Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators: Collaborations and Correspondence, 1865-1898 (review)

This handsome volume contains more than two hundred letters that Lewis Carroll wrote to his illustrators, only forty of which have previously appeared in print. Making such material available seems like a wonderful idea, given the key role that pictures play in Carroll's books, as well as the astonishing extent to which the author involved himself in the production of these illustrations. But the appeal of Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators is limited by the fact that virtually nothing remains of the correspondence between Carroll and his most famous partner, John Tenniel. For hard-core Carroll scholars, however, these meticulously annotated letters do provide a wealth of information regarding his lesser-known texts and his prickly relationships with various other artists.

Above all, these letters vividly convey just how difficult and demanding a collaborator Carroll was. As Morton Cohen and Edward Wakeling note in their introduction, Carroll bombarded illustrators with suggestions and advice, sending them long lists of possible subjects for illustration, as well as detailed sketches aimed at communicating more clearly "my own ideas" about what the finished products should look like (110). Then, after viewing the artist's rendering, Carroll would provide copious feedback about the composition and placement of the pictures, frequently demanding extensive alterations. He paid especially obsessive attention to the representation of the faces and bodies of his child characters, as indicated by his response to one of E. Gertrude Thomson's drawings of a young girl:

The face I will be content with, though it is still a leetle too old for her size. Surely the further arm ought not be thicker than the nearer one? What I chiefly demur to is her right thigh, the one which supports all her weight [. . .]. Its diameter seems to be too great. I think its upper edge is too high up, and should be visible below the point where her left elbow crosses the edge of the body. But it is the lower edge which seems to me all wrong. [. . .]

(262)

In the process of criticizing his artists' efforts, Carroll often makes comments that shed valuable light on his own writing process and authorial intentions. For example, his letters to Harry Furniss, who illustrated the Sylvie and Bruno books, reveal which characters function as doubles for which other characters in this famously confounding text. Reading the previously unpublished correspondence between these two also solves another little mystery. A number of critics have noted that the narrator of the Sylvie and Bruno books never appears in any of the pictures. But why? Carroll answers this question in an 1893 letter to Furniss, when he notes that the pictures "represen[t] what the 'I' of the book saw" (208). This revelation helps explain why Carroll refers to the narrator—in this and other letters to Furniss—as "the spectator." Thus, these letters provide extra support for Catherine Robson's argument, in Men in Wonderland, that the narrator of the Sylvie and Bruno books functions primarily as a voyeur.

The presence of such helpful nuggets of information made me realize afresh just how sad it is that so little remains of the Carroll/Tenniel correspondence. Only one letter from author to illustrator has been located, and it is a two line rebuke about a matter unrelated to the illustrations for Alice. Similarly, only two letters survive from the extensive correspondence that we know Carroll had with Henry Holiday, illustrator of The Hunting of the Snark (1876). This means that the bulk of letters included in Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators are focused on his less popular books, such as Phantasmagoria (1869), Rhyme? And Reason? (1883), and Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898).

Cohen and Wakeling annotate these remaining letters with terrific care, clarifying the context in which they were sent and received, explaining mysterious references, and quoting related passages from Carroll's diaries. They also reproduce Carroll's sketches, often juxtaposing them with the final drawing produced by his...