Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  Publisher John Murray brought Tenniel fame as a book illustrator with a publication of Aesop’s Fables in 1848. Tenniel was largely untutored, a point that aligns him with first-generation caricaturists like George Cruikshank and John Leech with whom he collaborated to illustrate The Ingoldsby Legends.59 A Punch cartoonist, Tenniel began his career in oils and exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1837 to 1842 and again in 1851 (Sarzano 9–10). In Art of Old England, John Ruskin likens Tenniel to Tintoretto, noting: “Tenniel has much of the largeness and symbolic mastery of imagination which belong to the great leaders of classic art: in the shadowy masses and sweeping lines of his great compositions, there are tendencies which might have won his adoption into the school of Tintoret” (86). Forrest Reid disliked the stiffness of Tenniel’s human figures and his partiality to draw from photographs, not from life (likely owing to his loss of vision in his right eye due to a fencing accident),60 but even he recognized Tenniel’s giftedness in drawing animals.61

  In a letter dated 20 December 1863, Carroll, an avid Punch reader, wrote to Tom Taylor, dramatist and editor of Punch, asking to be introduced to Tenniel. Admitting dissatisfaction with his own drawing, Carroll indicates, “of all artists on wood, I should prefer Mr. Tenniel. If he should be willing to undertake [the illustrations], I would send him the book to look over, not that he should at all follow my pictures, but simply to give him an idea of the sort of thing I want” (M. Cohen 1: 62). While some early biographers question whether Tenniel actually saw Carroll’s illustrations, others like Frankie Morris and Michael Hancher posit, “it is very likely that Tenniel did indeed see the Carroll illustrations, and, furthermore, that they helped shape his drawings for the book” (Hancher 27).62 Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the real-life model for Alice, goes so far as to say in a letter to her son Caryl Hargreaves published in Cornhill in 1932: “As a rule Tenniel used Mr. Dodgson’s drawings as the basis for his own illustrations and they held frequent consultations about them” (9).

  Tenniel’s contribution is all the more considerable because the text of Alice, written in the age of the richly descriptive Victorian novel, is relatively bare in its description of characters and settings; as Morris observes, “Carroll’s texts are practically all conversation (Alice’s with others and those she has with herself), with just sufficient narration to carry the story line and little to no description” (149). In many instances, the illustrations, which Carroll famously directs the reader to view in the case of the Gryphon, define character and place. Different from readers of the Household Dickens who were familiar with Dickens’s characters through the caricaturists who brought them to life, Alice’s first readers were not privy to the original illustrations and thus not aware of the resemblance of Tenniel’s designs to Carroll’s originals that Tenniel refashioned. In Sir John Tenniel, Rodney Engen notes that

  Tenniel realized he had been hired not as an imaginative illustrator but as a drawing machine: someone to polish and perfect Dodgson’s own ideas and prepare them for the engraver…. Although Dodgson’s original drawings are crude, the compositions are often exactly as Tenniel’s final versions, or at best with slight variations. It was clearly Dodgson’s book, and he rarely gave in to Tenniel’s more imaginative expertise. (74)

  Tenniel understood Carroll’s imagination, but in redrawing Carroll’s illustrations, Tenniel also added domestic interiors and landscapes that appealed to middle-class consumers of the 1860s. This Sixties artist excelled in drawing Carroll’s animal characters and literally drew out elements of pantomime in Carroll’s text as well as his social caricatures.

  Carroll was a fan of pantomime, an avid cardplayer, and an inventor of games. Pantomime was at its peak of popularity as a theatrical form when Carroll published Wonderland. Carroll chose a common plot device from early to mid-nineteenth-century pantomime familiar to his Victorian readers when Alice encounters a pack of personified cards in Under Ground and Wonderland.63 Carroll draws the card gardeners that paint the white roses red as actual playing cards without heads, but Tenniel turns them into costumed figures by adding human heads to the playing cards of various suits, making the Red Queen’s threat of beheading eerily possible. The pantomime connection in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass,64 “was not lost on Tenniel,” notes Morris, “who cleverly drew the habitants of Alice’s dreams as actors in big-head and other masks, contrivances, and skins” (169). The entire “Pig and Pepper” chapter that Carroll added for Wonderland is a pantomime complete with a howling baby, flying objects, an ill-natured cook, and a Duchess with a head too large for her body. Likewise, Tenniel drew the Fish-Footman and the Frog-Footman with human-looking bodies but large animal heads that look like fish and frog masks; in this manner, the artist evokes the style of pantomime wherein actors often wore masks that covered their entire heads. Another illustrative feature of Tenniel’s pantomime is the oversized object the Fish-Footman delivers to the Frog-Footman, which appears in this very scene in the form of an enormous letter with a Royal seal, which turns out to be an invitation from the Queen to the Duchess to play croquet. No doubt the element of pantomime in Tenniel’s illustrations facilitated Alice’s adaptation to the London stage in 1876.

  Tenniel had a fuller cast of characters and scenes to illustrate than Carroll since Carroll essentially doubled the length of the tale when he revised it for Wonderland; the 18,000 word Under Ground text with thirty-seven illustrations became, in Wonderland, a 35,000 word text with forty-two illustrations. However, the artist of Wonderland refashioned a striking number of Carroll’s designs form the original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Tenniel’s illustration of Alice conversing with the surly-speaking, hookah-smoking Caterpillar “departs considerably from Carroll’s,” notes Hancher in The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books, “but it still shows a dependence upon it” (31). In his revision of this design, Tenniel maintains Carroll’s concept of the Caterpillar with human attributes, but Tenniel renders the creature’s anatomy with naturalism.

  Carroll regrettably creates anatomical confusion in his Caterpillar, which has the eyes, nose, mouth, and hand of a human (see fig. 38A). In contrast, Tenniel maintains the naturalism of the Caterpillar while still personifying the creature: positioned in silhouette (as opposed to a frontal view in the original), the creature’s many appendages imply a human mouth and nose through which the Caterpillar speaks (see fig. 38B).65 Carroll’s hookah resembles a peace pipe, but Tenniel improves the smoking device, which now looks as if it comes straight from the British Raj with its clearly defined water jar, bowl, gasket, and elaborate hose. Moreover, Tenniel shows the Caterpillar in the process of inhaling smoke from the hookah’s hose, and smoke realistically billows out of the Caterpillar’s mouth-like appendage.

  Figure 38. A: “Caterpillar on a Mushroom.” Illustration by Lewis Carroll for his Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, 1864;

  Figure 38. B: “Caterpillar on a Mushroom.” Illustration by John Tenniel for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865.

  Alice and the talking Caterpillar are the focal point of both illustrations, but the setting is more striking in Tenniel’s picture than in Carroll’s as is the arrangement of the characters in relation to the mushroom. For his design, Carroll draws some sparse vegetation surrounding a crudely drawn mushroom, but Tenniel enhances the original in making the setting of Wonderland a believable fantasy world. Bell-shaped flowers frame Alice as she peeps over the top of an accurately rendered mushroom with a spongy gilled cap and a long stalk; two smaller egg-shaped toadstools in the foreground, waving blades of grass, and realistic shading make this setting look as lifelike as the natural history studies of mushrooms that Beatrix Potter drew in the 1890s.

  Tenniel’s drawing of Alice outgrowing the White Rabbit’s house reveals both a “dependence” on the original Carroll design and a marked improvement in its rendering of domestic interiors as well as elements of the grotesque.66 In Under Ground, for example, the White Rabbit’
s house is simply a rectangular box (see fig. 39A). Alice’s elbow rubs against a door not pictured. Alice’s foot presses against the top right-hand corner of the page. A single-line frame to signify an interior space was an unsophisticated choice for a Victorian audience that favored realistic representation in illustration. Tenniel builds the walls of a room in an actual Victorian dwelling and shows Alice attempting to free herself by extending her arm out a skillfully rendered curtained casement window (see fig. 39B). What we regrettably lose in claustrophobia and exaggerated growth in the original caricature, we gain in naturalism. Tenniel makes it look believable that a real child grows so impossibly large that she can outgrow a house. Dressed as a respectable Victorian girl, Tenniel’s Alice wears a pinafore over a knee-length dress with puffed sleeves. While Alice has a nondescript dress and wears a blank expression in Carroll’s depiction, Tenniel gives Alice a decided pout that expresses her exasperation in changing size every time she eats and drinks. In these ways, “Tenniel altered Carroll’s drawing considerably,” as Hancher notes, and improved it, “but he did not ignore it” (31).

  Adding details to suit popular taste, Tenniel at times drew from Victorian life and his own Punch cartoons as Hancher elaborates in The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books. The figure of Alice makes her debut in an 1864 Tenniel illustration of a girl garlanding a British Lion (Hancher 23). The Crystal Palace from the Great Exhibition of 1851 appears in the background of the croquet scene, showing Wonderland to look eerily like Victorian England. Tenniel also carries representational realism into the “Father William” sequence, showing once again how Tenniel sustains but refashions Carroll’s vision.

  Carroll famously parodies Robert Southey’s didactic poem “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them” (1799), a Victorian Sunday School favorite about a pious man who remains faithful to God and reaps the benefits of piety in his old age. Carroll’s four cartoonish illustrations in Under Ground are simple line drawings that match the tone of Carroll’s humorous parody of Southey’s poem. In the drawings, the old man stands on his head, performs a back somersault, and balances an eel on his nose. The wardrobe of Father William and the young man is basic, and the settings are sparse to nonexistent. Carroll includes a few essential props in his four pictures, such as a chair and a laden table. But Tenniel adds naturalistic details to frame—not overwhelm—the figures: haystacks (resembling those in Tenniel’s “Mr. Punch and his Family” from Punch, July-December 1856) surround a full-bodied but spindly-legged Father William, whose form approaches the grotesque. A modest Victorian home is the setting for Tenniel’s Father William’s back somersault, and an accurately rendered eel balances on Father William’s nose. Father William wears low-heeled buckled pumps, breeches, hose, a patterned waistcoat, and an overcoat that falls down when he stands on his head to expose a huge belly. In these ways, Tenniel makes Carroll’s original figures larger and more lifelike, as Barnard does with Phiz’s Dickensian characters. Nonetheless, in the posture, rotundity, and wide grin of Tenniel’s Father William and the positioning of Father William and the inquiring youth, we see the imprint of Carroll’s original humorous drawings.

  Figure 39. A: “Alice Outgrowing the White Rabbit’s House.” Illustration by Lewis Carroll for his Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, 1864;

  Figure 39. B: “Alice Outgrowing the White Rabbit’s House.” Illustration by John Tenniel for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865.

  Tenniel also excelled in drawing Carroll’s Wonderland and Looking-Glass characters who function as social caricatures, such as jurors and legal and political figures (for example, Benjamin Disraeli makes his appearance in Tenniel’s Looking-Glass illustration as the man in the white paper hat in Alice’s railway carriage); a world leader (for instance, the White Queen resembles Tenniel’s own caricatures of Pope Pius IX from Punch); and working-class types (for example, cook, carpenter, and footman), often targeted as fodder for comedy centuries before Alice.67 Of particular interest in the revision of the original illustrations are Tenniel’s drawings of two characters—the White Rabbit, Esquire, and the Mock Turtle—who function as social caricatures of, respectively, the Victorian gentleman living in a time-obsessed industrial age, and bourgeois pretension.

  Tenniel used his skill in anthropomorphization to turn the White Rabbit into a believable rabbit-human hybrid. Tenniel authenticated animal anatomy and added just enough clothing and a timepiece68 to humanize Carroll’s White Rabbit in constant fear of being late. “Belatedness, anxiety, physical props like the watch,” notes Gillian Beer in “‘Alice’ in Time,” “all bespeak the individual under the cosh of time-regulated society” (xxviii). As Beer points out, Carroll not only lived in a time-regulated society but also was intimately involved with time given his work as a logician and a mathematician. In order to make Carroll’s inventive character a joke on the time-bound Victorian gentleman living in a society ruled by timetables, the character had to look like a rabbit and a dapper Victorian gentleman, but not fully like a rabbit or a human. As Rose Lovell-Smith argues in “The Animals of Wonderland,” “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” (384)—or, I would add, by Carroll’s own pictures of the White Rabbit.

  Carroll offers little physical description of the White Rabbit—for example, the White Rabbit has “pink eyes” (UG 1) and is “splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand, and a nosegay in the other” (13).69 Of consequence, Carroll skews animal anatomy in his illustrations of the White Rabbit (see fig. 40A). The creature looks the size of a rabbit when positioned next to Alice, who in this illustration (UG 13) must crouch down on the ground to gaze upon the curious creature she follows down the rabbit hole. But the White Rabbit in this and other illustrations (for example, 33) lacks rabbitness: he has the ears of a donkey, the face and whiskers of a mouse, and a human hand. A full suit of rather nondescript clothing completely covers Carroll’s White Rabbit’s haunches and tail. He stands on his hind legs, as a human would, and socks and shoes adorn his paws, so no fluffy rabbit’s tail or furry paw is visible to the viewer.

  In contrast, Tenniel authenticates both the character’s human and rabbit traits essential to the social caricature (see fig. 40B). The White Rabbit appears in a meadow—a rabbit habitat. It wears a waistcoat but no pants, revealing the creature’s fluffy tail, haunches, and furry bottom paws. His front paws resemble human hands, and he walks upright as a human would. Tenniel’s White Rabbit wears a fashionable waistcoat and carries a pocket-watch, details that grant him the look and worth of a real Victorian gentleman—indeed the White Rabbit’s outfit resembles Mr. Brownlow’s in Cruikshank’s “Oliver Amazed” for Oliver Twist (see fig. 23A, ch. 2, 88). The timepiece symbolizes new technologies in Carroll’s age that ruled industry and transportation: office workers and factory workers clocked in and out of work, railways ran on schedule according to timetables, and chronometers kept time at sea. The watch was concomitantly a mark of gentility and respectability and an essential accouterment for the gentleman part of the White Rabbit’s status. Tenniel’s rabbit also has the slight paunch of a middle-aged gentleman, carries his umbrella under his arm as if braced for rainy English weather, always appears in a hurry, and fears the consequences of his lateness: “‘Oh! The Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! Wo’n’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!’” (AA 22). In contrast to Carroll’s mouse-donkey hybrid, Tenniel’s absentminded gentleman rabbit also looks imperious enough to take Alice for a servant girl—he calls her Mary Ann, a British euphemism for a maid—and orders her to fetch his gloves and fan, so he won’t be too late.

  Figure 40. A: “Alice and the White Rabbit.” Illustration by Lewis Carroll for his Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, 1864;

  Figure 40. B: “The White Rabbit, Esquire.” Illustration by John Tenniel for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865.


  A combination animal, the Mock Turtle relies upon anatomical precision to convey Carroll’s joke on the bourgeois pretentiousness of the Victorians who made a form of “turtle soup,” a rare delicacy, from veal, a much cheaper meat. When Alice asks the Queen of Hearts what a Mock Turtle is, the Queen replies, “‘It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from’” (AA 94). Carroll’s humor relies on a convincing depiction of a turtle and a calf that Carroll cannot visualize. In Under Ground, Carroll’s caricature of the Mock Turtle has an armadillo-like torso, a seal’s head, and an eagle’s talons.70 Building upon Carroll’s creative vision, Tenniel creates a believable hybrid animal with calf and turtle features. He brings to this combination animal “the conventional techniques of realism,” notes Lovell-Smith, “such as the cross-hatching and fine lines used to suggest light, shade, and solidity of form in the Mock Turtle’s shell and flippers” (391). Like a calf, Tenniel’s Mock Turtle has a pronounced forehead and ears, small horns, hooves, and a switch on its tail. Like a turtle, it has a large heart-shaped shell covered with horny plates, a smooth bottom shell, and flippers. Tenniel’s joining of believable bovine and reptilian features makes this joke on Victorian pretention complete. Nonetheless, Tenniel’s illustrations of both characters are built upon Carroll’s original imprint.

  Tenniel’s polishing and perfecting of Carroll’s original designs and Barnard’s and Mahoney’s redeployment of Dickens’s original illustrations by, respectively, Phiz and Cruikshank demonstrate a reengagement with the caricature tradition in a decade firmly associated with lifelike artistic representation and Royal Academy standards. Pre-Raphaelites and eminent Victorian narrative and genre painters became illustrators, making book illustrations that recall the beautifully bound books on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and prominently arranged on the circular tables of Victorian parlors. But within this new aesthetic of the Victorian illustrated book, the caricaturists’ vision remains in view.