Alice's impossible head

 

I think that you can see my point from these five Alice heads from my copies that I’m finding it extremely difficult to draw Alice’s head, and particularly her features. I also drew her in the caterpillar illustration, but I haven’t included that one because it’s only the eyes and the top of her head peeping over the mushroom. So working from left to right and starting on the top, the first is from a copy of Alice talking to the Red Queen. I made this one as a sketch for Inktober 2018 – can’t remember which prompt it was for, though. The chin and nose are wrong, in particular the chin is far too pointy. The second is from my sketch of Alice and the White Knight. You can’t see from the head here, but it is out of proportion to the body, too big. The features just aren’t right though. There’s something about the way that Tenniel draws Alice’s eyes that I find extremely difficult to capture. The third head, from my copy of the Lion and the Unicorn is the one where I’ve come closest to capturing a Tenniel Alice. The eyes are the best Alice eyes that I’ve done, and the whole thing is almost there. Close, but not quite a cigar, I think. The first one on the bottom row is from Alice and the Dodo.Eyes too heavily shaded, giving her an evil and menacing look. And the shape of the hair on the top of her head is wrong, even allowing for the fact that it’s meant to be wet and bedraggled. The last one, from where she is talking to the Duchess during the croquet match, the face is maybe a little too thin, and the eyes are just plain wrong.

What’s the answer? I don’t know – the only answer I have is to keep trying. If at first you don’t succeed. . .

Of Dodgson and Dodos

This is my copy of Alice and the Dodo from “Alices Adventures In Wonderland”. The dodo is believed to be a based on Lewis Carroll himself. Carroll suffered from a stutter, and some people think that he chose to represent himself as a dodo from his own attempts to pronounce his own name – do- do – Dodgson. As far as I know there is no documentary proof of this interpretation.

The Dodo chapters (2 and 3) are to some extent inspired by the boating expedition that Dodgson, Reverend Robinson Duckworth and the Liddell girls took in June 1862, during which Dodgson first told the story which would eventually become the book. Dodgson is the dodo, Duckworth a duck, Lorina Liddell the lory, Edith Liddell as the eaglet, and Alice Liddell as herself.

It's more than possible that Dodgson was inspired by the Oxford dodo remains in the Oxford Museum of Natural History, in fact it’s highly unlikely that he wouldn’t have seen it, living in Christ Church College himself. The famous painting of a dodo by Dutch artist Jan Savery was also on display in the museum, and it seems highly likely that Tenniel based his illustration of the dodo on this picture, bearing in mind the similarities. The story of the dodo was well entrenched in the Victorian consciousness by the 1860s as a cautionary tale about man interfering with Nature. Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection” had been published on a few years earlier in 1859, and the huge furore surrounding it had heightened interest in zoology and extinct creatures.

As for the Oxford dodo, this particular bird may well have been the same one seen in London in 1638. By 1683 the stuffed and mounted specimen had come into the collection of Elias Ashmole, founder of the Ashmolean Museum that bears his name. The taxidermy and preservation of the specimen was not all it could be, and apparently it was in such a state by 1755 that most of it was burned or otherwise destroyed. Only the head and one foot were saved, and the tragedy is that these are the most complete remains of any single dodo, and the only known tissue remains  of one on the planet. As a footnote, in 2018 researchers from the University of Warwick, using highly powered scanners, discovered lead shot in the back of the head and the neck, leading to the conclusion that this dodo was shot, rather having died of old age or mistreatment as had been previously conjectured.

Coming back to the drawing, one frustration in copying the illustrations from the Alice books is that I can never quite get the face of Alive right. In all of them I either make it too big, or somehow just not right, and you can see it again in this one. I'll post about this later.

Raleigh Chopper

 

Well, I took a break today from Sir John Tenniel and Lewis Carroll. I popped into Sketching Everyday in Facebook and saw that today’s prompt is National Bicycle Day. On a whim I sketched this.

If you’re a child of the 90s or later you may not be familiar with this. On the other hand, if, like me, you were born in the mid 1960s, you won’t need me to tell you that It’s a Raleigh Chopper. And the reason you won’t need me to tell you is that you probably wanted one yourself. If you didn’t want one, then you probably actually had one.

The Raleigh Chopper was inspired by the Schwinn Stingray of the 1960s. The Stingray incorporated features that would be used in the later Raleigh Chopper – smaller front wheel, slightly larger back wheel, ‘chopper’ motorbike style handlebars, elongated seat. The Stingray was a success in the mid 60s, and the British Raleigh company decided it wanted a piece of the action. Their first response was the Raleigh Rodeo. The Rodeo looked a lot like the Stingray, a major difference being the two wheels were of the same size. The Rodeo was not a conspicuous success, which led Raleigh to reconsider, and the design that they came up with was the Chopper.

There’s controversy over who actually produced the design. Alan Oakley of Raleigh and Tom Karen of the Ogle Design Company have both claimed to have been the original designer. The patent for the bike was applied for in the US in 1967.

The Mark I Chopper first went on sale in the UK and the USA in 1969. Within a couple of years it had certainly taken the UK kids’ bike market by storm and pretty much singlehandedly restored the fortunes of the Raleigh Company. Apparently assistant working in bike shops regularly had to remind adult customers that it was a child’s bike, and to try to steer them to something more appropriate. I turned 10 in 1974, and would very much liked to have owned a Chopper in the early 70s. I remember the days when kids in my school were put through the National Cycling Proficiency Test, and when that happened the kids could all bring their bikes into school. The playground became like a sea of Choppers, and many of them had accessories like wind shields and wing mirrors.

I never had a Chopper. I’ve read things today that suggest that the cost of a Chopper in the early 1970s was the equivalent of about £500 today. I don’t know how true that is, but they were certainly out of the reach of my family’s finances, what with me having two brothers, one a year old and the other year younger, who would have had to be bought one too, and a feckless father who thoughtfully drank away any spare cash the family came into. Quite a lot of the essential cash as well, for that matter, still I digress.

Now, looking back, I’m glad that I never had a Chopper. Yes, it would have been cool, but enough of my mates had Choppers that I got to cadge rides on from time to time, and to be honest, as bikes they were pretty terrible. They had these fat, small wheels and tyres, they wobbled even at relatively modest speeds and the frames were really heavy. If you came off the seat and landed on the crossbar, then that gear lever could do you a very nasty injury, in a place guaranteed to reduce your mates to helpless laughter. I mean, I think you’d be just about okay riding one to the corner shop to get a packet of Spangles, the latest edition of Look In and 10 Players Number 10 tipped for the old man, but I don’t think you’d have wanted to go much further.

The first bike I ever had was an ancient kids BSA bike. As I recall it had very strange brakes, which had no cables, but metal rods instead, which needed no encouragement to break and come loose. It was a Christmas present – my mum and my grandmother had somehow managed to buy three second hand bikes for us that year. All of them had stabilisers on, and I got frustrated with this. At Easter I finally persuaded my father to remove them, and I spent about a week, going up and down the back yard, teaching myself to balance on it and ride it properly.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I got my second bike. I think it was in the mid 70s. I certainly had it by 1977, because I remember buying silver jubilee union jacks from B&L Accessories in South Ealing to stick on it. This was a full sized racing bike, with 28 inch quick release wheels. It was old even then, but it was such a step up from my first. Over the next 2 or 3 years I replaced the handlebars, the cranks and the old man even splashed out for a new campagnolo five gear changer and a whole ten gear from changer set as well. I got far more out of that bike than I can believe I would ever have got out of a Chopper.

When I started working during holidays for a local temp agency, I rode the bike to work all over West London. When I went to University In Goldsmiths’ College, I used to ride the bike to and from the Student Hall, and then all the way across London for trips home and back. In 1984 I even used it for a one-day pilgrimage to Canterbury, my longest ever single trip. In fact, I only stopped using it when I moved to South Wales in 1986. When I’d first had the bike I wasn’t yet a teenager. When I last used it I was a married man with a kid.

The Elephant in the Room

So, let’s have a look at that elephant in the room that I mentioned in my last post. The elephant in question being – did Lewis Carroll have an unhealthy relationship with the Liddell girls in particular and children in general?

Bearing in mind the seriousness of the question, we shouldn’t just dismiss it out of hand as nonsense without looking at the reasons that lead people to ask the question in the first place.

As I see it boils down to three things. Firstly, there’s the photographs. Carroll was a keen and successful amateur photographer, and amongst the photographs he took of Alice and her sisters, some showed them partly nude, and he did take photographs of other children in the nude. Pretty damning to our modern way of thinking. Secondly, in the summer of 1863 there appears to have been a break in relations between Lewis Carroll and the Liddell family. Thirdly, 8 pages, one of which seems to have related to the reasons, were removed from Carroll’s diaries, presumably by his niece Violet who was co-guardian of the diaries from the 40s to the 60s.

As I said, the photographic evidence seems pretty damning to us now. But he was not the only photographer at the time who made nude child studies. I’ve seen it written that it was a bit of a fad in the 1860s, part of a cult of the child, and a celebration of childish innocence. Carroll apparently only ever made these pictures with the parents’ permission, and often in their presence. None of which completely absolves Carroll from any accusations. However, it certainly does seem to suggest that we shouldn’t convict him solely on this evidence.

As for the break with the Liddells and the pages cut from the diary, if the pages were cut from the diary in order not to damage Carroll’s reputation, sadly it has probably had the opposite effect. For the fact is we don’t just  don’t know for certain what caused the break. This has left the door open for people to theorise, without necessarily having any conclusive evidence on which to base their claims.

When she was in her 80s, Alice’s older sister Lorina wrote in a private letter that she had been approached by biographer Florence Baker Lennon, whose theory it was that Carroll had broached the subject of marrying Alice, by then 11 years old, which had so offended the Liddells that he was then banned from the Deanery. This isn’t quite so far fetched as it might seem. According to a source I read, Carroll had a younger brother who proposed to a 14 year old, although he postponed the wedding until the bride was 20. Lorina’s letter explained that she felt she had to give Lennon some explanation for the break up, and so confirmed that Carroll’s manner towards Alice had become too affectionate, causing her mother to speak to Carroll about it, at which he became so offended that he ceased visiting from that time on.

During the 1990s, a note emerged, supposedly in the handwriting of Carroll’s niece Violet, summarising the contents of the cut pages. The page referring to the break with the Liddell’s is summarised thus – ““L.C. learns from Mrs Liddell that he is supposed to be using the children as a means of paying court to the governess – he is also supposed [unreadable – ‘soon’/’go on’/’by some’?] to be courting Ina.””

This offers us two possible causes for the break up – firstly, that Carroll was using his friendship with the girls as a pretext for seeing their Governess, Miss Prickett (I’m not making that name up.) It wasn’t the first time this rumour had surfaced apparently, but Carroll always dismissed it as nonsense. The other seems rather more serious. Carroll supposedly was showing romantic interest in Ina – Lorina, the older sister of Alice who was 14 at the time of the break up. It has to be said that nobody has produced any evidence to corroborate this story though.

If we limit ourselves to the known facts, then :-

None of the Liddell family ever commented publically on the reason why their great friendship with Lewis Carroll came to an end, and even though Carroll would visit the Deanery on later occasions it was never on the same degree of friendship as previously.

None of Carroll’s child friends ever made any accusation that Carroll had ever acted in any way improperly towards them.

Carroll did make some photographic nude studies of children.

Letters exist which show that Carroll had friendships with adult women, just as much as he did with young girls.

Carroll never married, and there is no evidence of him ever engaging in any sexual activity with a woman, or anyone else. 

The court of public opinion is much harsher and more judgemental than any court of law. In some people’s mind Carroll has already been tried and found guilty, due to a fad for Freudian analysis of works of literature which began in the 1930s, then an onslaught of sensationalist biographies in the 1990s. It is possible to put an innocent connotation to connotation on all of the actual ‘evidence’ above. I’ve already explained how the photography can be looked at in context of the time and what Carroll’s contemporaries were producing at the same time. The ‘summary’ of the diary page concerning the end of the friendship with the Liddells actually says that Mrs. Liddell told Carroll that ‘supposedly’ he was interested in the Governess or Lorina. This implies that this is what other people were saying, not that it was what she thought herself. Even Lorina’s revelation that the break up with her family came about because her mother believed that Carroll was becoming too affectionate towards Alice is not necessarily conclusive. Lorina was in her 80s. She never actually met Florence Lennon, and in her own letter she gives a kind of written shrug, explaining that she had to tell her something. There’s more than a suggestion that she told Lennon what she wanted to hear to get her off her back.

As for the fact that there is no evidence that Carroll ever engaged in any kind of sexual activity, that’s relatively easy to deal with. When Carroll sought to become a senior student at Christ Church College Oxford in 1850 – the equivalent of what would be called a Fellow nowadays – the requirements were that they would remain celibate, and take ordination as a priest. Carroll actually managed to avoid the priesthood – but there’s no reason to doubt that he stuck to the rule of celibacy.

 Accusations of paedophilia have to be taken seriously. We’ve seen in recent memory the Jimmy Saville case, where an overwhelming body of evidence against a public figure was either ignored or deliberately covered up until after his death. But, from the evidence that is available to us now, I can’t believe that any court of law would convict Carroll. I certainly don’t believe that he acted improperly towards the Liddell girls, or any other child for that matter. Which means that any speculation about what Lewis Carroll’s deep and innermost desires and feelings were remains just that, speculation. And you can apply all the psychoanalytical analysis you wish to everything that Carroll ever wrote – not just the Alice books – and everything that we know he ever did, but you will never know, and never prove anything.

Tenniel's Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland

 

Hmm. I’ve not only got stuck on making copes of Tenniel drawings now, but I’m in a bit of a rut of copying his illustrations from the Alice books. Still, at least with this one I’ve got away from “Through The Looking Glass” and I’m on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”.

I don’t think for one minute that the illustration that I’ve copied here is the finest in the book. However, I’ve copied it because it depicts possibly my favourite character in the book. I still remember that the caterpillar fascinated me the first time I ever read the book.

Then, as I grew older, I became aware of some of the more modern interpretations of the book, ad some of the controversies surrounding it. The depiction of the caterpillar is one of the features of the narrative which some commentators have cited as evidence that “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland” was at least inspired by the use of mind altering substances. As I read it, the case for the prosecution relies on two main arguments, one relating toe the narrative of the book, and the other relating to Lewis Carroll himself.

1) The narrative. There is no doubt that Alice ingests several substances which change her – a cake, a liquid, and parts of a mushroom. Then there is the caterpillar. Right at the end of chapter the caterpillar is introduced in the last couple of sentences  - “. . . her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.” The at the start of Chapter V the description continues – “The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.” So, the Caterpillar is smoking an unnamed substance. At first he seems oblivious to his surroundings, and even when he does notice Alice he seems sleepy – one might almost say – drugged. Then there is the mushroom. Certain mushrooms have hallucinogenic properties.

2) Lewis Carroll himself. This line of argument rests almost entirely on the fact that narcotics – opiates like laudanum, and cocaine could be obtained from a chemist. So the argument rests on the fact that Lewis Carroll would not have been committing any crime if writing “Alice in Wonderland” under the influence of mind altering drugs.

So much for the case for the prosecution. Let’s begin the defence by looking at the second of the prosecution’s lines of argument. There is no evidence that Lewis Carroll ever used any narcotic. He makes no reference to anything of the sort in private letters or journals – not once. Yes, these things were available to him, but they were also available to, let’s say, Charlotte Bronte. Nobody would seriously suggest that “Jane Eyre” was written under the influence

Leading on to the narrative, if any of the strange occurrences in the story were based on Lewis Carroll’s own personal experiences at all, then it’s not impossible that the ‘telescoping Alice’ was inspired by his own experience of Migraine, and what has been diagnosed as possibly epileptic episodes. Which brings us to the narrative. Despite the strange things that happen in the story, there is a structure and coherence to it which I don’t think would have been possible for Carroll to achieve had he written it under the influence.

Which is not to say that we can completely exonerate the caterpillar. Certainly with the description I’ve quoted it’s not impossible to see the Caterpillar as a caricature of of either an intellectual academic type kidding himself that the habit made him think more clearly, or maybe a retired colonel from the Indian Army who’d brought the habit home with him. It’s worth noting, though, that the Caterpillar is the first of a small number of characters who actually give Alice any useful advice and render her any practical help. There’s nothing in the caterpillar’s responses to Alice which you’d necessarily associate with someone under the influence of drugs either. Yes, he’s a bit brusque, and convinced in the correctness of his own opinions, but then so probably were a number of the academics Carroll would have known at Christ Church.

As for the Tenniel illustration, while I’m fascinated with the Caterpillar in the text, I don’t think it’s one of his most striking illustrations. It’s a shame, for example, that we never get to see the Caterpillar’s face. Having said this, though, it does allow Tenniel to pull off an interesting optical illusion. You look at it, and it’s possible that you see the Caterpillar holding the mouthpiece of the pipe towards a mouth between a Mr. Punch nose and chin. Bearing in mind Tenniel’s fifty-year association with Punch I think that this can only be deliberate. However, if you look again the chin and the nose could just as easily be his topmost two legs as well.

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Hmm. I’ve been going on for a bit longer than I originally planned with his one. I’ll leave it there, and then in a future post I think  I’ll tackle the elephant in the room (every room, when it comes to discussing Lewis Carroll) – his relationship with the Liddell girls, and with other children.

Tenniel's The Lion and The Unicorn from Alice Through the Looking Glass

 

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.

More from the Looking Glass

 

My copy of one of the illustrations of the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter from "Alice Through the Looking Glass"

Staying with “Alice through the Looking Glass” today I copied one of the illustrations for Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. Poems feature in both of the Alice Books. In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” the Caterpillar tells Alice the rhyme of “You Are Old, Father William”. In Looking Glass Alice finds a book, where the poem “Jabberwocky” is written in mirror language. Then in chapter four, where Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee they recite this “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. This narrative poem of 108 lines in 18 stanzas tells how the eponymous walrus and carpenter invite oysters to take a walk along the beach with them, and then, having tied the oysters out, they proceed to eat all of them.

Over the years different commentators have tried hard to find deeper and hidden meetings within the poem. It’s probably not wrong to see it as a warning to beware of following those who really don’t have your best interests at heart. But many in their time have gone way beyond this. One write chose to see The Walrus as a satire on Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Others have chosen to see the inclusion of the Carpenter as a comment on Christianity. Well, the fact is that the carpenter might just as easily have been a butterfly or a baronet. Both have three syllables, and Lewis Carroll offered to use any of them to make it easier for Teniel to illustrate, which kind of blows the Christ allegory theory out of the water. Personally, I don’t think you need to read into it any more than is already there. The walrus is an out and out bounder, and the carpenter is his slightly stupider accomplice.

As a footnote, John Lennon loved the Alic books himself, and was inspired by the poem to write “I am The Walrus” by this poem. Apparently he was rather upset when he realised that the walrus is actually one of the bad guys in the original poem.

Ironically, this illustration has been used as the inspiration for many a political cartoon since, with various figures being portrayed as both of the principals. It’s a brilliant piece of work. I’m sure I’m not the first person to suggest that the cliffs behind the carpenter look very similar to the white cliffs of Dover.

Today's Tenniel -

 A couple of days ago I posted my copy of the cartoon showing Tenniel as the Black and White Knight, and said that it put me in mind of Tenniel's own illustrations of the White Knight in "Alice Through the Looking Glass." So this decided me that for today I'd not copy a Tenniel political cartoon, but a white knight illustration.

I'll be honest, I don't find it easy to draw Alice figures, and I've got it wrong again here. The head is out of proportion to the body. One of these days I'll get it right. Unlike many readers, I've always just about preferred Looking Glass to Wonderland. Maybe that's because of the chessboard logic of Alice behaving like a chess piece and wanting to become a queen. Maybe I'm not the only person to still look at large mirrors and half hope that he glass will start to become like liquid and let me pass through it. Yeah, better stop with that now, I agree. 

Who am I kidding - I'm on a Tenniel kick at the moment and I've just got to ride it where it takes me.

 

When I’ve copied Tenniel’s political cartoons more often they’ve been ones concerned with Foreign affairs.  They tend to be more dramatic than his cartoons on home affairs, but there are always worthy of the little bit of study they need to make sense out of what they are commenting on. I’m fond of this one because it also features my distant cousin Richard Cobden MP.

The caption to this one, which I haven’t included, says “Cobden to Dizzy: Carries Out His Bat? Of Course He Does! Your Underhand Bowling 'll Never Get Him Out! I'll Show You How to Do It Next Innings” The cartoon appeared in Punch in 1862, after the end of a session in Parliament where Disraeli, the leader of the opposition in the lower chamber, had failed to exert any real pressure on the Palmerston led Whig Government. The cartoon shows Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, as a successful batsman in a cricket match, who has carried his bat. (This term means he was the first batsman in the innings, and has not been bowled out for the whole of the innings.) The bowler behind his left shoulder is Disraeli. The guy with the long face is influential MP Richard Cobden – incidentally a distant cousin of mine. His advice to Disraeli can be taken two ways. Underarm bowling is considerably easier for the batsman to deal with than overarm, so Cobden is basically telling Disraeli to stop providing such soft opposition. However there may also be the hint of underarm meaning underhand tactics.

Once more with Feeling -

 

Sir John Tenniel - Self portrait

I've copied a depiction of Sir John following his being knighted by Queen Victoria in 1893. It's entitled "The Black and White Knight" and isn't actually sketched by Sir John himself, but by Edward Linley Sambourne. Sambourne had worked for Punch since the 1860s, and took over as chief cartoonist for the magazine following Sir John's retirement in 1901.

I like the irony about the fact that the night depicted here isn't that far removed from Tenniel's own white knight from "Alice Through the Looking Glass", which Tenniel allegedly based upon himself (even though this was a good two decades before his own knighthood). 

Maybe it's just me as well, but I can't help whether Linley Sambourne was deliberately hinting at Don Quixote here as well, with Sir John just about to start charging at windmills.

- and Again.

 

This is my copy of Tenniel’s December 1894 cartoon “All’s Well”. It reflects a time of rapprochement between British and Russian Empires. They were united in condemnation of massacres in Armenia in the Ottoman Empire, and also in forcing Japn to hand back some of the gains it made in the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894.

Particularly when looking at foreign affairs, Tenniel often used animorphs, that is anthropomorphised animal figures in allegorical fashion. Thus he often depicted the British Empire as a lion the Russian Empire as a Bear, and Prussia, and later the German Empire as an eagle.

By the end of the 19^th century the German Empire had overtaken the Russian Empire as the international bogeyman in popular British conception. However for much of Queen Victoria’s reign it was Russia that was viewed with greatest suspicion. Allies against Napoleon in the first two decades of the century, British mistrust of Russian intentions towards faltering Ottoman Empire led to British involvement in the Crimean War. The Russian defeat in the Crimean War did little to calm tensions between the two countries, and for the rest of the century the two empires were involved in the ‘Great Game’ for control of Central Asia, where it was felt that Russia represented a threat to British control of India.

In 1877, and again in 1885 was only avoided between the two Empires again through frantic diplomacy. I believe that the tensions of 1877 led to the term jingoism, from a song popular in he music halls at that time which went

‘We don’t want to fight you

But by jingo, if we do

We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men

We’ve got the money too.’

However, tensions eased in the 1890s, and in the early years of the 20^th century they worked together and with other countries to protect their interests in the Boxer Rebellion. Then in 1907 the Entente Cordiale between England and France was extended with the Anglo-Russian entente.

John Tenniel (again)

 Sorry, but I think that this prompt for John Tenniel on Sketching Every Day that I mentioned in my previous post has set me off on a real Tenniel kick. As well as posting 'Dropping the Pilot' I made and posted this copy of his cartoon "New Crowns for Old Ones".

This cartoon from April 1876 satirises Benjamin Disraeli's Royal Titles Act, the Act of Parliament that conferred the title of Empress of India upon Queen Victoria and her descendants, The title was finally relinquished by the British Crown as India finally gained independence in 1947.

The actual cartoon depicts Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as the bad guy in the story of Aladdin, posing as a crown (lamp) seller, trying to persuade Victoria to swap her dingy, old and yet magical British Crown (lamp) for the new, shiny but (in his view) worthless Indian one. Well, you wouldn't have expected him to necessarily be commenting upon the moral wrong of the British rule of India, would you. 

John Tenniel

 I belong to a lovely Facebook group called Sketching Everyday. Basically it does what it says on the tin. Every day you're given a prompt as the basis for a drawing or a picture. No pressure - if you want to do it and post it to the group page then great, if not, then no big deal. I will put my hand up and come clean that I tend to fade in and out of the group as the feeling takes me. Well, I checked in last week, and on Thursday saw that the prompt was featured artist Joaquim Frances. Didn't know him, so I googled him and saw he was very much my sort of thing. So I copied one of his sketches that I found on the net, and this is what I came up with:-

Then yesterday, the prompt was Rembrandt, and I copied one of his self-portrait sketches:-

Not perfect at all, but I really enjoyed it. Today, I noticed that on Friday the featured artist is Sir John Tenniel. I was too excited to wait. Rather than copy one of his world famous original illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, I wanted to copy one of his most famous political cartoons. This is my copy of his "Dropping the Pilot"

This famous cartoon appeared in Punch Magazine on 29th March 1890. It shows Count Otto Von Bismarck, in the guise of a ship's pilot, leaving the ship having steered it safely out of port, while the new pilot, Kaiser Wilhelm II looks down on him as he goes. It's a comment on the Kaiser's decision to ask for Bismarck's resignation as Chancellor. It's an exceptionally resonant cartoon, having been adapted by different cartoonists and referenced for the departure of many later political figures. 

Of course it's not the first time I've tried to copy Tenniel's work. I've used his Father Christmas sketches for Punch on a number of  hand drawn Christmas cards for friends and family.

I've even sketched one of his political cartoons before. For Inktober in 2018, when the prompt was the word 'Angular' I used this, copying one of his most famous political cartoons:-

It commemorates Benjamin Disraeli's political opportunism in purchasing the Khedive's shares in the Suez Canal. The Khedive was the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, and, strapped for cash, he made Dizzy a once in a lifetime offer, which he couldn't refuse. Tenniel wasn't always so kind to Disraeli, or other politicians. He, and his fellow political cartoonists were often seen as the conscience of the nation, on the side of common sense and decency, and championing the poor and oppressed. Having said that, though, it's difficult to excuse his cartoons on Ireland and Irish affairs. Home Rule for Ireland was a major political issue that grew in importance throughout the second half of the 19th century, and Tenniel had a habit of portraying the Irish as wild, savage, almost subhuman, with ape-like features. One cartoon even compared the Irish Nationalists to Frankenstein's monster. He would depict Ireland through the figure of Hibernia, personified as a helpless young woman, looking towards the older and stronger Britannia for protection and support. 

Of course, he's still best known not for 50 years of political cartoons, but for his illustrations to the original editions of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Lewis Carroll allegedly was very keen on having Tenniel because of the way he would sometimes use grotesque animorphisms - animals depicted with human qualities - in his political cartoons, which he saw as a perfect fit for his stories. It was, too, although neither man probably found the other easy to work with, if truth be told. I've copied several of the illustrations in both books over the years : - 

After producing the illustrations for "Alice through the Looking Glass" in 1870, Tenniel wouldn't illustrate another book, although he was asked to do so more than once. He told Lewis Carroll that after Looking Glass he found he had lost the faculty of illustrating novels. Whether this was literally true, or just a symptom of preferring the immediacy of producing his weekly cartoon for Punch to the often labour intensive work of producing book illustrations we can only speculate. 

In 1893 Tenniel was knighted by Queen Victoria - the first ever illustrator or cartoonist to receive this honour. He retired in 1901, when he was 81, and died in 1901 at the age of 93, just short of his 94th birthday. One of the more remarkable yet lesser known facts about Tenniel was that he only had one 'good' eye. His father was a dancing and fencing master and at the age of 20, while practising fencing Tenniel received a serious eye wound from one of his father's swords because the protective tip had come off the point of it. Apparently he never told his father how serious the injury was because he didn't want his father blaming himself. 

I've already mentioned his cartoons about the Irish question, and these make me wonder whether we'd have got on very well as people, if I had the use of a time machine and could go back and meet him. But that's not going to happen any time soon, so I don't have to worry about it. However I love the man's work. That's not too strong a word for it. I first fell under his spell, when I found a copy of Alice in Wonderland when I was very little. Some of the pictures frightened the hell out of me, but I would go back to them time after time. Whenever I see a Tenniel cartoon or illustration, I have an urge to try to copy it. And that's unlikely to ever change.