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Commentary by Ray Dyer

The White Knight has here a number of almost inexplicable accoutrements, including a beehive and vegetables, which have been briefly noted by others. Generally speaking, the battery of bizarre items reflects Lewis Carroll's efforts to de-Romanticise a popular icon, of both literature and art, for the purposes of his comic foray into children's literature. In this he was ably assisted by his chosen illustrator, whose many "full-pagers" in Punch over a number of years had demonstrated a varied capacity to satirise almost to the point of denigration - though always with the saving grace of humour — politicians, topical events and any others in need of acerbic judgement.

In his earlier adult life, during which period he had been the editor of the Oxford-Cambridge inter-varsity poetry magazine College Rhymes, which ran from 1862-64, Carroll's inclination had been much more that of a nineteenth-century late Romantic poet. His poem "Stolen Waters," for example, of 1862 and signed "C.L.D., Ch.Ch." [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Christ Church], in its evocatively haunting verse 2, can be compared, more or less favourably, with the fourth verse of Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (Dyer cv).

For Tenniel too this frontispiece illustration marks a significant advance. In three of the forty-two illustrations in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, he had creatively built on the traditional design strength of the courtly playing cards (King, Queen, Knave: see The King and Queen; Off with her Head; The Cheshire Cat Reappears). In the other thirty-nine, he had shown himself to be securely based in the storytelling style of his predecessors and contemporaries George Cruikshank, and John Leech. But the White Knight illustration of c.1870-71 is infused with Arts and Crafts movement overtones. The vertical tree structuring may well have been suggested to both Carroll and Tenniel by mediaeval revivalism in both literature and art, in particular by John Everett Millais's large and sentimental canvas, Sir Isumbras at the Ford, in which the knight in full armour rides an impressive horse laden with an assortment of weapons, peacock feathers and helmet, together with two young children and bundles of firewood. The comparison is clear, and suggests a move away from simply depicting the narrative content. Such a development can be seen in other artworks of the time, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti's (see Rossetti chronology, c.1857).

The year 1857 had seen Lewis Carroll in London and in contact with Millais (Carroll's Diaries 3: 33). Later that year Carroll had photographed Tennyson's eight-year old niece, Agnes Grace Weld, with the child romantically dressed as Little Red Riding Hood (3: 89 passim). Stanzas written by Carroll to accompany the photograph emphasise, as does Tenniel's illustration above, the background of a "dark, dark wood" (Diaries 3: 148 and note). Such a mediaeval-romantic setting also figures prominently in Tenniel's related The Jabberwock, the poem accompanying the opening chapter of Through the Looking Glass. Tenniel's own original and precocious forays of this kind disappear after this, until Chapter 7 of Through the Looking Glass, when the artist produces a further two exceptional designs, showing what for him were still the new features of the Arts and Crafts trend (see: Looking-glass-world armies; and Alice and the Drums). The remaining fifty contributions by Tenniel to Carroll's second major Alice adventure would continue to reflect the largely literary style of the time, as had been the case with most of his illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

A journal entry for Saturday 25 June 1870 suggests that Tenniel's present and carefully elaborated Frontispiece may have been ready by that summer. Carroll noted that whilst entertaining Lady Salisbury and her young children in his Christ Church rooms he had shown them, amongst other things, "the seven first pictures for Through the Looking-Glass (Diaries, 6: 120-121). The term "first" loosely employed could of course refer to either chronological page order, or simply to the first seven as chosen by the artist's or author's idiosyncratic preference. Lewis Carroll in his persona of children's author was certainly fond of being creatively unsystematic. For his later Sylvie and Bruno, he would begin by soliciting from his new artist Harry Furniss the series of illustrations for Ch. XI (Diaries, 8: 169, 182), leaving the opening chapters for later.

Some years after the publication of Through the Looking Glass, and during the exceptionally wet summer of 1879, fellow Punch artist George Du Maurier would place in the magazine at least three avant garde illustrations with enhanced decorative use of the then still universal large black umbrella: see especially A Garden Party of July 1879. Tenniel's part in seeding such future trends is even more striking in contributions to Chapter 7 of Through the Looking Glass.

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll's Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Vol. 3. Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: Lewis Carroll Society, 1995.

_____. Lewis Carroll's Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Vol. 6 and 8. Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: Lewis Carroll Society, 2001 and 2004.

Du Maurier, George. "A Garden Party." London: Punch, or The London Charivari. 2 August 1879.

Dyer, Ray. Lady Muriel. The Victorian Romance by Lewis Carroll. Annotated Scholar's Edition. Leicester: Troubador, 2016.

Haughton, Hugh (ed.). Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 (definitive edition, 2001).

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Last modified 8 July 2021