I’ve written a lot about Edgar Thurstan and the relationship between the 21 illustrations of the Alice books he made for the 1930 Odham’s combined edition, and the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. For me, as for many other lovers of the books, Tenniel’s illustrations are the vision that I see in my mind’s eye when I read the books again.
Why should this be? Especially when you consider that they
have a 1951 Disney animated movie to contend with. It can’t be just because
they came first , could it? Well, no, While I think being the first (published)
helped establish Tenniel’s rendition of Wonderland in public consciousness, if
they had been just mediocre they wouldn’t have lasted. And they’ve lasted
alright – boy how they’ve lasted.
I think we can find at least part of the answer by asking the
question – why did Lewis Carroll want Tenniel to make the illustrations in he
first place? Carroll doesn’t often get credit for this, but I think he really understood
how important illustrations would be for his story. He wrote it in manuscript
form as Alice’s Adventures Underground, and accompanied the handwritten text
with 37 of his own hand drawn illustrations, and presented it o Alice Liddell
for Christmas in 1863. When he conceived the idea of having the book published
he borrowed the manuscript and asked some literary friends to try it with their
children. They were very positive about the text, much less so about the
illustrations. Carroll, to his credit saw the recommendation to get a
professional illustrator for what it was. Good advice. He recognised what
Tenniel could bring to the party – the fact that he held off publishing Alice Through
the Looking Glass for several years until Tenniel could be persuaded to
illustrate it shows how essential he thought Tenniel was.
Why, though? Tenniel had already illustrated several books
prior to making the illustrations for Wonderland, but he was best known as a
cartoonist for Punch magazine. From 1850 he shared the duties of cartoonist
with John Leech – the illustrator of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, until becoming
sole cartoonist on the death of Leech in 1864. It seems that Carroll was drawn,
should you pardon the pun, to Tenniel through his great facility rendering
anthropomorphic animals, and his unusual habit of drawing from his prodigious visual
memory without using models or drawing from life. Did he perhaps see in Tenniel
a man capable of creating worlds out of his imagination?
I personally feel that Tenniel’s illustrations demonstrate
tremendous strengths. Namely –
Tenniel showed a fine ability to align his illustrations with
the text, both literally and metaphorically. Tenniel followed the story. His
illustrations show what Carroll wrote. In fact, he showed imagination in the
way that his illustrations linked physically with the text, particularly in the
L shaped illustrations of Alice looking up at Humpty and the Cheshire Cat, for
example. The two side of Alice passing through the looking Glass on opposite
sides of the page, and the two sides of the page showing the transformation of the
Red Queen into the kitten show great innovation.
Tenniel managed to take what were sometimes sparse
descriptions of the characters’ appearance and create archetypes of these same
characters. A great example of this being the Hatter. (The Cheshire Cat tells
us that he’s mad, but Carroll always refers to him as just The Hatter). It’s
not an exaggeration to say that pretty much every depiction of the character since
has been influenced by Tenniel. Illustrators are faced with the stark choice of
borrowing aspects of Tenniel’s Hatter, or producing something that is
deliberately made to be as different from Tenniel’s as possible.
I think that at least part of what makes Tenniel’s work on the
Alice books so effective is that he doesn’t do sugar or saccharine. Even in the
illustrations for the earlier chapters of Wonderland, he never really gives us
anything cute, for want of a better word. Using monochrome with sometimes heavy
shading means that even his brightest illustrations have shadows. Add to this
his willingness to use relatively grotesque caricature. What Dickens achieved
with words with, for example, a character like Sarah Gamp in “Nicholas Nickleby”
Tenniel achieved with his drawing of the Duchess.
More than many of the illustrators of the Alice books who
would come later, many of Tenniel’s illustrations reward the viewer who takes a
second, more detailed look at them. While many who came after would concentrate
on characters while giving merely the hint of a background, there’s a real
richness to many of Tenniel’s backgrounds, especially the outdoors scenes. On
first glance you might not notice the glass houses behind the Queen of Hearts,
or the eel traps behind Father William when he is balancing an eel on his nose.
They’re here. They don’t strictly need to be there but they add texture. The
first time that you looked at the Duchess’ first illustration, did you notice the
smiling cat by her feet? It’s the Cheshire cat before he is even mentioned as
such.
I mentioned that Carroll seems to have appreciated Tenniel’s
facility with anthropomorphic creatures which you can see in his illustrations
of the fish and frog footmen. But he goes even further than just depicting
living animals as people. For Tenniel was s wonderful fantasy artist even
before anyone had conceived of that term. His sleeping Gryphon is a wonderful illustration,
while his jabberwock is nothing less than a tour de force. Personally I think
that this one illustration justifies the price of admission by itself.
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So, when you get right down to it I think that while other illustrators
may have illustrated parts of either novel more effectively than Tenniel did, I
think as a whole, as a set of illustrations they are unmatched. Which is ot the
same as saying that they are beyond criticism.
I’m not totally sure exactly how I feel about Tenniel’s
depiction of Alice. With her pinafore dress, and her long blond hair with its
eponymous Alice band, Tenniel gives us another archetype. Even an artist as
distinctive as Ralph Steadman gave us an Alice with the band, the hair and the
pinafore dress. My issue with Tenniel’s Alice is that there is not a lot of
life about her. Alice doesn’t do much more than standing or sitting listening
to and looking at other characters, or reacting to something. In some
illustrations she resembles a porcelain doll, and she’s about as dynamic as one
too.
This is a criticism you can extend to many of Tenniel’s
illustrations. In many of these his characters’ positions are beautifully
observed, but they are poses. We, the viewers are looking straight on at
characters who resemble actors who have been carefully placed in a tableau on
stage, and are holding perfectly still.
Of course, it’s a bit much criticising Tenniel for not
being more cinematic in his compositions when it was decades before cinema was
even invented. But it’s clear how static many of his illustrations seem when you
compare the slow and steady rise out of the chimney his Bill the Lizard makes,
compared with the explosive lizard expectoration in Harry Rountree’s depiction
of the same scene.
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Well, nobody’s perfect and trust me, it is far easier to
criticise than to do something that other people can criticise. To me, Tenniel’s
work is the standard against which all Alice illustrators must be judged. It’s
that simple.
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