Peakeing again, and Good old Harry Boy

Well, it’s been a gently productive week, peeps. First, let’s look at the copy I made of one of Mervyn Peake’s Treasure Island illustrations. I have to say that this illustration of Long John Silver is one of my favourites. There’s something almost skeletal about the way that he is depicted here, with his skull like lower jaw, and the clear outline of his ribs. This is a malevolent Long John Silver. With Peake’s illustrations you never lose sight of the pirates as men capable of evil. They are cutthroats, every one. 

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Now I’d like to come back to Harry Rountree. I wrote in detail about this wonderful illustrator last week. One of the points I made was that you can find many of his illustrations on the web, but they are mostly those he made for Wonderland. Harry – I’d like to think that we would have got on had we lived at the same time and known each other so I take the liberty of using just his first name – did illustrate Looking Glass too, but it can be much harder to find them on the net.

Or so I thought. I’ll explain that in a moment. Last Sunday I found a reasonably priced edition of the two books that contained Harry’s illustrations. It’s a Collins Pocket Classics edition. The bookplate says that it was presented to the recipient in 1949 and that seems about right. This was a year before Harry passed away.

Now, I don’t believe that the book contains all of the illustrations Harry produced for Looking Glass. I don’t know how many he produced for Looking Glass. 21 are reproduced here including a single colour plate with Harry’s striking depiction of the Jabberwock. What makes me think they may have left some out? Well, this edition only reproduces 21 illustrations from Wonderland too, and I know from my other copy of the Harry illustrated Wonderland that he did many more than this.

Okay, so allowing for all that I’m delighted to see more of Harry’s Alice illustrations that I’ve never seen before. Only. . . well, a couple of the illustrations I have seen before, incorrectly described as illustrations of Wonderland. Then there’s this one I’ve even made a copy of.

I’ll be honest, when I made it last week I mistakenly thought that this was Alice with the Queen of Hearts. I’ve seen it described as such on the net. It is also printed on the inside over of my copy of Harry’s Wonderland – and this edition only contains the earlier book. Why? I have no idea. I didn’t realise hat this was in fact Alice with the Red Queen until I saw it in the Collins combined edition, with a caption from the text printed underneath. And it’s clearly meant to be the Red Queen when you look closely. Peaking out of her robes, her body does resemble the base of a chess piece.

Well anyway, yesterday I made my first straight copy from the book, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Here it is:-

Earlier in the week I made this copy of Alice and the Duchess from Wonderland:-

Finished with Harry for today then? Not quite. In the middle of last week I ordered a copy of an edition with Harry’s 1908 illustrations. I doubt I will end up copying these when it arrives, because I think that they were all or mostly colour plates. You know me and what happens when I try to copy coloured originals. Still, I can’t wait to see it when it’s delivered.

Harry Rountree and the 1928 Alice

So, my fourth Alice illustrator of choice (leaving aside Treasure Island) for a moment, is Harry Rountree. Maybe you’re not as familiar with the name as with Tenniel or Rackham. Yet after leaving his native New Zealand to play his trade in London in the first years of the 20th Century, Harry Rountree enjoyed a wonderful career in illustration. Not that he found it easy at first. Editors whom he approached for commissions were discouraging. He enrolled in the Regent Street Polytechnic’s School of Art, and received a commission to illustrate “Extracts from the Diary of a Duckling.” for a children’s magazine. The story is forgotten now, but it established Rountree as an illustrator of animals. And soon he was establishing a name for himself.

By 1905 he was following a well-trodden path by illustrating for Punch. I haven’t tried to work out how many Alice illustrators plied their trade with Punch over the years, but it would be quite a total, I reckon. In 1908 Rountree made his first set of illustrations for Alice. I say first, for 20 years later Rountree would make new illustrations for another edition, which is the one I will chiefly be writing about. Coming back to the 1908 edition, this was produced at the height of the Golden Age of British illustration. It’s rarer than the 1928 edition, and I believe it has more colour plates than the 1928. Rountree’s colour work is absolutely gorgeous, but I haven’t seen a copy in the flesh, besides which I want to be true to myself. I love monochrome line illustrations.

So to the 1928 edition. He did produce some colour plates for this one as well, but these are relatively few and it’s the black and white line work I want to concentrate on. More than 60 years separate Tenniel and Rountree and you can see it in the styles that they use. Tenniel showed innovation in the way that he integrated text with illustrations but compared with Rountree he was really just scratching the surface. Yes, many of his illustrations are full page – and my treasured edition from probably the forties or fifties is not quite A4 size, but it’s pretty large, and this does the illustrations justice. More than a few are integrated beside, above or below the text on the same page. Especially those where the characters are involved in some energetic action.

For the ’28 Rountree is abounding with life. I’ve written before about the way that he depicts Bill the lizard exploding out of the chimney. His White Rabbit, even in repose, looks as if he is about to explode any moment. His cook, from Pig and Pepper, looks as if she has been caught in freeze frame in the act of hurling the frying pan, which is a huge contrast to Tenniel’s carefully posed tableaux. Some of this energy comes from the poses in which he draws the characters, but a lot also come from the way that he uses shading. He does occasionally use cross hatching, but far less than Tenniel, and his use of hatching is less intricate. He uses blocks of almost pure monochrome in strategic places. Backgrounds are often minimal – patches of grass are shown by a few hastily drawn spikes that look as if they have been applied furiously against the clock. Clouds are a few curved lines joined together depicting the outline of a fluffy, cotton wool ball. Indoors is show with a few vertical pen strokes. I love copying Rountree’s work and one of the things that I love about it is that often Rountree achieves so much with so little. Maybe not genius or rare brilliance, no, but masterful? I think so. I’ve copied more of Harry Rountree’s illustrations of Alice than any other illustrator except for Tenniel of Edgar Thurstan.

I look at Rountree’s work and feel a sense of nostalgia, because this particular style of illustration is something that feels very familiar to me. There were elements of it in the (British) comic books that I used to read as a kid in the early 70s, the Beano and the Dandy and their sort. Even more than that, this was a style that many illustrators of the thirties, forties and fifties used, and I read a lot of books from this time, often in reprints.

More than many illustrators, I think that Hary Rountree got the figure of Alice herself right. In the 1908 edition his Alice has long, flowing golden hair, wears Edwardian clothes, and she is a bit older than Tenniel’s. By 1928 the Rountree Alice is a bit younger, maybe 7 or 8. Her hair is cut shorter in a fashionable 1920s bob and is darker. The clothes she wears are noticeably more modern. While she isn’t maybe quite as much of a free spirit as Peake’s Alice she is far more of a participant than Tenniel’s or Rackham’s. I particularly like one illustration from the front pages of the book where Alice is standing right next to the Queen of Hearts who is shouting – hard to believe, right? – and Alice is holding her hands to her ears. I also love his depiction of the pigeon verbally attacking Alice when her next zooms up into the sky. If you look at Harry’s illustration he has depicted the neck in such a way that you can completely understand why the pigeon calls her a serpent.

Other highlights of the 1928 set include Harry’s illustrations of the Father William poem. Harry’s Father William looks nothing like Tenniel’s, yet Harry ‘gets’ him as much as Tenniel does. I fact I do feel that taken as a whole set, while Harry doesn’t give us archetypal images, he rarely gives us anything that feels ‘wrong’ about the characters. Yes, I do feel that there are a couple of instances where inspiration seems to have failed him and he gives us something derivative. With his Hatter, for instance, yes, he is taller than Tenniel’s and no, his head does not seem ridiculously out of proportion. But he wears a top hat and has a very prominent nose. Likewise, Harry’s mock turtle seems to draw heavily on Tenniel’s – which is a shame because I think that his gryphon is wonderful

One thing I haven’t mentioned yet about Harry is the sheer joie de vivre and humour in his illustrations. His Cheshire Cat has more of the shape of a wildcat, yet he is absolutely laughing his head off. When Alice dreamily muses ‘Do bats eat cats. . . do cats eat bats’ Harry supplies us with a very funny image of a cat launched into the sky with a butterfly net trying to catch the bats around him.

My edition only has Alice in Wonderland. Harry did also illustrate Looking Glass, but images of his illustrations for it are far harder to find online. I’ve only seen a couple of them myself. The combined edition I read about was published in 1940, but when Harry made his illustrations for Looking Glass, I couldn’t say. I fact, as I’m writing this I’ve found a very reasonably priced copy of this combined edition on Ebay and just bought it. So doubtless you can expect some posts about this in the future.

Is Harry Rountree perched on the top of the tree of my favourite Alice illustrators alongside Tenniel and Peake? Ooh, he’s close. But. . . he’s short of genius. But I think that his 1928 edition will be a set that I will always love and appreciate.

There Goes Bill

You already know that it’s hard for me to find time for drawing in the evenings since starting my new job so I won’t go through all that again. Still, this weekend I’ve managed to work through the block I’ve had on writing the next chapter of “Alice’s Adventures at the Pole”. I haven’t finished it yet, but I think about 1000 more words will do it and I know exactly what to write and how to get to the end of the chapter. I’m just not forcing it. I will possibly finish writing the chapter this evening.

In celebration I spent quite a bit of time yesterday working on an illustration. In my first illustration showing Alice’s features I spent a long time before getting it right and the final version was actually my third attempt. Well, yesterday I spent quite a long time on the first attempt at the next illustration, before realising that it wasn’t going to work. 

Yes, that is a Walrus, and yes, I am conscious that one of the most famous and beloved poems in the Alice books is “The Walrus and the Carpenter” recited by Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Looking Glass. Well, this is the same character. If it was good enough for Lewis Carroll to resurrect characters from the first book in the second, then it’s certainly good enough for me. I shan’t at the moment explain just how he features in the story though.

The connections with Tenniel’s Walrus are fairly obvious. Although my head is more detailed than Tenniel’s, the clothes he wears are very similar, with the spotted bow tie being the most obvious difference. Tenniel’s wears a plain bow tie. However I did do something different with the flippers. Tenniel’s walrus has front flippers that are rather more like a seal's. They are a little more elongated than a walrus’ flippers and they have little definition. With my walrus I exaggerated the qualities that make a walrus’ flippers different from a seal’s, shortening them a little and highlighting some of the detail.

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Well, that’s my Alice story and illustrations. On Friday I made some more copies. Last week I looked at the way some different illustrators chose to illustrate the Hatter. This week I wanted to look at another character who I think is difficult to be original with, namely, Bill the Lizard.

This is what Lewis Carroll wrote,

“she made out the words: “Where’s the other ladder?—Why, I hadn’t to bring but one; Bill’s got the other—Bill! fetch it here, lad!—Here, put ’em up at this corner—No, tie ’em together first—they don’t reach half high enough yet—Oh! they’ll do well enough; don’t be particular—Here, Bill! catch hold of this rope—Will the roof bear?—Mind that loose slate—Oh, it’s coming down! Heads below!” (a loud crash)—“Now, who did that?—It was Bill, I fancy—Who’s to go down the chimney?—Nay, I shan’t! You do it!—That I won’t, then!—Bill’s to go down—Here, Bill! the master says you’re to go down the chimney!”

“Oh! So Bill’s got to come down the chimney, has he?” said Alice to herself. “Shy, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn’t be in Bill’s place for a good deal: this fireplace is narrow, to be sure; but I think I can kick a little!”

She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and waited till she heard a little animal (she couldn’t guess of what sort it was) scratching and scrambling about in the chimney close above her: then, saying to herself “This is Bill,” she gave one sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next.

The first thing she heard was a general chorus of “There goes Bill!” 

This little episode where giant Alice boots Bill the Lizard back up out of the chimney has proved a very attractive one to illustrators through the years. Now, I do think that a lot of illustrators have drawn on Tenniel’s illustration of Bill. However, I also believe that Tenniel himself drew on Lewis Carroll’s original.

If you’ve followed my blog posts on the illustrations of the Alice books, then you’ll probably know that Lewis Carroll first wrote some of his stories down at the urging of Alice Liddell, and presented the handwritten manuscript to her as a gift for Christmas 1864. The manuscript contained over 30 of Carroll’s own illustrations to the story. It is now in the British Library.

Carroll took advice about publishing the story with his own illustrations after which he engaged John Tenniel to provide the illustrations. So before we look at any of Carroll’s illustrations let’s accept a couple of facts.

Lewis Carroll never claimed to be an artist or an illustrator.

The first facsimile of Carroll’s original manuscript was never published until a relatively short while ago, so during his lifetime only a handful of people would ever have seen his illustrations.

So, bearing that in mind, here’s my copy of Carroll’s own Bill illustration.

I’ve never copied one of his illustrations before, partly because he was an amateur, and I’ve been afraid that my amateurish deficiencies might magnify his. I think that the Bill illustration is one of his better ones. For one thing the mathematician clearly knew a bit about perspective, from the way he drew the roof and chimneys. It looks to me as if, like many young men of his class and background, he probably had lessons in drawing when he was growing up, as he does use some shading and I’ve already mentioned the perspective.

Okay, now let’s have a look at Tenniel’s –

So one glance comparing the two shows that this is the work of a very accomplished masterful illustrator, while Carroll’s is the work of an amateur. Tenniel’s Bill is more lizard like as you’d expect. He was a master of shading and uses it far more effectively and extensively than Carroll could. He knows that Bill and the chimney are what’s important to the scene so doesn’t include any more than this.

Now look again and see just how Tenniel has drawn (pardon the pun) from Carroll. Both Bills are in pretty similar positions. The shape of the tail makes me think of a snake rising from a snake charmer’s basket. Carroll’s Bill seems to hover in mid-air, while the only thing about Tenniel’s illustration to suggest any movement at all is the smoke rising from the pot underneath him.

Compare this with the copy I’ve recently made of Harry Rountree’s Bill.

The composition to me draws on Tenniel’s which as we’ve seen draws on Carroll’s. Like Tenniel, we see the chimney pot and Bill coming out of it, just as with Tenniel. As fine an illustrator as Harry Rountree, though, wouldn’t just largely copy Tenniel. So he has Bill upside down, which to my mind works really well. Harry Rountree was renowned through his life as a great illustrator of animals and birds, and his Bill is even more convincingly Saurian than Tenniel’s. Unlike Tenniel, Rountree uses motion lines and has soot rather than smoke being expelled with Bill. This gives it a really explosive quality. It’s my favourite illustration of the scene.

We’ve seen before that one of the illustrators who often got further away from Tenniel than most others was Mervyn Peake. Here’s his Bill.

Like Rountree he chooses to use motion lines, but doesn’t depict the chimney. Bill’s whole body is curved sinuously and he’s fully clothed. It’s an interesting choice, but for me it’s a rare occasion when one of Mervyn Peake’s illustrations doesn’t somehow give the scene the movement that you’d expect based on what he achieved with other scenes from the story.

So I’ll finish this post with a look at my copy of what Ralph Steadman did with this scene.

It’s very easy to look at Ralph Steadman’s illustrations of both Alice books and say, well, they’re nothing like Tenniel’s. And of course when you put them side by side it’s far easier to see the differences than the similarities. But it’s still Bill rising head first out of the chimney – and that’s what Tenniel drew. This has far more of an explosive quality than Tenniel’s – like Harry Rountree he uses motion lines underneath Bill, and there’s soot being expelled along with the lizard. The originality of this sketch, apart from the comical expression on Bill’s face, is the way his cap is rising faster than he is, suggested by the motion lines. I’m intrigued that Ralph Steadman gave him a cap – was he possibly influenced in this by the depiction of Bill in the Disney film of the fifties?

To be original or faithful?

Yesterday was a bit of a bumper day for making copies of illustrations in my new Royal Talens sketchbook. I wrote yesterday about the watercolour test based on a 1908 Harry Rountree illustration of Advice from a Caterpillar, and also showed my copy of his White Rabbit in the page’s tabard.

Later on in the day I took on a TH Robinson illustration of The Pool of Tears. I’m sure that I’ve written about him before, but briefly, T.H. Robinson – Thomas Heath Robinson – was one of a very talented trio of brothers. His brothers were Charles Robinson and William Heath Robinson. William, the most famous of the three, never illustrated Alice to the best of my knowledge, but Charles did, and he produced one of my all-time favourite Alice illustrations, which was also of the Pool of Tears. I wanted to draw Thomas’ illustration of the same scene by way of comparison.

After that I copied two more Harry Rountree illustrations – of the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, and of the Mock Turtle. The Mad Hatter surely must be one of the biggest problems for illustrators since 1907. The Tenniel illustrations of him are so distinctive and have become so ingrained within the public consciousness that an illustrator can be forgiven for thinking long and hard before going too far away from Tenniel’s Hatter. Amongst my favourite other Alice illustrators, Mervyn Peake displays more originality than most. If you look at Rountree’s, he moves away from the oversized head and shortened limbs of Tenniel, but his Hatter still has an exaggerated nose, a tail coat and a top hat. At least he didn’t go the whole hog of having the 10/6 ticket in it.

Incidentally, even Walt Disney didn’t go very far away from the Tenniel original of the Hatter. Disney loved Carroll’s book. One of his earliest cartoons was “Alice’s Wonderland” which combined live action and animation, and led to a series of fifty seven short films. He wanted to make “Alice in Wonderland” as his first feature film, but may have been put off by the fact that MGM produced a live action version in 1933 that bombed at the box office. When he made his 1951 “Alice in Wonderland”, the script did play a little bit fast and loose with the story, including Tweedledum and Tweedledee from “Alice Through the Looking Glass” and leaving out some of the characters from the first book. One character you just couldn’t leave out is the Mad Hatter. If you looked at one of the Tenniel illustrations of the character alongside a still from the film you’d perhaps be struck by the facial differences between them. Disney’s is fleshier and has a bulbous hooter rather than the hawklike beak that Tenniel’s Hatter sports. But look closer and you can see that facial differences aside, he is otherwise pretty faithful, down to the 10/6 label in the hat.

Of course, the Mock Turtle is one of the Wonderland characters excised from the Disney animation. Many illustrators of Wonderland since Tenniel have faced the challenge of the Mock Turtle in three ways – 1) – ot to illustrate the character at all – 2) – To use a similar visual concept of the character to Tenniel’s – 3) To ignore that it’s a ‘mock’ turtle and draw it as a tortoise or turtle. It’s pretty easy to see that Harry Rountree took the second approach. I think it’s technically a fine illustration, but it doesn’t show us anything about the character that Tenniel didn’t do before.

Other Alice's - What Tenniel didn't sketch, and Caterpillars

I can’t help thinking that once the copyright ran out on the Alice books and they could be illustrated by other artists from 1907, being engaged to illustrate the book might well have been something of a thankless task. After all, you’re always going to be compared to Tenniel, probably unfavourably. You either do something which looks like it’s been influenced by Tenniel, or you try to do something completely different, which risks alienating those for whom Tenniel is the gold standard.

Of course, one thing you could do is to illustrate episodes from the books that Tenniel didn’t use. The first and one of the most obvious is Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

Tenniel’s frontispiece shows the courtroom with the king and queen of Hearts, the first illustration as such is the white rabbit, and then the next shows Alice peeping behind a curtain after she has finished falling. I don’t know why he didn’t illustrate her falling, but then he produced forty two illustrations as it was. Maybe it was not required by Lewis Carroll. He was actually the first person to illustrate the story. He first wrote it in longhand, complete with his own illustrations. When you see them you do understand why friends advised him to get a professional illustrator when having the book published. Quite a few of Tenniel’s illustrations do follow the episodes that Carroll illustrated, and Carroll himself did not draw Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Still, whatever the reason why Tenniel didn’t illustrate this episode, Well at least it gave later illustrators an opportunity. This is my copy of Harry Furniss’ illustration of the scene.

Harry Furniss did work with both John Tenniel and Lewis Carroll. He began working for Punch in 1880, wat which time Tenniel was the chief cartoonist. Furniss was commissioned by Carroll to illustrate his two Sylvie and Bruno books, neither of which is much read today. Tenniel reputedly said that Furniss would find it an unpleasant experience working with Carroll, and this seems to have been the case. So the story goes Furniss would pretend to be out whenever Carroll came to look at his work, and he vowed never to work with Carroll again.

Carroll passed away in 1898. Several editions appeared in America in the 1890s and early 1900s. but when the copyright expired in 1907 a huge number of editions appeared with the work of other illustrators. Harry Furniss’ illustrations appeared in 1908 in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia.

I think that if you look at my copy you might well see that Harry Furniss’ work does bear some similarities with Tenniel’s. I’m particularly thinking about the heavy shading with hatching and cross hatching. Tenniel’s illustrations do often look like beautifully posed and staged tableaux, while Furniss’ do seem to have more movement and spontaneity. Furniss’ Alice is brunette, and looks rather older than Tenniel’s.

By way of comparison I’ve copied Ralph Steadman’s illustration of Alice falling from his 1967 illustrated edition. By contrast this is quite a minimalist illustration, with a couple of bookshelves, a map, a picture and a jar doing all the work to show this is a rabbit hole. But the position Alice is in, with her ridiculously long, thin limbs perfectly captures the feeling of falling. I’ve copied several of Ralph Steadman’s illustrations before. As I have said, they’re marmite for me. I either absolutely love them, or I have a strong reaction against them.

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Another scene which Tenniel did not illustrate but many later illustrators did is Alice being called a serpent by a pigeon when her head has stretched up into the sky. Again, it is an episode with plenty of scope for visual representation. In this case Lewis Carroll did illustrate the episode. He actually made two sketches, one showing Alice with normal sized head but impossibly long, straight neck shooting out above the tree tops, the other showing her with long, curving neck being harangued by the pigeon.

Last year I copied my favourite rendition of Alice being accosted by the pigeon, which was made in 1907 by T.H. Robinson. I love the way he captures the foreshortening effect of looking down on Alice’s body from being roughly eye level with her head. Her neck is elongated, but nothing like as much as is often the case when illustrators tackle this episode. Robinson was the brother of the much more famous William Heath Robinson, and Charles Robinson who also illustrated Alice in Wonderland I 1907, several of whose illustrations I’ve copied in the past.

Compare this with my copy of Steadman’s 1967 illustration. This may sound like a strange thing to say, but this is far more similar to Lewis Carroll’s original illustration than Robinson’s is. Steadman's Alice is very different to Carroll’s dark haired Alice, but both head and bird are in similar positions, and the neck curves in similar fashion. I think that the pigeon is a real tour de force.

This next rendition is my copy of a Harry Rountree illustration. Harry Rountree was a New Zealand born illustrator and cartoonist who was successful in New Zealand before moving to London in 1901. During his career he worked for many publications, including Punch.Rountree actually illustrated Wonderland twice, first in 1908 and then 20 years later in 1928. Judging by Alice’s hairstyle I’d say that this is more likely the 1928 version. In this one Rountree opted to emphasize the serpentine nature of Alice’s neck, and he’s by no means the only illustrator to do this. Again, I think that the pigeon is very well rendered, and indeed living creatures were something of a speciality for Harry Rountree. 

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You know, I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. This mark you even though Tenniel’s illustration of the caterpillar is one of his less effective in my opinion. I mean, it’s certainly clever the way that the two top pairs of legs do actually look like a face – possibly the face of Mr. Punch – but I’d love to have seen just how he would have rendered the caterpillar’s face head on.

Last year I made a copy of Arthur Rackham’s illustration of the caterpillar, which is one of my favourites. Arthur Rackham was a leading light during what has been called the golden age of British illustration from the 1890s until the First World War. His illustrations for the book were a mixture of colour plates, like the one I’ve copied here, and black and white line drawings. Rackham shows the caterpillar’s face properly, and so what we get, a caterpillar’s body bearing a rather wizened, bespectacled and almost human head is pretty much the norm for illustrators of Alice. If you look at this, by Harry Rountree, you can probably see what I mean. 

Rountree doesn’t put Alice in the picture, which is more unusual, but he does give us a traditional hookah and mushroom.

Harry Furniss rendered it like this. He differs from Tenniel in as much as the mushroom is smaller and Alice can clearly see the caterpillar. You can also see how Furniss’ Alice is older and more mature than Tenniel’s. His caterpillar is slightly less human, having what appears to be a beak, although like Rountree he does go along with the convention of giving the caterpillar one pair of arms with very human hands on the end, and feet only at the end of his body.

One of the earlier renditions of the caterpillar is this one I copied which was by Charles Robinson. In terms of composition this is like a mirror image of Tenniel’s. With Alice peering over the mushroom on the left rather than the right, and the caterpillar on the right rather than the left. It means we don’t really see his face, which is a pity. One thing he does, which Tenniel also did but a lot of later illustrations don’t is to provide the foliage all round the scene.

T.H. Robinson also illustrated the caterpillar, and I copied this last year. Like his brother Charles, and Tenniel TH Robinson did at least illustrate the whole scene, with many mushrooms rather than just the one and this is something original. The caterpillar himself does have a very human face. The features look old and tired, which kind of matches the sleepy languid voice that Lewis Carroll gave him in the text. To be honest though this caterpillar doesn’t really look like a caterpillar at all. His only visible limbs are human arms and legs, he is fully clothed and this is topped off by a stage magician’s turban.

This is the first illustration I’ve copied by one of the best loved of Alice illustrators, Willy Pogany. He illustrated the book in 1929. Pogany was born in Austria-Hungary, and worked all over Europe in the early years of the 20^th century before finally emigrating to the USA. Many of his illustrations for Alice are deceptively simple. In this one we only get the caterpillar, and half the hookah. No mushroom, no Alice, no foliage. His caterpillar, though, is far more of a caterpillar, with distinctly non-human limbs evenly spaced along his body.

I know what you’re asking yourself. What did Ralph Steadman do with the caterpillar? Well, here’s my copy. My guess is that your first reaction when you look at this is that it’s very different from what has gone before. For one thing, the caterpillar is facing away from Alice. For another thing there’s no hookah, he is smoking a cigarette (of some kind) in a cigarette holder. Also he looks totally wired, with his wild unkempt hair and his wide, unmatching eyes. Look at it again, though. We have Alice peering over the top of the mushroom – we’ve seen that before. The caterpillar seems to have a vaguely human arm and hand, and there’s no mistaking that his two legs are very human, clad in pinstripe trousers and what look like sandals. If I’m honest this not actually one of my favourite Steadman illustrations. I just have an issue with the caterpillar looking so wired. The text describes him talking in a languid, sleepy voice.