Sir John Tenniel

Since the first time I picked up a copy of "Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass" more than fifty years ago, I have been fascinated, and frankly, have loved the work of illustrator Sir John Tenniel. I first tried to copy his work to use as designs to go on hand-drawn Christmas Cards for family and friends. 

For more than 50 years Tenniel was the chief cartoonist for Punch Magazine. Started in 1841, Punch offered a satirical take on the interests, concerns and attitudes of Britain and the British. It ceased publication in 2002, although there was an unsuccessful later revival. Tenniel sketched Father Christmas many times for Punch, and his Father Christmas was very much the traditional English Father Christmas and not Santa Claus. Tenniel's Father Christmas is a superannuated figure , bringing good cheer - although not presents - all around in the depths of winter, with his holly crown, and his holly tree and especially with his wassailing bowl. 

Of course, Tenniel is most famous today and best remembered today for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice books, and I've copied several of these over the last few years. 

While this was one of my first. It was copied in about 2019 in response to a prompt - probably on the Facebook Sketching Every Day. The prompt was Tea for Two. I may well have another go at this sketch from the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. The Mad Hatter isn't quite right, but more than that I made the decision to only draw part of the original and didn't include Alice. If you scroll down you'll see a copy I later on made of the full illustration.

The Queen of Hearts. One of Carroll's most popular and enduring characters. Again, made in response to a Sketching Every Day Prompt. I actually took the queen of Hearts from one original, and copied one of the playing cards from another. They combined quite well, but it's another case of not being faithful to the original. Again, much later I did make a copy of the full original playing cards painting roses picture and that's also further down this page.

Alice Through The Looking Glass - the Red Queen instructing Alice on the intricacies of running as fast as you can to stay exactly where you are. First time I sketched Alice herself, and incidentally the first time I failed to get Alice right. Look at that pointed chin, horrible.

The Jabberwock. A masterpiece of Fantasy illustration. Originally this was meant to be the frontispiece to Through The Looking Glass, but Carroll used a sort of focus group of mothers who told him that this was too frightening for the kids, and so the White Knight illustration was substituted, although the Jabberwock illustration was kept in the book. Response to a prompt again. The creature is pretty well drawn, but I left out the whole of the background so again, much later on I did make a copy of the full illustration. That's further down the page. 

The Queen of Hearts' herald. Is this the same character as the White Rabbit? Can't remember.

Of course, the majority of his huge body of work are his political cartoons. I find myself increasingly fascinated by these. So far I have copied these:-

This is my copy of the famous cartoon "Mose in Egitto!!!". It satirises Disraeli's political manouevre in buying the Khedive's shares in the Suez Canal. Tenniel was unable to resist often putting an anti-semitic twist on his depictions of Disraeli. I used this one to respond to the Inktober 2018 prompt word'Angular'

This is a copy of the 1890 cartoon "Dropping the Pilot". This famous cartoon appeared in Punch in 1890 following the request of Kaiser Wilhelm II that Count Otto Von Bismarck resign the Chancellorship of Germany. 

This is another Disraeli cartoon. It comments on the Royal Titles Act that installed Victoria as the Empress of India as well as monarch of the United Kingdom. Alluding once more from Disraeli's exotic origins, Tenniel depicts him as the lamp seller from the story Aladdin, sneakily trying to persuade Queen Victoria to exchange her old yet magical British crown for the gaudy, shiny yet mundane Indian one. In reality Queen Victoria was supposedly delighted with the title. For one thing, it meant that when her son in law Crown Prince Frederick of the German Empire became Kaiser, his wife, Victoria's daughter Victoria, would not outrank her as an Empress as opposed to a mere Queen. 

Apart from loving it, one reason why I wanted to copy 'Alls Well!' is that it's a very nice example of the way that Tenniel would often depict international affairs by using anthropomorphic animals as allegorical representations of countries. So here we see the British Lion coming to a rapprochement with the Russian Bear, while the 2 Empires reached consensus over their repsonses to Ottoman atrocities in Armenia, and the first Sino Japanese war.

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. 

This is not a cartoon by Sir John Tenniel, rather a cartoon about Sir John Tenniel. This cartoon by Edward Linley Sambourne, Tenniel's successor as chief cartoonist for Punch, is entitled "The Black and White Knight" and celebrates Tenniel being knighted in 1893.

I’m fascinated with the Caterpillar in the text of Alice in Wonderland although I don’t think it’s one of Tenniel's 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. 

This is the second of two of Tenniel’s illustrations in Alice in Wonderland which feature the Duchess. The Duchess is really interesting because it’s one occasion where we can suggest an inspiration for his conception of the character. The other, first illustration of the Duchess, where she is shown full face, and holding a baby, looks very like an oil painting known as The Ugly Duchess, by 16^th century Flemish painter Quentin Matsys. Honestly, he resemblance is pretty clear when you see the painting. The painting supposedly depicts Margaretha Maultasch, who was a 13th century Duchess of Carinthia and Tirol, although this has been disputed. It’s widely viewed as a work of satire, since the Ugly Duchess holds a red flower, symbolising youth and engagement.

I remember seeing the painting in London’s National Gallery in 1980, where the grotesqueness of the image made an impression on me. I did not, I will admit, make the connection with Tenniel’s Duchess which I was already quite familiar with. To be fair, they were calling it “A Grotesque Old Woman” rather than the Ugly Duchess at the time, which might have made it slightly more obvious to me. 

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, pne 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.

This is the second time that I have copied this illustration of he white rabbit. I know that I made a copy some years ago, but I have no idea what I did with it, I can't find a digital copy on my laptop, and I don't seem to have ever posted it on a blog. So there you go.

What a fantasy illustrator Tenniel was! The original of this rendition of the gryphon is just superb. 

The names Tweedledum and Tweedledee were not invented by Lewis Carroll. John Byron, in a satire of 1725, used the names to refer to composers Handel and Bononcini (Bonon who?). With reference to the nursery rhyme, the two of them never quite have a battle in “Through the Looking Glass” because they’re frightened off by a raven. There you go.

I love the disappointment and disillusion on Alice's face in this one. She's achieved her objective and become a queen. Yay! Now what? 

Right, honesty time. My favourite ever rendition of the Cheshire Cat is not Tenniel's. I do like this one, though, even though it isn't my favourite. 

Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Carroll never invented Humpty Dumpty. Versions of the rhyme exist from the 18th century and it may be even older than that. To me, there's almost hints of the caterpillar from Wonderland in the way that Humpty is portrayed in Looking Glass, no more so than when he says that a word means exactly what he chooses it to mean. 

The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. So much of what Tenniel did with the Alice books became the visual vocabulary for the characters, and subsequent illustrators have found it hard to move away from his archetypes. Many later Mock Turtles use Tenniel's convention of the Mock Turtle sharing characteristics of a cow or a sheep, and a turtle. 

Tenniel would produce even more illustrations for Looking Glass than he did for Wonderland. He actually produced 51 illustrations , compared with the 43 he made for  Wonderland. I think that if anything, the Looking Glass illustrations are even better than Wonderland, although I admit that this is purely a matter of personal taste. It's all the more remarkable considering that Tenniel refused more than once to do the illustrations, and then eventually only agreed on the understanding that they would not get in the way of his work, and he would only do them in such spare time as he could find. 

For me there's a nice parallel between this illustration which occurs not long after the start of the narrative, and the illustration of Alice picking up the Red Queen at the end of the book, which then morphs into the kitten. 

This is one of the most recent - sketched in February 2023. I love the business of it. In order to copy a sketch like this you kind of have to deconstruct it with you eye, to at least get an idea of how it woks before you start. With this one I started with the Duchess' left eye, and worked outwards from there. 

I made this as part of Inktober 2022. (An Internet challenge to produce and ink sketch for each day of the month according to a list of prompts.) I wondered what the effect of using the sepia pen would be. Answer - not great. Well, you live and learn. The original to be fair, is one of my least favourite of the original Alice in Wonderland sketches. Each to their own - it would be a boring old world if we all liked the same things, wouldn't it?

February 2023 - This is my copy of one of the four illustrations of the poem "Father William" which Tenniel made. The caterpillar has Alice to recite the poem. I love the poses of the young man and Father William himself, I think they're beautifully observed by Tenniel. I also really like the eel that he's balancing on his nose - surely it's deliberate that it looks like a sword?

The Hatter from Wonderland again

Wool and Water from Looking Glass.

There we are, the proper full scene of the painting the roses red picture.

The White Rabbit and the giant Alice's Hand from Alice in Wonderland. 

Another of several illustrations Tenniel made of the Mad Hatter - and he also features in some illustrations from Looking Glass as well.

My copy of Tenniel's quite magnificent original picture of the Jabberwock. What a fabulous piece of fantasy illustration. 

By way of comparison with the Linley Sambourne picture, here's the white Knight from Alice Through the Looking Glass. The Jabberwock is my favourite illustration from the book, but I'm also very fond of this one. I also preferred Looking Glass to Wonderland, mainly because I liked the chessboard logic of the second book, and saw the point of Alice trying to make herself a queen. 

Staying with “Alice through the Looking Glass” I've also 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 Alice 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.

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 I gave myself the next 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 for a while. 

This is from Alice in Wonderland. You have a fish footman and you have a frog footman. In all honesty, what is not to like here?

Alice and the Cheshire Cat. You know it was only when I made a copy of one of Tenniel's earlier cartoons, called Up a Tree, which bears some similarities to this illustration that I came to realise that I hadn't previously copied it. This, like he Humpty Dumpty sketch for Looking Glass, was drawn like this to accommodate the text .

Another from Looking Glass - the end of the story where Alice picks up the Red Queen who eventually turns into the kitten she was playing with at the start of the story. Oops - spoilers.

A more recent attempt at the tea party picture from Wonderland, this time including Alice. Once again the curse of Alice strikes. I just can't seem to copy her head very well. 

From Looking Glass, at the start of the story where Alice is playing with Dinah's kitten. 

From Wonderland - the Lobster Quadrille

Wonderland - There goes Bill

- and another Hatter from Wonderland

Another of the illustrations of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. I think I've copied all of the Wonderland illustrations featuring the Mad Hatter, although I know there's several Looking Glass pictures which feature him as well. 

Alice in the croquet match with flamingo and hedgehogs.

When I made this copy I'd decided to bite the bullet and copy all ninety plus Tenniel illustrations of the two books. It made sense to complete Wonderland first and to I copied this illustration which is perfectly good, but doesn't hold my interest in the way that some of the more fantasy based pictures do.

For once I've done a halfway decent job with Alice's head. Not perfect, but then not quite so awful as some of the other goes I've had at Alice's head. I used a much darker pen for the mouse.

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For the most part Tenniel kept his cartoon work quite seperate from Alice, a job that, by all accounts he didn't seem to enjoy very much - it was very hard for Lewis Carroll to persuade him to undertake the illustrations for Looking Glass. However there are times when you can see his Alice illustrations did owe something to his cartoon work, and even two occasions where he used Alice and characters from Alice for his own cartoon purposes. 

This is copied from a cartoon from Punch in 1862, a few years before Alice came along. It satirises Abraham Lincoln's 'climb down' over two Confederate emissaries to the UK who were seized from a British ship by Union forces. Knowing what a visual memory Tenniel had its quite possible that he drew on memories of this cartoon when creating the illustration of Alice and the Cheshire Cat.

Alice in Bumbleland. This is my copy of a cartoon Tenniel drew for Punch in 1899. I've only found two occasions when Tenniel used his own illustrations as inspiration for political cartons, which is ironic when you consider just how much some of his illustrations for the two books have been used as the basis of political cartoons by other cartoonists since. This is the second - where Alice is actually politician and future prime minister Arthur Balfour. The cartoon and the accompanying text mocked his mind numbingly boring and bumbling delivery of the London Government Bill, which created the London County Council. It draws very heavily on an illustration of Alice and the Gryphon listening to the Mock Turtle - you can see my copy of the original above. 

This is my copy of Alice in Blunderland, an earlier cartoon which appeared in Punch in 1880. The topic of the cartoon is the Temple Bar Memorial in the Strand, which many criticised at the time for obstructing traffic. The fact that the Monument bears a sculpture of a Gryphon on top must have made it irresistible for Tenniel to use Alice, the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. The Gryphon is in a very different stance from any of the Alice illustrations depicting him and his tail is very different. As for the Mock Turtle, well, he is no longer so much Mock Turtle as real turtle, as his calf's head has been replaced by a real turtle's head. I do wonder that Tenniel didn't use references to Alice more in his cartoons.