Abstract
While John Tenniel’s illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are nearly as famous as the books themselves, the question of whether these illustrations contribute to or compromise the effects produced by the written text has rarely been explored. In this paper, it is argued that the status of the illustrations is problematic unless the actual process of reading is taken into account. However humorous, strange or witty they may appear on paper, Carroll’s words ultimately depend on the reader’s interest to achieve their desired effects fully. Words alone may prove to be insufficient to achieve the sense of nonsense within the vicissitudes of a temporal reading. Focusing on several of John Tenniel’s illustrations, which attempt to draw out the impossible references and the strangely humanized animals of Carroll’s text, this article shows that Tenniel’s illustrations often reinforce the effect of nonsense that might remain buried in a perfunctory reading or, without them, might not be generated at all.
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Notes
For example, when Tenniel dislikes Carroll’s idea of a “wasp in a wig,” Carroll agrees “to omit a whole section from Looking-Glass” (Cohen and Wakeling, 2003, p. 11).
The Times, December 26, 1865, p. 5. For a discussion of the initial reviews, see Helen Groth (2012, pp. 670–674).
A comprehensive comparison has been offered by Edward Hodnett (1982), whose method of evaluation is based on the “attractiveness” of the illustrations and how they “answer children’s questions” (p. 178). Note that Hodnett finds some of the illustrations that I analyze in my article somewhat inadequate: he thinks that the choice of the White Rabbit as the headpiece of the first chapter in the first edition is odd; instead of the White Rabbit, Hodnett says, “children would probably have liked first to see a picture of Alice sitting on the bank beside her older sister” (p. 176). Hodnett also thinks that the telescoping Alice could have been rendered more dynamic (p. 177) and finds the nonsense verse describing the lobster “insufficient for an illustration” (p. 178).
To my knowledge, the only study that takes into account the reading process (without however exploring the general question of the representation of “nonsense”) is Mou-Lan Wong’s (2009). Working with a different set of illustrations, Wong explores “Carroll’s employment of the mechanics of the page as a medium for the interaction of text, reader, and illustrations” (p. 144) and shows in particular the interaction between the physical layout of the text and the illustrations during the reading process.
See Perry Nodelman (1988) for an approach that breaks with the textual bias, delineating the importance of reading the images of picture books and the possibility of ironic divergences between the images and the written text. See also Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott (2000) for an excellent outline of the multiple ways in which the images interact with the written text, including complementariness, counterpoint and contradiction. More recent work on picture books engages with cognitive psychology (e.g., Nikolajeva, 2012) or performs multimodal readings of text/image ensembles (e.g., Maagerø and Østbye, 2017).
A facsimile of this edition could be found on the internet: https://www.adobe.com/be_en/active-use/pdf/Alice_in_Wonderland.pdf.
For a detailed commentary on Alice’s reading of the poem and Humpty Dumpty’s later exegesis, see Süner (2017).
For a detailed account of Tenniel’s Jabberwocky illustration and its historic relationship to other artistic works, both by Tenniel and other artists in late 19th century England, see Hancher (1985).
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Ahmet Süner is a Turkish scholar and an Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature at Yaşar University, Izmir, Turkey. He has two Ph.D.s, one in Comparative Literature (2006, University of Southern California), the other in Structural Engineering (1999, Duke University). His publications include essays on the work of Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Brontë, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Matthew Lewis, James Joyce and Horace Walpole.
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Süner, A. On the Contribution of Tenniel’s Illustrations to the Reading of the Alice Books. Child Lit Educ 51, 41–62 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9353-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9353-y