume of Alice will after all be illustrated by Tenniel, who has reluctantly consented, as his hands are full’.3 Henceforward, however various her subsequent reincarnations on page, stage and screen, the face and fate of Dodgson’s heroine have been inextricably intertwined with Tenniel’s original images. Unfortunately this particular collaboration between author and illustrator was never to be repeated, since Tenniel refused to have anything more to do with Dodgson after the experience of working on the Alice books with him and Dodgson had to look elsewhere for illustrators to The Hunting of the Snark, Sylvie and Bruno and his collections of verse. It took nearly three years for Tenniel to complete the fifty illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass– three years of delays, corrections and negotiations between author, artist and printers, in which Dodgson usually had the upper hand (though he accepted a number of suggestions by Tenniel, such as making the Walrus’s companion a carpenter rather than a butterfly or baronet, and making Alice grab the goat’s beard rather than an old lady’s hair in the carriage scene). Though when the book was published in 1871, it was another triumph, one of the high points in the artist’s career, Tenniel later wrote that: ‘It is a curious fact that with Through the Looking-Glass the faculty of making drawings for book illustrations parted from me, and notwithstanding all sorts of tempting inducements, I have done nothing in that direction since’.4 When Harry Furniss agreed to illustrate Sylvie and Bruno, Tenniel told him that ‘Lewis Carroll is impossible’. Nevertheless, while it lasted, their partnership resulted in one of the most memorably successful combinations