Arthur Rackham - Did he really 'get' Alice?

So, today’s Alice illustrator of choice is Arthur Rackham. In the history of British illustration, Rackham’s place is as secure as both Tenniel’s and Peake’s. He is renowned as one of the leading lights of what has since been called the Golden Age of British Illustration, a time, between roughly 1880 and 1920, when there was a market for beautifully, sumptuously illustrated children’s books, and when printing technology had advanced to allow reproduction of coloured illustrations. By the middle of the first decade of the 20^th century Arthur Rackham had well established a reputation for himself as an illustrator of fairy stories. His work is characterised by bold ink lines and beautifully subtle use of watercolour. So as soon as “Alice in Wonderland” passed into the public domain it seemed a natural choice to engage Rackham to produce his own illustrations for a new edition.

Don’t misunderstand me either. Some of Rackham’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland are very beautiful, although we will have to consider whether they ae works of rare brilliance (genius). For Wonderland Arthur Rackham made 13 colour plates and 15 line drawings, and I think that you can see a clear difference between hem. I’ll come to the line drawings later, but for me it’s the colour plates that display Rackham’s best work on the book.

For one thing, each colour plate is a lovingly detailed, complete full page illustration. His wonderfully subtle use of watercolour gives each of them an ethereal, almost dreamlike quality. Arthur Rackham’s colour plate illustrating ‘Advice from a Caterpillar” is my favourite depiction of the caterpillar that I’ve yet seen. To get a flavour of just how good Rackham’s colour plates are it’s useful to compare them with the colorised Tenniel illustrations in “The Nursery Alice”. Thse are very nice, but the colour isn’t helping to tell the story at all. If anything (say it quietly) I think that in a few instances the bold colour actually detracts a little from Tenniel’s original sketch. Not so with Rackham. His use of colour is magical, and I wish I had just a fraction of his skill.

Having said that, the top of the tree of Alice illustrators whose work I value is a lonely place. Arthur Rackham doesn’t sit alongside John Tenniel and Mervyn Peake for me, but slightly below. Why should that be? Well, remember, please that this is just my opinion, but I think that there’s a couple of reasons why.

Firstly, there’s the line drawings. Now, again, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that they are not good. They are. Rackham was a great and skillful draughtsman. But in many cases they are quite, should you pardon the pun, sketchy. Peake didn’t use detailed backgrounds either, but he contrived to suggest something vague, insubstantial and in its own way dreamlike. Considering how brilliant the backgrounds in his colour plates are, it almost looks as if he couldn’t be bothered – well, unless there was a tree in the background. I look at his line drawings of the Gryphon and the Cheshire Cat and I feel that he must have loved drawing trees, especially gnarled and twisted ones. But even with his drawing of the Gryphon, I can’t respond to it in the way that I respond to Tenniel’s illustration of the sleeping Gryphon. The lightness of touch that makes the colour plates so appealing works against the line drawings in my opinion.

When you look at Rackham’s line drawings you also can’t help feeling that the way that he depicts some of the characters is a little derivative of Tenniel and this is also a criticism you can make of his beautiful watercolour plates. If we start with the Hatter, alright, Rackham’s Hatter has dark hair, while Tenniel’s doesn’t. On the other hand, just like Tenniel’s archetype, Rackham’s Hatter has an overly large head, a remarkably prominent nose and he wears a top hat with a price ticket stuck into the hatband. When you look at it you get the impression that Rackham is not so much giving you his take on Carroll’s Hatter, as his take on Tenniel’s Hatter. However I look at Rackham’s Hatter it looks like a failure of the imagination to me.

That’s a colour plate. If you look at the line drawing of the Mock Turtle you can make the same criticism. Rackham was not the only illustrator to use what is essentially Tenniel’s conception of the character, but he is the illustrator we’re discussing now. I have a feeling about this. I have the feeling that Rackham didn’t really ‘get’ Carroll’s story. He does a thoroughly professional job but to me for the most part he is responding to Tenniel’s presentation of Wonderland. So while he can portray the substance of “Wonderland” he doesn’t get to the soul of it. I think that Mervyn Peake does and I think that he ‘gets’ Wonderland. Knowing of Tenniel’s relationship with Lewis Carroll and his extreme reluctance to illustrate ‘Looking Glass’ it’s tempting to suggest that Tenniel himself didn’t have a great deal of time for the story, but there’s such a connection between Carroll’s words and Tenniel’s illustration that it betrays an underlying understanding and connection.

Ironically Rackham, for me, gets closest to a really original response in the colour plates where he gets furthest away from Tenniel. I’ve already mentioned the caterpillar, but I also think his colour plate showing Alice with the White Rabbit is superb. His rabbit is something of a dandy with his frilly shirt cuffs flopping down from his long sleeves, and his red eyes reveal that he is an albino and at the same time hint at some suppressed rage and madness. The contrast between the darkness of the ground around him with the pale yellow sky is stunningly atmospheric.

Coming back to my comment about Rackham not necessarily ‘getting’ Carroll’s story is demonstrated by his conception of Alice as a character. Superficially Rackham’s Alice is darker haired than Tenniel’s, older than Tenniel’s and dressed in more contemporary clothes than Tenniel’s. For all that, though, Rackham’s Alice, like Tenniel’s, is often depicted as a bystander. She hardly ever seems to emote at all, maintaining a slightly glum expression on her face in many of the illustrations in which she appears. It’s difficult to believe that Rackham’s Alice would ever have had the gumption or the curiosity to follow the rabbit down the hole in the first place.

I'm not denying that Arthur Rackham was a master illustrator, and some of his work on Alice was wonderful. But I just can't quite help thinking that he lacks the inspiration of Tenniel and Peake.