In her introduction to Artist of Wonderland: The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel, Frankie Morris recounts that it was in "the land of counterpane" that she was introduced to the drawings of Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914). During a long childhood illness she had been given the Alice books as a gift from her school, and she recalls that "The strangeness of those books was like a private place to which I returned again and again to imbibe its odd flavor." Strangeness nicely captures the elusive essence of Wonderland. If Tenniel had been set to illustrate Dickens or Surtees or Thackeray or Trollope, he might have produced illustrations of a high order—his Punch cartoons prove how adaptable, professional, ready to please he was—but he would never have got hold of the peculiar strangeness that we see displayed in the Alice books, a strangeness that allowed him to forsake the expectations of his Punch readers and go instead down the rabbit-hole of his imagination.

Virginia Woolf said that since childhood somehow survived intact in Lewis Carroll, "he could do what no one else has ever been able to do—he could return to that world; he could recreate it, so that we become children again." But surely Carroll could never have recreated that world entire without Tenniel's wonderful drawings. To read Woolf's description of that world is to be reminded of a collaboration unparalleled in literature:

"Down, down, down, would the fall never come to an end?" Down, down, down we fall into that terrifying, wildly inconsequent, yet perfectly logical world where time races, stands still; where space stretches, then contracts. It is the world of sleep; it is also the world of dreams. Without any conscious effort dreams come; the white rabbit, the walrus, and the carpenter, one after another, turning and changing one into the other…. It is for this reason that the two Alice books are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children. President Wilson, Queen Victoria, The Times leader writer, the late Lord Salisbury—it does not matter how old, how important, or how insignificant you are, you become a child again. To become a child is to be very literal; to find everything so strange that nothing is surprising; to be heartless, to be ruthless, yet to be so passionate that a snub or a shadow drapes the world in gloom. It is to be Alice in Wonderland.

If as readers we tend to find book illustration disappointing, it is because the illustrations in our heads always seem better than those on the page. How frequently do we glance over at the Phiz illustrations in Dickens and think, "Well done, amusing, but nothing like the people I had in mind." This never happens with Tenniel. We never think, "Well, that is how Tenniel sees Wonderland. Fine in its way but I see it differently." No, Tenniel's Wonderland is Wonderland—and yet how incomparably strange it is!

The man who achieved this feat was born in Marylebone, London on March 24, 1820. He was the son of a dancing-master and a Scottish-born beauty. Morris provides a vivid portrait of what Tenniel would have encountered in his London childhood. "The milk women making their rounds with pails suspended from the wooden yokes across their shoulders, crossing sweepers, dustmen with leather flaps at the back of their caps, the barrel-organ man, the muffin man, the peep show man, the Punch-and-Judy man, and the man wheeling a 'happy family' cage of small animals"—all familiar to readers of Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851–1862). (Mayhew, incidentally, was one of the founders of Punch.) 

    The influence that London had on Tenniel is reminiscent of the influence that it had on Turner, about which Ruskin wrote so eloquently: "No Venetian ever draws anything foul; but Turner devoted picture after picture to the illustration of effects of dinginess, smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture; old sides of boats, weedy roadside vegetation, dung-hills, straw-yards, and all the soilings and strains of every common labour." Tenniel, too, could make himself at home in the squalor of London. And, yet, like Turner, most of his best work—certainly his illustrations for the Alice books—can be seen as an attempt to escape what Ruskin called "multitudinous, marred humanity."

Tenniel was educated at a private school in Kensington, and once a schoolboy "would have advanced to trousers, perhaps buttoned to the close-fitting jacket of a shell or skeleton suit such as he gave Tweedledum and Tweedledee." Subsequently in Fitzroy Square he studied antiquities and the nude and then anatomy and the Elgin marbles at the British Museum. He was a lifelong fan of the theater and drew pencil studies from performances of Shakespeare plays. Later he immersed himself in the study of costume and armor, which he would put to good use in the Alice books. In 1845, he won a contest to depict Dryden's "St. Cecilia" in the House of Lords and went off to Munich for a year to learn fresco technique. For four years Tenniel toiled amidst the sewer gases of the Thames. Yet when the fresco was finished it only confirmed his "irrepressible tendency to see the absurdities that might accompany lofty aspirations." In 1895, the fresco had become so blistered that it was mercifully covered over.

A quiet, modest, popular man, Tenniel joined Punch in 1850. One of his earliest and best cartoons, which unfortunately Morris does not include in her book, is of Lord John Russell as Jack the Giant-Killer advancing to attack Cardinal Wiseman during the period known as Papal Aggression (1850-1), which aptly captures the paranoia that greeted the reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England. Punch was robustly anti-Catholic. Indeed, Tenniel was only engaged after the Catholic Richard "Dicky" Doyle resigned in protest over the paper's anti-papal pronouncements. Ruskin was memorably witty about the paper's editorial slant: "You must be clear about Punch's politics. He is a polite whig, with a sentimental respect for the Crown, and a practical respect for property. He steadily flatters Lord Palmerston, from his heart adores Mr. Gladstone, steadily but not virulently caricatures Mr. Disraeli, violently and virulently castigates assault on property of any kind, and holds up for the general idea of perfection, to be aimed at by the children of Heaven and earth, the British Hunting Squire, the British Colonel and the British sailor."

"Pater" Evans, the paper's editor-in-chief, would rightly claim that "Sociability is the seat of the success of Punch." Elaborate dinners were routinely held at the paper's offices in Bouverie Street, as well as at the Song and Supper Rooms on the Piazza at Covent Garden. There were also outings each year to Richmond, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Dulwich, and, of course, the Derby at Epsom Downs. No doubt these festivities were in Tenniel's mind when he illustrated the tea-party of the March Hare and the Hatter in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the banquet at the end of Through the Looking Glass (1872).  In later life, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) gratified his fondness for banquets by taking charge of the Senior Common Room at Christ Church, in the cellars of which he was careful to lay down stores of excellent port.

In his political cartoons, Tenniel was at his best portraying Disraeli, whom he depicted by turns as "Great Wizard," "Great Medicine Man," "Asian Mystery," "showman," "acrobat," "conjurer," "trickster," "farceur," "Sphinx"—all suitable roles for the man who managed to humbug both Bismarck and Queen Victoria.

When Tenniel resigned his position at the paper in 1901—after producing a staggering 2,000 cartoons—a dinner was held in his honor at the Hôtel Métropole with Prime Minister Balfour presiding over a gathering that included notables from every walk of life. When the toast was made, Tenniel, who had begun to lose his sight, broke down. By his death in 1914, he was stone blind, a sad end to the life of a man whom Balfour accurately called a "great artist and a great gentleman."

Morris' book is a series of essays, including biographical sketches as well as pieces on the political cartoons and different aspects of the Alice books. The biographical and Alice sections are the best. Morris makes a valiant attempt to find bright things to say about the political cartoons, but, perhaps inevitably, they disappoint. The entry for Tenniel in the old Dictionary of National Biography recalled that

Through fifty years it was his mission to shoot at folly, to strike at fraud and corruption, to touch with delicate though firm hand the political problems of the hour. This task he accomplished with unfailing fancy and with a delightful humor which never degenerated into coarseness nor was lacking in dignity. Tenniel was never carried away by private feeling. His aim was to treat all public men with equality and fairness, and to be severe without being vindictive. Thus, he was always careful to make the politician, not the man, appear ridiculous, and the laugh raised is almost invariably good-natured.

Here, in a nutshell, is why Tenniel disappoints as a cartoonist: he was too nice. Compare him to James Gillray (1757–1815), the scourge of Napoleon, George III, Burke, and Charles James Fox, and one sees at once how very vital nastiness is to good political caricature. Tenniel was too much the Victorian gentleman to be nasty, and his cartoons suffered accordingly.

But this did not affect the immortal illustrations of the Alice books, where Tenniel's otherworldly geniality was a decided asset. For fans of those illustrations, Frankie Morris' handsome, well-researched, well-illustrated book can be highly recommended.

Edward Short is at work on a book about John Henry Newman and his contemporaries.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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