[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Book Illustration —> John Tenniel —> Lewis Carroll —> Next]
The Railway Guard looking at Alice
Sir John Tenniel
1871
Wood-engraving by Dalziel
Illustration for the third chapter of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass
"All this time, the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass."
[At the same time, a chorus of voices is echoing Alice's frightened thoughts. What is the effect of this? In the commentaries below, mouse over the text for links.]
The man wearing the paper hat seated opposite Alice in the railway carriage is generally considered to be Benjamin Disraeli, later Lord Beaconsfield. Since before illustrating the Alice books, Tenniel was a well known political cartoonist, and since Disraeli, who served several times as Prime Minister, was a well known political figure, many commentators have assumed that something's going on here, but no one has convincingly explained what it might be. How would you go about carrying out literary research — that is, detective work — on such a topic? Hint: What did Carroll think of Disraeli, and what did Tenniel think of him, and how could you find out? Was Disraeli in the news at the time the artist created the drawing for this illustration? [Looking at features of the man wearing the paper hat, I am not completely convinced that it is Disraeli at all. Compare some of Tenniel's political cartoons to this illustration.
Student assistants from the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, scanned this image and added caption material under the supervision of George Landow. [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.]
Lewis Carroll's direct involvement with railways dated from the age of eleven, with the removal of his family from Cheshire to northerly Yorkshire in 1843 (see Carroll chronology, 1843). With "Railway Mania" well underway, and the notorious railway mêlée providing a rite de passage on crowded platforms and refreshment rooms, as well as at the obligatory ticket-offices at each station-change (since through-tickets had not yet been introduced), it was inevitable that powerful emotional residues and vivid visual impressions would remain for the future children's author to employ: "What a number of people there are in the carriage!" notes the exasperated Alice to herself, reminding us of the crowds in such masterpieces as William Frith's The Railway Station.
Railway journeys, and the frequent new child-friends made in First-Class railway carriages - as with Mary "Minnie" Frances Drury, 1859-1935, and her siblings, on Monday 2 August 1869 on a journey between Oxford and Guildford - would appear at intervals throughout Lewis Carroll's later Journals. On Tuesday 3 August, for instance, he would note the sending off of the (no doubt promised) copy of Alice, to "my railway-companions of yesterday" (See Carroll's Diaries, 91).
In Carroll's later Sylvie and Bruno of 1889, railway journeys would also figure large. In the partially-hidden adult social romance recently identified as Lady Muriel, a relevant annotation to the now-reformed text reads:
A series of articles on "Thoughts in the Train," on health, dreaming, boredom etc. on railway journeys, had appeared in [Carroll's] weekly Punch on July 15 1871. The writer covered how "very soon" one gets through three newspapers; recommends returning to "the small paragraphs" and personal ads; discusses sleepiness brought on, and his Analytical History of Motion; the use of "little black bags" with interesting contents; sleepiness again ... and lost items "indelibly fixed on the retina of your mind's eye" ... There is the intrusion of the Guard with "Tickets! Tickets please! to wake one up; then "going to sleep" standing up on the station platform, entering his cab "dreamily" and declaring "These mental phenomena must be noted down." His memo to himself was to "get up anatomy," no doubt to better understand the deplorable bodily changes which were noted as occurring during prolonged journeys. Changing stations in London, he notes "Feelings of loneliness," "Melancholy" and "the heartlessness of London," all Romantic notions which Carroll also in all likelihood experienced ... and placed into the Lady Muriel strand of this, his major late work. [64-65]
Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll's Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Vol. 6. Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: The Lewis Carroll Society, 2001.
_____. Sylvie and Bruno. London: Macmillan, 1889.
Dyer, Ray. Lady Muriel. The Victorian Romance by Lewis Carroll. Annotated Scholar's Edition. Leicester: Troubador, 2016 (see Ch. 1, Note 3).
Punch. Vol. 61. 15 July 1871: 17, 174.
Last modified 28 April 2021