The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll's Reader

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Rose Lovell-Smith

WHEN JOHN TENNIEL was providing 42 illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1864 he was in his mid-forties, an established illustrator and a Punch cartoonist. At that time C. L. Dodgson and Lewis Carroll were equally unknown as authors, for adults or children. Tenniel, on the other hand, already had a professional understanding of the visual codes and illustrative techniques of his day, and already had an audience--an adult rather than a child audience--who would expect from him a certain level of technical proficiency, humor, and social nous. Tenniel's illustrations should therefore interest us today not just for their remarkable and continuing success as a felicitous adjunct to Carroll's text, but also as the first--arguably, the best--Victorian reading or interpretation of Carroll's text. After all, as a reader Tenniel enjoyed considerable advantages, including his personal position and experience, his access to the author's own illustrations to the manuscript version of the story, and access to the author himself. In his study of illustration in children's literature, Words about Pictures, Perry Nodelman has argued that "the pictures in a sequence act as schemata for each other"--that is, all the expectations, understanding, and information we bring to reading an illustrated book, and all the information we accumulate as our reading proceeds, "becomes a schema for each new page of words and each new picture as we continue throughout a book." (1) If this is so, all Tenniel's choices relating to subject matter, size, position, and style of illustration must come to operate, as we proceed through Alice in Wonderland, as a kind of guide to reading Carroll's text. An examination of Tenniel's opening sequence of illustrations as they appeared on the page in the 1866 edition of Alice in Wonderland (2) will therefore begin to reveal Tenniel's preoccupations, the kind of interpretation of Carroll's text he is interested in making.

As William Empson pointed out in 1935, two aspects of Alice are traditional in children's stories: the idea of characters of unusual size (miniatures and giants) and the idea of the talking beast. (3) Tenniel's opening drawing, the White Rabbit at the head of chapter 1, draws on both these traditions. The rabbit occupies a point between animal and human, simultaneously both these things and neither of them, an implication hardly made so firmly by Carroll's text. The rabbitness of the rabbit is emphasized by the meadow setting, the absence of trousers, and the careful attention paid to anatomy and proportion. But the rabbit is slightly distorted towards the human by his upright posture, his clothing and accessories, his pose, and his human eye and hand. Less obviously, Tenniel also extends Carroll's text by offering information about the size of the rabbit. From the grass and dandelion clock (a visual joke) in the background the reader grasps the rabbit as rather larger than normal bunny size: about the size of a toddler or small child, perhaps. As this illustration was invented by Tenniel (Carroll's headpiece illustration shows Alice, her sister, and the book), the contrast is clear between Carroll, whose picture draws attention to the frame of the story, to the affectionate relationship of sisters, and thereby to Alice's membership of the human family, and Tenniel, who selects a traditional story idea that shifts the focus another way, toward a mediation between different kinds familiar from those many forms of art in which animal behavior is used to represent human behavior.

In further illustrations, Tenniel offers more images suggestive of unusual relative size. The second picture, page 8, shows Alice too large to go through the little door. On page 10 she holds the bottle labeled "DRINK ME" which will shrink her; on page 15 she is growing taller, with the text elongated to match. Then comes page 18, where the frame and larger size suggest that here is an important picture. In it the human/animal rabbit and the idea of Alice's unusual size occur together. Alice looks gigantic in relation to the hallway, and the White Rabbit, normal size for the hallway (it appears) but perhaps (in that case) outsize for a rabbit, is much reduced from the importance he assumed in the first illustration and is shown fleeing from her terrifying figure. The pool of tears illustration on page 26 also relates to these themes. Here a fully dad human, Alice, is depicted much the same size as the unclothed mouse with which she swims. Note, too, that in the text, Alice frightens the mouse away as she had previously frightened the rabbit, although this time it is by talking about her pet, her cat Dinah. The reader who ponders this opening sequence of illustrations might reflect that Alice would also be frightened of Dinah if she met her while still mouse-sized. The schemata, then, direct the reader towards a cluster of ideas in which animal fears and anxieties about survival are connected with images of lesser or greater relative size. (4) Tenniel appears to have arrived at this interpretation independently: while he does frequently follow Carroll's designs closely in the subject and overall approach to an illustration (Michael Hancher provides some useful opportunities to make comparisons), (5) of the pictures just discussed only the one of Alice growing taller at the head of chapter 2 very much resembles a parallel drawing in Carroll's manuscript. Moreover, when Tenniel does follow Carroll in choice of subject he usually makes significant changes in treatment: Tenniel's Alice, for instance, having slipped into the pool of tears, is very much more alarmed than Carroll's Alice. (6) Edward Hodnett, who reviewed Tenniel's work for the Alice books picture by picture, makes rather slighting remarks about several of the designs in this opening sequence: those on pages 8 and 10 are "too matter-of-fact to be necessary," the "elongated Alice stands merely looking round-eyed," and the second vignette of Alice swimming with the mouse "makes the first superfluous." (7) Hodnett seems to me to have missed the point. These designs are in my view extremely consistent in seeking and developing a particular nexus of ideas.