The nursery rhyme “The Lion and the Unicorn” is much older
than “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, having been written down as early as
the early 1700s. Carroll extracts some fun from using the two characters from
the rhyme, by having them fight each other for the white king’s crown, even
though they’re both on the same side.
I looked on the Wikipedia entry, and it suggests that
Tenniel deliberately caricatured Disraeli as the unicorn, and Gladstone as the
lion. Really? I’m just not so sure about this – Tenniel’s caricatures do
usually look like the people they’re meant to represent. It can’t really have
been Lewis Carroll’s intention either, and there really isn’t anything of either politician in the way he
writes about them, in my humble opinion.
After doing “The Walrus and the Carpenter” on Tuesday I
gave myself the last two days off. I’m thoroughly enjoying making these
sketches just for the sheer fun of it, but as I get older I get slower, and
after several consecutive days of sketching more than a couple of hours a day,
my arthritis is playing up. I don’t suffer very badly from it, thank the Lord,
but when the fingers start to ache it’s best to give them a rest fr a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment