Inspiring Young Readers
John Tenniel (1820 – 1914 )
I don’t have any statistics to support this but I suspect that editions of Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass are amongst the most collected and collectible of children’s books. A good deal of this collecting is driven by the huge range of different illustrators who have taken on the task of bringing Lewis Carroll’s work to life. And the range of different approaches taken by artists is genuinely amazing , from the abstract to the surreal to the cosily figurative and, even, to the political. And there have been some big names of the art world getting in on the act – Salvador Dali, Ralph Steadman, Arthur Rackham, Mabel Lucie Atwell, Mervyn Peake, Tove Jansson to name just a tiny number.
One of the consequences of having all this variety is that the sheer brilliance and imagination of the original illustrator – John Tenniel – tends to get overlooked or taken for granted. In the search for constant reinterpretation and novelty it’s easy to lose sight of just how innovative and brilliant Tenniel’s drawings are and the danger is that we give too little praise for the way in which his visualisation of Carroll’s writing has helped turn the books into such masterpieces of English literature.
Although Tenniel’s fame will always rest most heavily on the Alice books, he was a substantial figure in the world of political cartooning before he took on the commission with Carroll. He had studied at the Royal Academy of Art where he learned the formal skills of draughtsmanship and life drawing. However, it was as a political cartoonist that he made his breakthrough and he became a cartoon artist for the magazine Punch in 1850 and rose to be their chief cartoon artist by 1861. At this time Punch was by some distance the most influential political magazine of the day and was able to exert a fair amount of influence on the direction of public policy – Tenniel would have been a well -known figure amongst the political chattering classes.
So the choice of Tenniel to illustrate Carroll’s Alice books must have seemed a good match – the satirical aspects of Carroll’s writing are, I think, often underplayed in favour of the fantastic or fanciful and a Punch artist with Tenniel’s experience would have seen the possibilities the books offered.
However, the relationship between artist and writer was never entirely comfortable. Carroll was an interfering control freak and was exacting in getting what he wanted. It’s fair to assume that, given the nature of the working arrangements , what Tenniel produced is as close as it’s possible to get to the way in which Carroll imagined his characters would look. The reality is that Tenniel took quite a lot of persuading to take on Through the Looking Glass and this does rather support the notion that their working relationship was strained but the fact that he eventually agreed to do it shows too just how much Tenniel himself had emotionally invested in the enterprise.
In the end it’s the drawings we’re left with that count and so many of them deserve the adjective ‘iconic’ – for many of us these drawings are the world of Alice and are so ubiquitous that we often don’t stop to look at them carefully enough. He is able to capture the sense of mystery and even menace that many of Alice’s encounters have lying not far in the background. The world of the adults who appear in the books is illogical and sinister and it is Alice, the child, who stands for common sense and real values in this world. It is this inversion of the child / adult role that appeals so much to younger readers who know just how crazy the adult world looks from the ‘outside’.
The way Tenniel produced the illustrations was quite a laborious process. The creators of the website Alice In Wonderland.net have this to say about how he worked:
“his method for creating the illustrations of the Alice books was the same as the method he used for Punch, namely preliminary pencil drawings, further drawings in ‘ink and Chinese white’ to simulate the wood engraver’s line, then transference to the wood-block by the use of tracing paper. Then the drawings were engraved to the highest standards, in this instance by the Dalziel Brothers.”
They also point out that making changes to drawings using this process is clumsy and expensive and this limited what Tenniel could do:
“Because of the difficult process of creating wood-blocks involved, sometimes concessions had to be made as to the overall design of the illustration. For example, a character might be moved into a different position – which probably happened with the ape in the illustration of the Dodo with the thimble.
And, once wood had been removed, it could not be put back without a great deal of difficulty. A small number of Alice wood-blocks have had alterations or repairs made to them, that are in some cases detectable from the proofs which have been taken directly from the blocks. For example, the wood-block of the Hatter at the trial scene, the section showing the Hatter’s cup with a piece bitten out, had to be repaired and re-engraved.”
The illustrations were reproduced in black and white in the early editions of the book but Tenniel did supervise the printing of some in colour for the later Nursery Alice – although I personally prefer the originals in black and white.
I love Tenniel’s work but not just for their artistic merit – which is substantial. What I most admire is the audacious way in which he found a style that would make the Alice characters live for me and generations of children before me. It’s great to see new interpretations but these new editions always have to acknowledge and work with, or maybe consciously reject, these powerful originals in order to find an identity of their own and that in itself is a mark of just how great Tenniel’s work is.
Terry Potter
September 2016