| White Rabbit Press | “The Nursery Alice” ~ Illustrations |
- HOME -VIEW
ALL 22 PRINTS - VIEW
INDIVIDUAL PRINTS - |
- PRICES
/ SHIPPING / DISCOUNTS - TRADE
INQUIRIES - |
2 - Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (biography, by Edward Wakeling) 3 - Sir John Tenniel (biography, by Edward Wakeling) 4 - Alice Pleasance Liddell (biography, by Edward Wakeling) 5 - Emily Gertrude Thomson (biography, by Edward Wakeling)) 6 - "The Nursery 'Alice'
Illustrations" (by Brian Sibley, courtesy The Lewis
Carroll Society, UK)
The colourful characters spilling out of the jury-box make it by far the best version of that particular scene Tenniel ever drew. (But is that really the Dormouse in the jury-box, Mr Carroll? I thought he was a witness at the Trial, and he can't have been both, you know!)
It is rather curious that Miss Thomson's Rabbit (such a very lean character) should be out without his waistcoat; and the Hare on the back-cover wears quite different clothes from his outfit at the Tea-Party. He actually appears without his trousers, but perhaps Miss Thomson thought that, like the Rabbit, it wouldn't wear those articles of clothing. Had she looked at the picture of the Dormouse being potted, she would have known differently, but she wouldn't have been able to tell from the Tenniel enlargement as the table-cloth obscures all the characters' lower regions. The face of her Hare is, in fact, a careful copy of the Tenniel animal, and his clutch of straws is identically arranged about his ears, just as they appear in both the Tenniel drawings (but surely he didn't need to copy his own work?).
As an epilogue to this story, it is interesting to note that when, in 1911, Macmillan published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with the original line illustrations and 16 new colour plates (can they be by Tenniel?) a totally different range of colours was used for the five Wonderland plates which depict scenes shown in The Nursery "Alice". |
by Brian Sibley (except
from his article in the "Jabberwocky", The
Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society, Autumn 1975,
reprinted by the kind permission of © © © Carroll recorded in his diary on 29 March 1885, that twenty illustrations for The Nursery "Alice" 'are now being coloured by Mr Tenniel', and by 10 July he was able to report that 'Mr Tenniel has finished the coloured pictures for The Nursery "Alice"'; although, in fact, the author was not to start the text for another three and a half years. The choice of illustrations is interesting, since it limited the development of Carroll's text: Father William and Son, the Lobster, the Footmen, and the Cheshire Cat's spectral reappearance were all omitted, and the selection is ingeniously made so that few characters (the Cat, Duchess and Royal Family are exceptions) appear in more than one illustration.
Some doubt has been expressed as to whether Tenniel was personally responsible for the colouring of the illustrations to The Nursery "Alice", largely because of the advertisement which appeared in the 1886 facsimile edition of Alice's Adventures Under Ground (and later in the 1887 'People's Edition' of Alice) that announced The Nursery "Alice" as "in preparation": "Being a selection of twenty of the pictures in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland enlarged and coloured under the Artist's superintendence, with explanations." It seems likely, however, that this simply refers to Tenniel's supervision of Edward Evans' colour printing. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood describes the book as being "illustrated by the old pictures, coloured by Tenniel"; and in a letter to Mary Brown on 1 April 1889, Carroll mentions "getting a little book through the Press - which I hope will be out by Easter, to be called The Nursery 'Alice' - pictures enlarged and coloured by Tenniel." Collingwood was not quite correct in referring to the illustrations as "the old pictures", for while some are simply enlargements of the original drawings - like the pictures of Bill the Lizard, the Tea-Party, the card gardeners and Alice in the Pool of Tears - others are in part redrawn. In every case, however, engraver Dalziel's signature has been removed. The frontispiece is identical to the one in Wonderland, except that - as Selwyn Goodacre has noted - the looking-glass pikeman, to the left of the Queen, is wearing a tunic emblazoned with hearts instead of clubs. And, as Hercules Molloy observed, in his curiously instructive book of horrors, Oedipus in Disneyland, the White Rabbit's watch in The Nursery "Alice" shows the time as five minutes to one, instead of the original five minutes to six (or could it be half past eleven?). Alice's pleated dress is closer-fitting than her first one, and the artist was therefore required to show more of the backgrounds than had been previously necessary: the Eaglet's right claw and the Gryphon's tail come into view, and we are shown more of Alice's flamingo than before. For the flight of cards illustration, Tenniel finished the Duck's wing, and simply filled in the remaining area with scratchy cross-hatching, when he had sufficient space to show us some other Wonderland creatures. And why does that double-line of stitching still appear around the hem of Alice's dress in three of the new designs? Alice's features vary from picture to picture, and the child at the Tea-Party is very different from the one seen arm-in-arm with the Duchess, or confronting the Queen of Hearts; and the drawing of Alice about to sample the "DRINK ME" bottle is even more inaccurate anatomically than the original picture.
The cover, of course, was not Mr Tenniel's work, but that of Gertrude Thomson, who has surely acquired an excessive amount of credit for her meagre contribution to The Nursery "Alice". On 26 February 1889, Carroll wrote in his diary: "Miss Thomson writes that she hopes to send sketch for the picture cover directly," and on the 18 March impatiently adds "But it hasn't come yet! She has been very busy, and lately unwell. Still we may get it out by Easter after all." The pose of the Little Bo Peep figure on the cover is so very Carrollian, one wonders if it could be based on a Carroll photograph of a child-friend: perhaps that of Irene MacDonald taken in 1863.
For further reading: ©Dodgson and the Victorian Cult of the Child ©The Illustrations of Sir John Tenniel ©Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators ©The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (Rev. C.L. Dodgson) by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood ©Tenniel's Illustrations - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass ©Illustrator of Alice in Wonderland ©Lenny's Alice in Wonderland Site ©Alice Liddell - the original Alice ©LibriVox - different recordings of Alice Pleasance Liddell by Lewis Carroll ©Descendants of William the Conqueror ©Biography of Emily Gertrude Thomson by Lesley O'Neil ©Contrariwise - The Association for new Lewis Carroll Studies |
- HOME -VIEW
ALL 22 PRINTS - VIEW
INDIVIDUAL PRINTS - |
- PRICES
/ SHIPPING / DISCOUNTS - TRADE
INQUIRIES - |
