Alice finds the Red Queen — Illustrations for "Through the Looking Glass" by John Tenniel

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Alice finds the Red Queen

Sir John Tenniel

Wood-engraving by Dalziel

Illustration for the twelfth chapter of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871)

"So Alice hunted among the chessmen on the table till she had found the Red Queen: then she went down on her knees on the hearth-rug, and put the kitten and the Queen to look at each other." [See below for commentary; mouse over the text for links.]

In 2000 student assistants from the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, scanned this image and added text under the supervision of George P. Landow.

Commentary by Ray Dyer

And so we arrive at the very last new illustration which John Tenniel produced for Lewis Carroll. The economy of his previous pair of illustrations (Shaking the Red Queen, for example), is largely abandoned, although there is no sign here of the chessmen mentioned in the text itself. Since neither Carroll nor Tenniel were constrained by strict chronological sequencing, we cannot be sure that this illustration was in fact produced later that the other two: it might have been an earlier one, indicating Tenniel's direction of travel. But, given that this more economical approach is rare in Tenniel's work as a whole, it is hard to reach any conclusion about the artist's stylistic development.

From the wider perspective offered by the gallery of Tenniel's pictures for the book, we do see a certain symmetry between this closing depiction of warm Victorian domesticity and the opening scene, of Alice snuggled into her big armchair with Kitty. These scenes reflect the unchanging world on either side of the fantasy world, with just the sort of symmetry which Lewis Carroll, as a mathematics tutor who wrote on the timeless symmetries of Euclid, appreciated. His technique here is similar to that of Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice's older sister — in real life, Lorina Liddell, the first Liddell sister whom he befriended, who then became his lifelong friend Mrs. Skene — reappears at the end.

The publication of Through the Looking Glass in 1871 effectively brings to a close Lewis Carroll's very productive "Alice Phase," as well as his equally productive relationship with Tenniel. The author's particular and private revenants were quietly packed away into the storage box of his copious mind, much as were the end-of-performance dolls of the itinerant showmen of his childhood. After such a creative partnership, the talented illustrator was allowed to slip away to receive further political-satirical acclaim as a cartoonist. Carroll would, however, call on him to produce twenty coloured enlargements of the original illustrations for the later edition of his proposed Nursery Alice (Diaries 8: 181,507).

For his next works, Lewis Carroll approached George Du Maurier and Linley Sambourne, both younger men, also from Punch - but without success. Thereafter his major illustrators would all be younger than himself. In chronological order, these were: Henry Holiday, b.1839; Arthur B. Frost, b. 1851; Harry Furniss, b. 1854, and Emily Gertrude Thomson, b. 1850. Thus did the mercurial author secure for himself his desired future role, like that of Humpty Dumpty, "master," at least to some extent, of a panoply of gifted artists.

Link to related material

Alice in Blunderland (a later reappearance of Alice in a Punch cartoon)

You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the site and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll's Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: Lewis Carroll Society. Vol. 2, 1994. Vol. 4, 1997. Vol. 8, 2004.

_____. The Nursery Alice. London: Macmillan, 1890.

Created 2000

Last modified 8 March 2022