Picture This: Adventures with Alice
In her latest Picture This column, Nicolette Jones takes a look at three different representations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
This year marked the 160th anniversary of publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the run-up to Alice’s Day, orchestrated by The Story Museum in Oxford on the Saturday nearest to 4 July (the date of Carroll’s river trip on the Isis with Alice Liddell and her sister), my #NewIllustrationoftheDay on BlueSky and Instagram featured 12 living illustrators of Carroll’s book. Most people still visualise Carroll’s characters as John Tenniel’s drawings – to what would have been Carroll’s chagrin. Unenthusiastic about Tenniel’s work, Carroll looked unsuccessfully for someone else to illustrate Alice Through the Looking Glass. In time he would have had plenty of options. The artists who have since taken on the text are myriad.
Among the countless contributors to this body of work there are the classic illustrators such as Arthur Rackham, Randolph Caldecott, and Mabel Lucie Atwell. There are fine artists, including Salvador Dali and Peter Blake, revelling in the oddness. There are names better known for other work – for example Tove Jansson (Moomins), Pauline Baynes (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe), and Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast). There are interpreters who have a unique angle – John Vernon Lord, for instance, none of whose pictures include Alice herself, or Maggie Taylor who incorporates scanned Victorian daguerreotypes (or ambrotypes or tintypes) of young girls, to haunting effect. And there are other celebrated artists still practising: Michael Foreman, Chris Riddell, Anthony Browne, Mini Grey and more who are in my recent selection.
The issue for those who respond to Carroll’s text seems to be identifying the predominant mood, on scale from sunny to nightmarish. Is this a story full of childlike whimsy, or one so strange and surreal that only a heroine with Alice’s courage and resilience can cope with the disturbing illogicality, the aggressive royals and the terrifying shifts in scale?
I have chosen three images to look at in closer detail: by Lisbeth Zwerger, Helen Oxenbury and Emma Chichester Clark.
Zwerger’s luminous watercolour illustrates this passage:
‘Here! you may nurse it a bit, if you like!’ the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. `I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,’ and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went out, but it just missed her. Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, ‘just like a star-fish,’ thought Alice.
This picture embraces the improbability. It is simple but dreamlike, using light and dark, with the colour limited mostly to black, white, green and red, the Duchess’s evening gloves matching Alice’s red tights and the baby’s shoes. Both the Duchess and Alice are quite unlike Tenniel’s elaborately drawn figures with their fine line, but instead are represented by blocks of colour contoured by shade. And the angles are strange, so what looks like a tiled floor seems to be a wall. This is both beautiful and eerie, as it deliberately turns its back on Tenniel. His work is also more static, to the point of stolidity: this is full of movement, a startling moment, with the thrown shadows of reaching, prancing people and objects flying about. Meanwhile the fact that the baby turns out to be a piglet is a secret held back.
Helen Oxenbury’s picture from her rightly feted Alice in Wonderland has quite a different mood, though it is also full of movement. It illustrates:
‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards.’ said Alice.
At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her …
Zwerger’s chilly room is replaced by warmth, even though the background is also white. There is a sweetness in the drawing, and Alice is not odd, but ordinary, an everyday modern girl in her little blue shift dress and plimsolls, her hair flying free and a charming menagerie scattering at her feet. Miniature figures clamber back into the royal cards as they fly through the air. They are fun rather than sinister, despite the aerial bombardment, which some other artists have depicted as a frightening attack. For Oxenbury it as menacing as a gust of fallen leaves. Alice makes a gesture to protect herself, but the feeling is more of surprise than real alarm.
Oxenbury’s image is playful rather than surreal, and summery rather than spooky. There is humour in the expressions of the animals, and a softness in the line. Both Tenniel and Zwerger, for all their skill, might give a child bad dreams. Oxenbury will not.
And finally Emma Chichester Clark’s double page spread of the game of croquet is full of the light of a summer afternoon.
‘Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingos, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away …’
Instead of taking her cue from the disconcerting strangeness of flamingos being used as croquet mallets and human playing cards bending to be hoops, Chichester Clark picks up the mood of ‘she could not help bursting out laughing’, which is not the tone of the Tenniel originals. Here Alice looks into the face of her unmanageable mallet with amusement rather than fear or confusion.
All the faces are relatively benevolent, compared to the grotesques of other versions. And the outlandishness is countered by the decorative patterns and the rhythmic composition, with the satisfying interplay of distinct creatures and characters, slotting into each other like the elements of a tapestry. This has delicious colours and a feeling of fairy tale. The atmosphere is of a fancy dress garden party. It makes you want to join in rather than run away.
And Alice, in the foreground, but in a corner so as not to distract the eye from all the delights around her, wears a timeless blue tunic, half way between Tenniel’s frock and Oxenbury’s shift. Of these three responses, this is the one that reverts to the original Alice – not blonde like Tenniel’s (or most others, including, later, Disney’s) but with the short dark bob we know was worn by Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church. This too is a choice for illustrators. With Emma Chichester Clark on the dark bob side are, for instance, Anthony Browne and Michael Foreman. It is not an absolutely binary option, however. Mabel Lucie Atwell shows Alice as a redhead.
Nicolette Jones writes about children’s books for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson); The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth Century Art (Tate Publishing) and Writes of Passage: Words to Read Before You Turn 13 (Nosy Crow).
Books mentioned:
Alice In Wonderland (Mini-Edition), Lewis Caroll, illus Lisbeth Zwerger, 978-988-8341-016
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, illus Helen Oxenbury, Walker Books, 978-0744582673, £14.99 pbk
Alice in Wonderland, Emma Chichester Clark, based on the original story by Lewis Carroll, HarperCollins Children’s Books, 978-0007351596, £8.99 pbk
