|
|

|
 |
|
John Tenniel &
Lewis Carroll
|
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
|
|

|
|
Lewis Carroll
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Jan. 27, 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, Eng.
died Jan. 14, 1898, Guildford, Surrey
pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson English logician, mathematician,
photographer, and novelist, especially remembered for Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871).
His poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is nonsense literature of the
highest order.
Dodgson was the eldest son and third child in a family of seven girls
and four boys born to Frances Jane Lutwidge, the wife of the Rev.
Charles Dodgson. He was born in the old parsonage at Daresbury. His
father was perpetual curate there from 1827 until 1843, when he became
rector of Croft in Yorkshire—a post he held for the rest of his life
(though later he became also archdeacon of Richmond and a canon of Ripon
cathedral).
The Dodgson children, living as they did in an isolated country village,
had few friends outside the family but, like many other families in
similar circumstances, found little difficulty in entertaining
themselves. Charles from the first showed a great aptitude for inventing
games to amuse them. With the move to Croft when he was 12 came the
beginning of the “Rectory Magazines,” manuscript compilations to which
all the family were supposed to contribute. In fact, Charles wrote
nearly all of those that survive, beginning withUseful and Instructive
Poetry (1845; published 1954) and following with The Rectory Magazine
(c. 1850, mostly unpublished), The Rectory Umbrella (1850–53), and
Mischmasch (1853–62; published with The Rectory Umbrella in 1932).
Meanwhile, young Dodgson attended Richmond School, Yorkshire (1844–45),
and then proceeded to Rugby School (1846–50). He disliked his four years
at public school, principally because of his innate shyness, although he
was also subjected to a certain amount of bullying; he also endured
several illnesses, one of which left him deaf in one ear. After Rugby he
spent a further year being tutored by his father, during which time he
matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford (May 23, 1850). He went into
residence as an undergraduate there on Jan. 24, 1851.
Dodgson excelled in his mathematical and classical studies in 1852; on
the strength of his performance in examinations, he was nominated to a
studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges). In 1854 he gained
a first in mathematical Finals—coming out at the head of the class—and
proceeded to a bachelor of arts degree in December of the same year. He
was made a “Master of the House” and a senior student (called a fellow
in other colleges) the following year and was appointed lecturer in
mathematics (the equivalent of today'stutor), a post he resigned in
1881. He held his studentship until the end of his life.
As was the case with all fellowships at that time, the studentship at
Christ Church was dependent upon his remaining unmarried, and, by the
terms of this particular endowment, proceeding to holy orders. Dodgson
was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on Dec. 22, 1861.Had he
gone on to become a priest he could have married and would then have
been appointed to a parish by the college. But he felt himself unsuited
for parish work and, though he considered the possibility of marriage,
decided that he was perfectly content to remain a bachelor.
Dodgson's association with children grew naturally enough out of his
position as an eldest son with eight younger brothers and sisters. He
also suffered from a bad stammer (which he never wholly overcame,
although he was able to preach with considerable success in later life)
and, like many others who suffer from the disability, found that he was
able to speak naturally and easily to children. It is therefore not
surprising that he should begin to entertain the children of Henry
George Liddell, dean of Christ Church. Alice Liddell and her sisters
Lorina and Edith were not, of course, the first of Dodgson's child
friends. They had been preceded or were overlapped by the children of
the writer George Macdonald, the sons of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
and various otherchance acquaintances. But the Liddell children
undoubtedly held an especially high place in his affections—partly
because they were the only children in Christ Church, since only heads
of houses were free both to marry and to continuein residence.
Properly chaperoned by their governess, Miss Prickett (nicknamed
“Pricks”—“one of the thorny kind,” and so the prototype of the Red Queen
in Through the Looking-Glass), the three little girls paid many visits
to the young mathematics lecturer in his college rooms. As Alice
remembered in 1932, they
|
used to sit on the big sofa on each side of
him, while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil
or ink drawings as he went along . . . . He seemed to have
an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made
up as he told them, drawing busily on a large sheet of paper
all the time. They were not always entirely new. Sometimes
they were new versions of old stories; sometimes they
started on the old basis, but grew into new tales owing to
the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and
undreamed-of possibilities.
|
|
On July 4, 1862, Dodgson and his friend Robinson
Duckworth, fellow of Trinity, rowed the three children up the Thames
from Oxford to Godstow, picnicked on the bank, and returnedto Christ
Church late in the evening: “On which occasion,” wrote Dodgson in his
diary, “I told them the fairy-tale of Alice's Adventures Underground,
which I undertook to write out for Alice.” Much of the story was based
on a picnic a couple of weeks earlier when they had all been caught in
the rain; for some reason, this inspired Dodgson to tell so much better
a story than usual that both Duckworth and Alice noticed the difference,
and Alice went so far as to cry, when they parted at the door of the
deanery, “Oh, Mr. Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice's adventures
for me!” Dodgson himself recollected in 1887
|
how, in a desperate attempt to strike out
some new lineof fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight
down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea
what was to happen afterwards.
|
Dodgson was able to write down the story more or less as
told and added to it several extra adventures that had been told on
other occasions. He illustrated it with his own crude but distinctive
drawings and gave the finished product to Alice Liddell, with no thought
of hearing of it again. But the novelist Henry Kingsley, while visiting
the deanery, chanced to pick it up from the drawing-room table, read it,
and urged Mrs. Liddell to persuade the author to publish it. Dodgson,
honestly surprised, consulted his friend George Macdonald, author of
some of the best children's stories of the period. Macdonald took it
home to be read to his children, and his son Greville, aged six,
declared that he “wished there were 60,000 volumes of it.”
Accordingly, Dodgson revised it for publication. He cut out the more
particular references to the previous picnic (they may be found in the
facsimile of the original manuscript, later published by him as Alice's
Adventures Underground in 1886) and added some additional stories, told
to the Liddellsat other times, to make up a volume of the desired
length. At Duckworth's suggestion he got an introduction to John Tenniel,
the Punch magazine cartoonist, whom he commissioned to make
illustrations to his specification. The book was published as Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. (The first edition was withdrawn
because of bad printing, and only about 21 copies survive—one of the
rare books of the 19th century—and the reprint was ready for publication
by Christmas of the same year, though dated 1866.)
The book was a slow but steadily increasing success, and by the
following year Dodgson was already considering a sequel to it, based on
further stories told to the Liddells. The result was Through the
Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (dated 1872; actually published
December 1871), a work as good as, or better than, its predecessor.
By the time of Dodgson's death, Alice (taking the two volumes as a
single artistic triumph) had become the most popular children's book in
England: by the time of his centenary in 1932 it was one of the most
popular and perhaps the most famous in the world.
There is no answer to the mystery of Alice's success. Many explanations
have been suggested, but, like the Mad Hatter's riddle (“The riddle, as
originally invented, had no answer at all”), they are no more than
afterthoughts. The book is not an allegory; it has no hidden meaning or
message, either religious, political, or psychological, as some have
tried to prove; and its only undertones are some touches of gentle
satire—on education for the children's special benefit and on familiar
university types, whom the Liddells may or may not have recognized.
Various attempts have been made to solve the “riddle of Lewis Carroll”
himself; these include the efforts to prove that his friendships with
little girls were some sort of subconscious substitute for a married
life, that he showed symptoms of jealousy when his favourites came to
tell him that they were engaged to be married, that he contemplated
marriage with some of them—notably with Alice Liddell. But there is
little orno evidence to back up such theorizing. He in fact dropped the
acquaintance of Alice Liddell when she was 12, as he did with most of
his young friends. In the case of the Liddells, hisfriendship with the
younger children, Rhoda and Violet, was cut short at the time of his
skits on some of Dean Liddell's Christ Church “reforms.” For besides
children's stories, Dodgson also produced humorous pamphlets on
university affairs, which still make good reading. The best of these
werecollected by him as Notes by an Oxford Chiel (1874).
Besides writing for them, Dodgson is also to be remembered as a fine
photographer of children and of adults as well (notable portraits of the
actress Ellen Terry, the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet-painter
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and many others survive and have been often
reproduced). Dodgson had an early ambition to be an artist: failing in
this, he turned to photography. He photographed children in every
possible costume and situation, finally making nude studies of them. But
in 1880 Dodgson abandoned his hobby altogether, feeling that it was
taking up too much time that might be better spent. Suggestions that
this sudden decision was reached because of an impurity of motive for
his nude studies have been made, but again without any evidence.
Before he had told the original tale of Alice's Adventures, Dodgson had,
in fact, published a number of humorous items in verse and prose and a
few inferior serious poems. The earliest of these appeared anonymously,
but in March 1856 apoem called “Solitude” was published over the
pseudonym Lewis Carroll. Dodgson arrived at this pen name by taking his
own names Charles Lutwidge, translating them into Latin as Carolus
Ludovicus, then reversing and retranslating them into English. He used
the name afterward for all his nonacademic works. As Charles L. Dodgson,
he was the author of a fair number of books on mathematics, none of
enduring importance, although Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) is of
some historical interest.
His humorous and other verses were collected in 1869 as Phantasmagoria
and Other Poems and later separated (with additions) as Rhyme? and
Reason? (1883) and Three Sunsets and Other Poems (published
posthumously, 1898). The 1883 volume also contained The Hunting of the
Snark, a narrative nonsense poem that is rivalled only by the best of
Edward Lear.
Later in life, Dodgson had attempted a return to the Alice vein but only
produced Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and its second volume, Sylvie and Bruno
Concluded (1893), which has been described aptly as “one of the most
interesting failures in English literature.” This elaborate combination
of fairy-tale, social novel, and collection of ethical discussions is
unduly neglected and ridiculed. It presents the truest available
portrait of the man. Alice, the perfect creation of the logical and
mathematical mind applied to the pure and unadulterated amusement of
children, was struck out of him as if by chance; while making full use
of his specialized knowledge, it transcends his weaknesses and remains
unique.
Roger Lancelyn Green
|
|
John Tenniel
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Feb. 28, 1820, London, Eng.
died Feb. 25, 1914, London
English illustrator and satirical artist, especially known for his work
in Punchand his illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872).
Tenniel attended the Royal Academy schools and in 1836 sent his first
picture to the exhibition of the Society of British Artists. In 1845 he
contributed a 16-foot cartoon to the competition of designs for mural
decoration of the new Palace of Westminster and received £100 and a
commission for a fresco in the Upper Waiting Hall (or “Hall of Poets”)
in the House of Lords. In 1850 he was invited to succeed Richard Doyle
as joint cartoonist with John Leech for Punch, a periodical Tenniel
worked on for most of his life. Gradually he took over altogether the
weekly drawing of the political “big cut.” In his drawings for Punch
Tenniel lent new dignity to the political cartoon. His most famous
cartoon was probably “Dropping the Pilot” (1890), on the subject of
Bismarck's resignation. Tenniel was knighted in 1893 and retired from
Punch in 1901. He illustrated many books; his drawings for Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are remarkably
subtle and clever and are extremely well-suited to Lewis Carroll's text.
These illustrations won him an international reputation and a continuing
audience.
|
|
|
|