The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll's Reader

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Rose Lovell-Smith

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Can sources for Tenniel's remarkable animal drawings be more precisely identified? An early biographer of Tenniel records his acknowledgment that he liked to spend time observing the animals at the zoos However, comparisons between pictures reveal that in addition Tenniel almost certainly consulted scientific illustrations or recalled them for his Alice in Wonderland drawings. For example, in the mid-eighteenth century George Edwards produced a hand-colored engraving of a dodo which, he wrote, he had copied from a painting of a live dodo brought from Mauritius to Holland. The original painting was acquired by Sir Hans Sloane, passed on to Edwards, and given by him to the British Museum. (38) In 1847 C. A. Marlborough painted a picture of a dodo, which is now in the Ashmolean Museum (it was reproduced on the cover of the magazine Oxford Today in 1999). And in 1862 the second volume of J. G. Wood's The Illustrated Natural History includes a picture of a dodo. (39) Compare all these with Tenniel's dodo (figs. 8, 9, 10, and 11): they surely either have a common ancestor or are copies one from the other.

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The dodo is a special case in that Tenniel could hardly have studied one at the London zoo. But I wish to put forward a claim that Wood's 1851 one-volume and, later, expanded three-volume Illustrated Natural History were very probably familiar to Carroll and the small Liddells and also to Tenniel, not only because Wood's dodo illustration is a possible source for Tenniel's but because these volumes also display smiling crocodiles, baby eagles in their nest, and the lory, (40) as well as illustrations of numerous more familiar animals that appear in the words and/or pictures of Alice, including the edible crab, the lobster, the frog, the dormouse, guinea pigs, flamingos, varieties of fancy pigeon, and so forth. Given the compendious nature of Wood's works, this is hardly surprising, of course. But Wood must be favored as the source of animal drawings most probably known to Tenniel for the further reason that Wood illustrations often quite strongly resemble Tenniel illustrations, as readers may judge by comparing figures 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16, to the toucan, eagle, and crab from Alice (see fig. 1) and the lobster and dormouse (see Alice in Wonderland, 157 and 97). (41)

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No matter how good Tenniel's famous visual memory, he is unlikely to have drawn such a menagerie without some research. Hancher noted the strong resemblance between a Bewick hedgehog (from the General History of Quadrupeds, 1790, often reprinted) and the evasive croquet-ball hedgehog at Alice's feet on page 121. (42) Bewick's hedgehog, however, had already been recycled by William Harvey for Wood's one-volume Illustrated Natural History where Tenniel is equally likely to have seen and remembered it: all three hedgehogs have the same dragging rear foot (see figs. 17, 18, and 19). This is another case, like that of the dodo, where scientific natural history illustrations have been copied, recopied, or reworked for reprinting. A similar argument could be presented about the large number of depictions of sinuous flamingos that Tenniel might have consulted. The volume of contemporary natural history publishing for children and adults, the evident contemporary interest in illustrations of animals, and the resemblance between Tenniel's and contemporary natural history drawings have important implications: the resemblance indicates that Tenniel is here creating the context within which he wants his pictures to be read. He shows us that he saw (and wanted the viewer to be able to see) Carroll's animals as "real" animals, like those that were the objects of current scientific study and theories, at least as much as he saw them as Grandville or Punch-type instruments of social satire, or fairy-tale or fable talking beasts. (43)