John Tenniel’s drawings put wonder into Wonderland

Alice In Wonderland was published 150 years ago this month but it wasn’t Lewis Carroll’s story that initially excited British readers.

An 1875 illustration for Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by John Tenniel.

THE publication of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland 150 years ago this month was greeted with delight and anticipation.

But it wasn’t the prospect of a story by Lewis Carroll that whet middle class British appetites. The real drawcard was John Tenniel, a man 12 years Carroll’s senior whose ­illustrations were known and loved throughout the Empire.

“Forty-two illustrations by Tenniel! Why there needs nothing else to sell this book, one would think,” the children’s journal, Aunt Judy’s Magazine, gushed.

At time of publication by Macmillan, Lewis Carroll was virtually unknown. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, his real name, was an Oxford mathematics lecturer. But Tenniel’s black and white illustrations for Punch, the satirical weekly magazine, had made him a household name. Queen Victoria would eventually knight him in 1893.

Tenniel’s death on February 25, 1914, caused the New York Tribute to call him “one of the greatest intellectual forces of his time”.

The Daily Graphic wrote: “He had an influence on the political feeling of this time which is hardly measurable. We always looked to (Tenniel’s) Punch cartoon to crystallise the national and international situation, and the popular feeling about it.”News_Image_File: A self-portrait of John Tenniel from 1889. News_Image_File: John Tenniel’s illustration of Alice.

Every week for more than 50 years Punch carried a cartoon by Tenniel. Today he is best-known for his black and white illustrations of Alice, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and all the crazy cast of Wonderland.

Tenniel was born in Bayswater, London, on February 28, 1820. At the age of 20 his father, a fencing instructor, wounded his son’s eye with his fencing foil. This led to blindness in the eye — a condition Tenniel never complained about, not wanting to upset his father.

Tenniel was a natural draughtsman and largely self-taught. He frequented the zoo and the British Museum with his sketchbook and was good enough to exhibit and sell his first oil painting at the Society of British Artists at the age of 16. In 1842, the year he illustrated his first book, Tenniel began studying at the Royal Academy of Arts. Dissatisfied, he joined the Clipstone Street Life Academy, emerging as a satirical draughtsman. He joined Punch in 1850, becoming senior illustrator in 1864.

Tenniel married a woman with consumption in 1852 but was widowed within two years. He then lived quietly with his mother-in-law and then his sister. In 1865 Tenniel was approached by Carroll to illustrate his story about Alice and her hallucinogenic experiences down the rabbit hole. In April that year Tenniel took on the job for £138.News_Image_File: Alice and the Duchess by John Tenniel, coloured by Diz Wallis for The Complete Alice, The Definitive Edition Celebrating 150 Years. Copyright: Macmillan Publishers Limited

The extent to which the relationship between Tenniel and Carroll was querulous is a matter for debate. But Carroll points to some prickliness between them when he writes: “Mr Tenniel is the only artist who has drawn for me who has resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he no more needed one than I should need a multiplication table to work a mathematical problem!

“I venture to think that he was mistaken and that, for want of a model, he drew several pictures of ‘Alice’ entirely out of proportion.”

Carroll was inclined to issue so many detailed instructions that Tenniel only reluctantly agreed to work on Wonderland’s 1872 sequel, Through The Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There.

When Carroll approached him about a third commission, Tenniel replied: “It is a curious fact that with Looking-Glass the faculty of making drawings for book illustrations departed from me, and I have done nothing in that direction since.”News_Image_File: A Tenniel illustration coloured by Diz Wallis for The Complete Alice, The Definitive Edition Celebrating 150 Years. Copyright: Macmillan Publishers Limited

Tenniel had a reputation for Victorian rectitude. MH Spielmann, in his History of Punch, spoke of Tenniel’s “courteous high-mindedness” and his “apologetic humour and true modesty”.

Tenniel once explained his refusal to use models. “Anything I see, I remember,” he told Spielmann.

His drawings are remembered by all who see them, and remain the most seductive illustrations ever to grace the stories of Alice and her surreal world.

The Complete Alice, The Definitive Edition Celebrating 150 Years, $54.99, Macmillan, includes extra content such as a deleted section of Through The Looking-Glass