The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll's Reader

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In line with his scientific interpretation, then, Tenniel in illustrating Alice in Wonderland intensifies Carroll's reference to Darwin's theory of evolution by carrying out his own visual editing of the Carroll illustrations in the manuscript. Tenniel makes the ape appear in two consecutive illustrations: in the second, it stares thoughtfully into the eyes of the reader--appearing to claim kinship. Tenniel includes among the creatures in these illustrations on pages 29 and 35 a fancy pigeon, perhaps a fantail or a pouter, which should in my view be taken as a direct reference to Darwin's argument from the selective breeding of fancy pigeon varieties in chapter 1 of The Orion of Species. (44) A visual detail that Tenniel introduced into the book, the glass dome in the background to the royal garden scene on page 117, looks like the dome at the old Surrey Zoological Gardens (45) and therefore constitutes another reference to the study of animals. And as already noted, Tenniel does not reproduce Carroll's rather lonely image of Alice abandoned by the animals, which would have had the effect of separating her human figure from the animal ones and thus emphasizing Alice's difference from them. Instead, Tenniel provides two images of Alice among, and almost of, the animal world, developing a radical implication of Carroll's text of which Carroll himself was possibly unaware.

On the other hand, Carroll's interest in predation, in the motif of "eat or be eaten," is not one on which Tenniel expands. No doubt it would have been thought too frightening for children: one must recall the care taken by Carroll over the positioning of the Jabberwocky illustration in Through the Looking-Glass. (46) But while Carroll's text here develops emphatically--albeit peripherally--some ideas that Tenniel could only leave aside, Tenniel's recognition of the importance of such themes is strongly demonstrated by the puppy picture. This illustration is a particularly large one, dominating the page (55) on which it appears. It is framed, and therefore gives an impression of completion and independent significance, very different from that given by the more common vignette with its intimate and fluid relationship to the text. These things make it probable that the puppy scene and its illustration were especially important in Tenniel's reading of Alice in Wonderland. Yet commentaries on Alice in Wonderland tend to ignore the puppy scene, perhaps because critics are often most interested by Carroll's verbal nonsense, and the puppy is speechless. Indeed, Denis Crutch disapproves of the puppy as "an intruder from the 'real' world" and Goldthwaite takes up this point, commenting that the puppy was Carroll's "most glaring aesthetic mistake in ... Alice"--neither seems to have noticed that the hedgehogs and flamingos are also not talking beasts. (47) Another reader of Tenniel's illustrations, Isabelle Nitres, takes a similar line, remarking that "the full-page illustration is perhaps placing too much emphasis on Alice's encounter with the puppy." (48) But what Tenniel's puppy illustration encapsulates, in my view, is the theme of the importance of relative size. Here is Alice's fearful moment of uncertainty about whether she is meeting a predator or a pet. As reader and Alice will discover, the puppy only wants to play. But Alice is "terribly frightened all the time at the thought it might be hungry, in which case it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing" (54), and Tenniel's illustration with the thistle in the foreground towering over the tiny Alice, like many of his memorable illustrations, primarily signifies her anxiety.