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Tenniel’s illustrations form an inescapable complement and counterpart to Carroll’s dream text and to the reader’s sense of the squarely down-to-earth ‘dream child’ in her striped stockings and long brushed hair, as well as her various fabulous and incongruous interlocutors in Wonderland and beyond the mirror. If the books are, among other things, portrait galleries of nineteenth-century eccentrics à la Dickens, then this is in large part due to Tenniel. His portraits of the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the Ugly Duchess, the Brothers Tweedle, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the White Knight (possibly a self-portrait) and Humpty Dumpty (based on a sketch by Dodgson) give solid, credible physiognomies and physical reality to speakers who have psychological and vocal individuality in Carroll’s text but little of the specific visual identity Tenniel’s designs confer. Tenniel has also fixed with memorable precision some of the more fantastic fauna of the Carrollian wonderlands – such as those phantasmal compound ghosts the Mock Turtle and Jabberwocky – and chronicled with admirable prosaic density the social scenes of the Mad Tea-Party, the Duchess’s Kitchen, the courtroom where the Trial scene is held, the Oxonian shop where the sheep presides, the railway carriage, and the horribly convincing royal dinner party where Alice’s coronation is finally celebrated. In depicting the cards, chess-pieces and animals around which the narratives revolve, Tenniel always manages to be true to their double-nature – as ‘characters’ and as non-humans, fantastical figures and social types. Above all, Tenniel’s graphic idiom manages to create a visual equivalent of this most uncomfortable fantastic text’s relationship to mid nineteenth-century Britain and to anchor it in the solid ground of the bourgeois public and domestic world and its comfortable self-representations.

Tenniel’s image of Alice feeling her way through the solid reflective surface of the looking-glass into the world of dizzying instabilities and grotesque metamorphoses beyond is a beautiful instance of his art at its most expressively attuned to Carroll’s text. It can also stand as an expressive emblem of the illustrator’s contribution to Alice’s books of ‘pictures and conversations’.

Notes

1 20 December 1863, Letters, vol 1, p. 62.

2 Diaries, vol 1, p. 210.

3 Diaries, vol 1, p. 275.

4 Quoted in Anne Clark, Lewis Carroll: A Biography, London, 1979, p. 169.

5 On this, see Edward Hodnett, Image and Text, Studies in the Illustration of English Literature, Aldershot, 1986. For a fuller account of the collaboration between Carroll and Tenniel, see Rodney Engen, Sir John Tenniel: Alice’s White Knight, Aldershot, 1991.

6 For a detailed account of this, see Forrest Reid, Illustrators of the Sixties, London, 1928, and Percy Muir, Victorian Illustrated Books, London, 1991.

7 For further details of Carroll and contemporary artistic taste, see Jeffrey Stern, ‘Lewis Carroll and the Pre-Raphaelites’, in Lewis Carroll Observed, ed. Edward Guiliano, New York, 1976.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

ALICE’S ADVENTUEES IN WONDEELAND

BY

LEWIS CARROLL

WITH FORTY–TWO ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN TENNIEL

EIGHTY–SEVENTH THOUSAND

PRICE SIX SHILLINGS

All in the golden afternoon1

Full leisurely we glide;

For both our oars, with little skill,

By little arms are plied,

While little hands make vain pretence

Our wanderings to guide.

Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,

Beneath such dreamy weather,

To beg a tale of breath too weak

To stir the tiniest feather!

Yet what can one poor voice avail

Against three tongues together?

Imperious Prima flashes forth

Her edict “to begin it”:

In gentler tones Secunda hopes

“There will be nonsense in it!”

While Tertia interrupts the tale

Not more than once a minute.

Anon, to sudden silence won,

In fancy they pursue

The dream–child moving through a land

Of wonders wild and new,

In friendly chat with bird or beast—

And half believe it true.

And ever, as the story drained

The wells of fancy