"Alice arriving at the world on the other side of the mirror" — Illustrations for Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

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Alice arriving at the world on the other side of the mirror

Sir John Tenniel

1871

Wood-engraving by Dalziel

Illustration for the first chapter of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass

What pictorial details immediately show that Alice has entered a new world?

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Transitions to Wonderland, by Ray Dyer

Carroll's new and elegant literary device - of the mirror as marking the crucial threshold between our everyday real world and his story's fantastically reversed "nonsense" world - gave John Tenniel a distinctly new inspiration for the book's opening illustrations. This is entirely different from the rustic rabbit hole of Carroll's earlier Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for which "threshold mechanism" no pictorial attempt appears to have been made (nor certainly finalised) for inclusion within that earlier opening chapter.

Here for the later adventure the artist could now call upon much widely available, and artistic albeit homely, nineteenth-century furniture and paraphernalia. The result is two of the present fairy story's more carefully crafted, technically structured and pleasingly domestic "Victorian" illustrations. With a further interesting and unusual twist, the Dalziel brothers, who engraved them, have applied an extended and rarely employed form of their own signature to them. Could they have been acknowledging what they too recognised to be a new and worthy direction in the depiction of traditional fairytale "thresholds" with space-time shifts? See also Carroll's own early recognition of dreams (c. 1856) as being a linking state or flux between an individual's psychological worlds, both internal and external, and their varying kinds of reality.

Employing a mirror in this second major children's work - and including it in the title - may well have been inspired by Carroll's early reading, especially of the works of Tennyson, who would become his life-long favourite poet. For the many relevant collected citations and references to the Laureate, see Carroll, Diaries 10: 333. Particularly relevant here is Tennyson's early poem, "The Lady of Shalott," with its dramatic and evocative lines on the plight of the damsel weaving in her solitary tower: "The mirror crack'd from side to side; 'The curse is come upon me,' cried / The Lady of Shalott" (Poems, 5).

In his later children's works Carroll would employ further colourful transition mechanisms. In Sylvie and Bruno, for example, these would include an Ivory Door, which he had met as early as his first degree studies of Virgil's Aeneid, and was linked to Greek legends of the fateful delusions of dreams (see Ch. XXI). But his favourite such mechanism by this time (1889) was undoubtedly the casual summer stroll into woodland, and the lying down to rest on warm grass, to wait for the mysterious "dreamy" internal transition to arrive (see Ch. XXIV).

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis. Sylvie and Bruno. London: Macmillan, 1889.

Tennyson, Alfred. Poems. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1842.

Created 2000

Last modified 8 November 2021