Rowing with the sheep — Illustrations for Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

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Rowing with the sheep

Sir John Tenniel

Wood-engraving by Dalziel

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

This illustration and the passage it illustrates exemplify how Lewis Carroll uses an element of dreams — here the way they have sudden, inexplicable transitions — to lead the readers into the following chapter. How does the ilustration differ from the transition in the text?

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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.]

Commentary by Ray Dyer

Tenniel's delightful rendition of Alice rowing on the river, amongst tall scented reeds which could have pleased even the early Pre-Raphaelites, is a far cry from his usual robust satires on political and international affairs. Keen observers will have noted the backwards lettering and prices accurately adorning the inside shop windows with information for those who have entered, and now reminiscent of Carroll's opening and closing stanzas to the Jabberwocky poem of Chapter I. The present chapter, however, together with Tenniel's faithfully parallel accompanying illustration, labours with a special task: that of providing a further outlet for Carroll's intensely felt and difficult to express need to reminisce about his enduring "loss" of the Christ Church Deanery trio of young sisters, and in particular of the middle sister Alice Liddell, in the pivotal period c. 1864-1866 of these mutually significant and lengthy previous relationships (see the Carroll Chronology):

So the boat was left to drift down the stream as it would, till it glided gently in among the waving rushes. And then the little sleeves were carefully rolled up, and the little arms were plunged in elbow-deep to get the rushes a good long way down before breaking them off… and for a while Alice forgot all … as she bent over the side of the boat, with just the ends of her tangled hair dipping into the water…[Ch. V]

Such a caring intimacy of accurate detail almost certainly indicates that this particular scene was biographical, and had been witnessed by Carroll, stored away in his own "memory's mystic band," and was later brought back as a revenant to embellish the second and more mournful of his Alice books.

By late 1871, when Through the Looking Glass became widely available, and the Liddell sisters much less so, Lewis Carroll had long since renounced the pleasures and opportunities of such boating trips on his nearby Oxford river (Isis-Thames). His final boating outing, recorded and indexed in his Journal (Diaries 5: 77 and n.177), was on Saturday 27 May 1865, during the same week that he had instructed his publisher Macmillan regarding the presentation copies of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. These included a specially-bound white vellum copy to be sent to the Christ Church Alice. She, however, was nowhere to be seen. The boat party that day consisted of Carroll and his long-standing friend and Christ Church colleague Vernon Harcourt (1834-1919) - who had been one of the rowers on the famous outing to Godstow in August 1862 - together with "the eldest three Brodies" (77). These were Margaret aged sixteen, Ida fourteen and Lilian twelve: "… by river to Nuneham…'Lily' rowed a little of the distance" he noted, resigned but resilient, with these three daughters of Professor Brodie as likely "cover images" for the missing Deanery three. Tenniel's warm illustration, depicted here, would seem to fill the role of a further "cover memory," largely of joy to assuage the residual melancholy.

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll's Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Vol. 5, Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: Lewis Carroll Society, 1999.

Last modified 9 June 2021