Artist of Wonderland: The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel (review)

On a June evening in 1901, two hundred of Britain’s most prominent men gathered in the West End at the luxurious Hôtel Métropole to honor the recently retired John Tenniel, revered cartoonist for Punch. Like many of his fellow guests who had provided five decades of fodder for Tenniel’s widely published skewerings, gala chair Arthur Balfour embraced with ironic good humor his position as the lead “proverbial lamb” proposing the “toast of the wolf on his retirement after a long and honourable career of destruction.”

Morris’s investigation of Sir John Tenniel weaves anecdote and insight into a highly readable and thoroughly researched account of the artist’s extraordinarily influential career as chief cartoonist for Punch and as book illustrator, most famously of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872). The first third of the book is largely devoted to the life and interests of the sport-loving, theater-going, conservative, convivial, never-married and intensely private Tenniel. Unfortunately, Tenniel’s own voice is rarely present; because he kept no letters, Morris has pieced together the narrative of the artist’s life and work largely from the correspondence and reminiscences of colleagues. This is no shortcoming, for Morris has been meticulous in her research and has benefited from Tenniel’s active social and professional life, amply recorded by Shirley Brooks, George du Maurier, M. H. Spielmann, Tom Taylor, Lewis Carroll, and many other contemporaries.

Several chapters explore Tenniel’s thirty-four-year relationship with Carroll and venture into aspects of social caricature, the grotesque, and the gothic in the Alice drawings. Despite Carroll’s erratic writing methods and frustrating habit of starting his illustrators on incomplete material, Morris dispenses with any notions of discord between Carroll and Tenniel. Although in this section Morris sacrifices a bit of narrative momentum, these chapters are firmly anchored in a rich analysis of how Tenniel’s drawings collobarate with and expand the Alice text. Morris further examines how Tenniel took the familiar shapes of childhood toys, popular Christmas pantomine figures and his own stock Punch caricatures and pulled and tweaked them into the charmingly weird occupants of Wonderland. But no matter how delightfully contorted and distanced from reality, Tenniel’s ever-careful cross-hatching and sure command of glance and gesture contrived to impart a believable familiarity to the distorted world down the rabbit hole.

If Tenniel had an uncanny power to humanize bespectacled lions, bandy-legged frogs, and tottering chessmen, so in equal measures he had the power to distort, to mock and to dehumanize members of the lower classes, all for the amusement and political tutoring of the vast readership of the conservative and reliably imperialistic Punch. From Melbourne to Bombay, readers routinely paged to the weekly “large cut,” which frequently featured Tenniel’s usually comic but often unsparing stereotyping of domestic servants, unskilled workers, rustics, and other suspects who might remotely be associated with leading England down the rabbit holes of socialism, radicalism, or anarchy. Tenniel’s most vicious caricatures were reserved for the Irish, whose aspirations for independence were personified as the drunken Paddy, a slouching subhuman with jutting jaw and bony brow, ignorant, indolent and menacing.

These cartoons—over 3,900 of them—are Tenniel at his most powerful, most resourceful, and most provocative. Early in his career, in 1857, with the nation in an uproar over the rebellion of native Indian troops and the massacre of women and children at Cawnpore, Tenniel drew the cartoon that established him as Britain’s preeminent political artist. “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger” depicts the split-second before an enormous lion, hurling through the air with mane flying and eyes flashing, smashes fangs first into a snarling tiger, crouched low over and about to make a meal of a bare-shouldered women and her infant. It was histrionic, but effective. A...