The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll's Reader

University of Auckland

Notes

(1.) Perry Nodelman, Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children's Books (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 217.

(2.) All references in this article are to a recent Macmillan facsimile of the first (i.e., 1866) edition (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Children's Books, 1984). When studying Tenniel and Carroll it is essential to know the original relationship of words and pictures on the page. However, compared with earlier Macmillan facsimiles the quality of the pictures in this one is poor, with much fine detail lost. Unaccountably, the frontispiece in this edition has also been reversed. The other works by Lewis Carroll referred to here are Alice's Adventures Under Ground (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1964), a facsimile of the original Lewis Carroll Manuscript; and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Children's Books, 1984), facsimile of the first (1872) edition.

(3.) William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935), 212.

(4.) There is no particular necessity for Tenniers selection of subjects in the opening to the book: later illustrators have often been attracted by other moments, like Alice's actual fall down the rabbit hole. See, for example, Harry Rountree (London: Nelson, 1908), W. H. Walker (facsimile edition, London: Michael O'Mara, 1986), Ralph Steadman (London: Dennis Dobson, 1967), Moritz Kennel (London: Elsevier-Phaidon, 1975), Michael Hague (London: Methuen, 1985), or Anthony Browne (London: Walker Books, 1993). In fact, Edward Hodnett, Image and Text: Studies in the Illustration of English Literature (London: Scolar Press, 1982), 176, expresses a sense of disappointment that Tenniel does not show child readers Alice and her sister together on the riverbank, and the slow fall past the well-stocked shelves of the rabbit hole. But Tenniel may have been restrained from depicting Alice's fall for reasons of decorum. Visions of disarranged skirts and exposed childish legs may have been, conversely, the reason for Carroll's inventing the scene in the first place: Carroll's challenge to his young readers to attempt a curtsey while falling through the air (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 5) suggests such fantasies.

(5.) Michael Hancher, The Tenniel Illustrations to the "Alice" Books (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985). I, like Hancher, think it very likely "that Tenniel did indeed see the Carroll illustrations" and that they "helped shape his drawings for the book" (27), and I have worked on that assumption.

(6.) Ibid., 21.

(7.) Hodnett, Image and Text, 176-77.

(8.) Denis Crutch, "Familiar Chat with Bird and Beast," Jabberwocky: The Journal of the Lewish Carroll Society 6, no. 1 (1977): 18-19, claims that the animals are all "of their own natural size" and that Alice meets them "as she passes through whichever of her sizes is convenient for a conversation" (18). Clearly this is not always precisely so, and in fact, in the same number of Jabberwocky Selwyn Goodacre, "On Alice's Changes of Size in Wonderland," 20-24, remarks that if Alice is assumed to be about three inches high when she falls into the pool of tears, she would "only come up to the dodo's leg in height, and most of the other animals would crush her under their feet" (20). Tenniel handles this slight difficulty with tact.