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The Alice books were published during perhaps the most self-conscious and richly productive period of English printed book illustration.6 Following in the wake of George Cruikshank’s pioneering illustrations to the brothers Grimm’s Household Tales and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Hablot Browne (under the pseudonym of ‘Phiz’) provided densely detailed illustrations to over ten novels by Dickens and innumerable works by contemporaries, making book illustration integral to contemporary fiction as well as to the publication of anthologies of tales and poems, ancient and modern, in the period. This was the period of the great illustrators associated with Punch – not only Tenniel, but also Richard Doyle, John Leech, Charles Keene and George du Maurier – and also the heyday of Pre-Raphaelitism, in which Arthur Hughes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Millais provided illustrations not only for earlier literature but for contemporary writers such as George MacDonald, Christina Rossetti, Trollope and Tennyson. Luckily for Alice, with her predilection for books with ‘pictures’ in them, text and image were probably more closely allied during the Victorian period than at any time since the Middle Ages. Dodgson was an enthusiastic follower of contemporary art – he photographed many of the foremost artists of the day, possessed the Pre-Raphaelite periodical the Germ, owned paintings by Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, photographed drawings of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and his library indicates a developed taste for illustrated books of both the earlier generation of Gillray Seymour and Cruikshank and contemporaries, such as Richard Doyle (illustrator of Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River), Noel Paton (in particular, his Shakespeare illustrations) and the later work of children’s artists such as Randolph Caldecott and T. Pym, an early imitator of Kate Greenaway.7 In opting for John Tenniel as his illustrator for his story, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Tenniel’s earlier book illustrations show the influence of German and English Victorian medievalism (as in The Book of British Ballads,1842), as well as Gothic (in his versions of Poe’s ‘The Raven’), picturesque orientalism in his Lallah Rookh (1861) and the Dalziels’s Arabian Knights Entertainment (1863), and probably the satirical anthropomorphism of the brilliant French cartoonist Grandville in his Aesop’s Fables. As the principal political cartoonist for Punch from 1864 until his retirement in 1901, Tenniel was one of the most influential visual artists of the period, combining a satiric fantasy style with a solid circumstantial grasp of the social and political details of the Victorian world (these cartoons were collected in book form too, as in the four volumes of Cartoons from Punch by John Tenniel, 1864, 1864–70, 1871–81 and 1882–91, and The Queen and Mr Punch, 1897, and Cartoons by Sir John Tenniel,1901). The combination of his crisply grotesque Punch style and the fashionable atmospheric medievalism of his ‘serious’ book illustrations, in addition to the meticulous anthropomorphism of his animal cartoons for Aesop and Punch, all contribute to the soberly fantastic idiom of the two Alice books. It is a strange irony that this talented and prolific graphic artist should be remembered now almost exclusively for his contributions to two children’s books – but his pictures bear the imprint of his broad and solid experience in those other fields, enabling the illustrations, like the text, to infuse a fantastic tale for children with strangely representative status as an expression of the Victorian age.

Though there have been numerous brilliant illustrators of the Alice books in the twentieth century – by among others, Arthur Rackham, Mervyn Peake, Salvador Dali, the Walt Disney studio and Ralph Stead-man – Carroll’s text has remained indissolubly bound up with the original illustrations which appeared in all the texts published in his lifetime (with the exception of the 1886 facsimile of Alice’s Adventures under Ground).