Other Alice Illustrators

Last night there was nothing I wanted to watch on after about 10pm so I was idly searching the documentaries on the iplayer. I chanced upon a series with the title “The Beauty of Books”. – Hullo – thought I – I’m in. Now, the fourth episode happened to focus on illustrated books, with a particular focus on . . . yes, Alice in Wonderland. So even if I hadn’t been in before, I was in then.

A good show. It did do a bit with Tenniel but wasn’t exclusively about him. It did focus on some of the other illustrators to have a go at the books. Research I did this morning showed that there have been more than 300 of them. In fact, I’ve even copied some of them before. Back in the 2020 lockdown I set myself the challenge of copying the work of forty different British illustrators – stretching a point to illustrators who might not have been born in the UK but worked primarily in the UK. 3 of the illustrations I copied were from Alice in Wonderland. These were : -

This is my copy of one of Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations for “Alice through the Looking Glass”, showing Alice with the White Queen. Her illustrations for “Alice in Wonderland” won the 1999 Kate Greenaway Medal.

This is Arthur Rackham’s Griffin from “Alice in Wonderland”. Rackham is synonymous with a fairytale style of illustration combining strong ink work with subtle watercolour. Rackham was the illustrator of J.M.Barrie’s first ever Peter Pan story “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens”. Rackham’s illustrations do suit the magical, dreamlike quality of the books, although they don’t have the unsettling quality of Tenniel’s work.

That’s not something I would say about Ralph Steadman’s work. There’s little dreamlike about it, although at times nightmarish would be more appropriate. That’s not a criticism, more of an appreciation.

Before I watched the programme last night, I didn’t know that Mervyn Peake had also illustrated “Alice in Wonderland”. I did copy a Peake illustration in 2020, but it ws one of his magnificent illustrations for Treasure Island. Ralph Steadman also illustrated Treasure Island, which is a coincidence.

The programme featured Mervyn Peake’s son who explained that his father had been sent to Germany as a war artist at the end of world war II, just a year before producing his illustrations to “Alice in Wonderland”. Looking through Peake’s original sketch books, he pointed to the original sketch for the Queen of Hearts and suggested that this may well have been influenced by the fact that Peake was present at one of the first war crimes trials, of the Nazi Peter Back. There is certainly a darkness in some of Peake’s illustrations for the books, which matches and at times exceeds Tenniel’s. Michael Foreman, a Greenaway Medal winner who has illustrated Alice himself made the point on the show that he’s particularly fond of Peake’s illustrations for Alice.

He pointed to Peake’s superb draughtsmanship and his great technical ability, and in this he certainly is a true successor to Tenniel. I copied Peake’s rendition of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, possibly his most acclaimed Alice illustration. I found it a fascinating and at the same time frustrating experience. His use of hatching and cross hatching seems far more intricate to me than Tenniel’s, but it does mean that he achieves the depth and intensity of the finest of the Victorian illustrators. It takes hours to try to reproduce, though.

All of which set me to musing about why – in my opinion (feel free to disagree) – Tenniel and Peake produced illustrations more suited to the Alice books than other illustrators. I can’t hlpe feeling that, in Tenniel’s case his career as a political cartoonist stood him in great stead here. Essentially, his work as a political cartoonist involved taking the very familiar – politicians of the day like Disraeli, Gladstone and Palmerston for example – and twisting the way that they are presented away from the norm – presenting Disraeli as the lamp seller from Aladdin in “New Crowns for Old” for instance. His work inhabits a world in which the great powers of Europe are presented as anthropomorphic animals as well, and both of these traits made him an absolutely inspired choice to illustrate Alice in Wonderland. It’s no surprise to me that he even ended up satirising his own illustrations for the book in two cartoons for Punch – Alice in Blunderland – and – Alice in Bumbleland.

As for Mervyn Peake, well I’ve already mentioned his son’s theory about the influence that his experiences in Germany at the end of the war had on his work. Also, Mervyn Peake was a writer himself. In the mid-late 190’s – the period during which his illustrations for Alice were produced, he also wrote the first two parts of his “Gormenghast” trilogy. This is a remarkable work, of dark fantasy – despite a conspicuous lack of ‘fantastic’ elements such as magic. The same inner forces that drove him to create the books, also made him such a great illustrator for Alice, in my opinion.