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.