[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Book Illustration —> John Tenniel —> Lewis Carroll —> Next]
Jabberwocky
Sir John Tenniel
1871
Wood-engraving by Dalziel
Illustration for the first chapter of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass
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.
[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.]
The dragons of Arthurian Legend would seem to have weighed heavily with Tenniel - as with almost all Victorian readers from their childhood and illustrated nursery tales - in his evocative illustration for Carroll's curious poem about the slaying of an extraordinary monster. Click here for an analysis of aspects of the whole poem.
The modern preference and use of the term "Monster" offers interesting parallels to the mind-set of educated Victorians and earlier generations. The Biblical Hebrews knew of the Canaanites, who had their "Moloch" [SOED Gk. Molokh from the Hebrew melek = king; then via substitution of vowel "o" from boset = shame, giving Hebrew molek], linked to such vile practices as sacrificing of children for burnt offerings (Leviticus 18:21). The Middle English term "Monster" [Latin monstrum = a divine portent, from monere = to warn] was thus rooted in such culturally early emotive associations. Carroll used the term as early as July 3 1857, reporting on a visit to London to see Shakespeare's The Tempest. For such precise word borrowing - and as an ordained Christ Church deacon, and son of an Archdeacon and canon of Ripon Cathedral - he may well have had in mind the ancient and original Middle English usage of the term, from the Biblical and Latin, both of which he had at his command. In Through the Looking Glass he would continue to employ the term, as in Ch. VII, "The Lion and the Unicorn," where the innocent Alice is maligned as "Monster": see later illustrations in the present series; and Dyer (2015, Ch.14, annotated note 7, pp. 518-519). But in this case, he gives the creature in the poem, the "manxome foe," a nonsense name.
The late Victorian-Edwardian children's author Edith Nesbit, 1858-1924, had clearly grown up with the stories of Lewis Carroll, among other "greats" whom she chose to seed throughout her own books. In the closing page of Ch.7 of her classic Five Children and It of 1902, there is the hint of a "Jabberwock" monster association, when the author borrows the curious word "frumious" from Carroll's "frumious Bandersnatch" in verse 2 of his poem. That Carroll had ancient moral associations to proper use of the alternative term "monster," almost certainly formed from his deep religious and cultural-historical reading, would be shown later in his Preface to the 1889 children's book Sylvie and Bruno. There, in a discussion of his distaste for the popular Victorian blood-sports/hunting, he was careful to distinguish those who inflict wanton fear and pain upon animals posing no threat to the hunter, and those instances that involve such creatures as a man-killing tiger, where he could "heartily sympathize" with any who struggle "with the monster brought to bay" (Carroll, 1889, Preface). Creative to the last, Carroll continued to experiment with language and imagery, and in his sequel to the 1889 book he devised yet another "fearful monster," his last in print, in the form of a giant Porcupine running amok, until cleverly captured by one of his characters-avatars (Carroll, 1893, Ch. XXIV, "The Beggar's Return").
With regard to Tenniel's compositional style here, the artist does appear to have made use - and very successfully, as with his vertical tree-textured forest background - of the then emergent and more decorative styles from the British art world. These trends will be returned to later in the further commentaries for the present gallery/series - for example in the Looking-glass-world Armies.
Carroll, Lewis. Sylvie and Bruno. London: Macmillan, 1889.
_____. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. London: Macmillan, 1893.
Dyer, Ray. Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno with Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Annotated Scholar's Edition. Leicester: Troubador, 2015.
SOED. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 2 vols. Oxford: University Press, 2008.
Last modified 15 April 2021